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With less than a week before South Carolina puts its own possibly decisive spin on the GOP presidential race, the state's voters already have been bombarded with more than 5,000 TV ads from the candidates and their deep-pocketed and secretive super PACs.
That means, in the Columbia TV market alone, the average viewer could see a political ad 65 times by today.
From their lounge chairs, S.C. voters are getting a barrage of contrasting images of the Republicans vying to challenge President Barack Obama.
In some ads, Mitt Romney is the proven job creator; in others, the heartless corporate raider.
One minute, Newt Gingrich is the bold conservative heir to Ronald Reagan; the next, he's the corrupt Washington insider.
And Rick Santorum: family values champion or pork barrel king?
Add the campaign spots for and against the other three candidates - Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman - and it translates into more than $11 million spent so far on the 2012 campaign's biggest air war yet.
South Carolinians haven't seen this kind of deluge since Hurricane Hugo hit the state decades ago, said former CNN correspondent Charles Bierbauer, now dean of the University of South Carolina's College of Mass Communications.
"And South Carolina (TV) is a cheap buy," he said, "so you can get a lot of mileage out of that kind of money."
Overall, the Romney campaign and his super PAC, Restore Our Future, combined have spent $3.7 million in the state - more than any of the others in the race. The runners-up: Perry and his super Pac, Make Us Great Again, ($2.5 million) and Gingrich and his Super PAC, Winning Our Future, ($2 million).
The 30- and 60-second spots are popping up on TV channels in Charleston, Columbia, Greenville-Spartanburg and Florence-Myrtle Beach.
Even Charlotteans, who won't vote in North Carolina's presidential primary until May, are getting an early look this weekend. Because the Queen City's TV market includes four Upstate S.C. counties - York, Lancaster, Chester and Chesterfield - some of the campaigns are buying commercial time on Charlotte stations.
The Gingrich and Romney super PACs, for example, are each spending $31,000 to place ads on WCCB (channel 18) and WBTV (channel 3) during this weekend's NFL playoff games.
The campaigns' decision to pay top dollar to get to sports fans doesn't surprise Ken Goldstein, who tracks media spending for Virginia-based Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group.
"Football, football, football - it's a great way to reach white males," a group that trends Republican, he said. "It's also live, so it's not DVR'ed ... Buying sports - that's very much a part of the Republican playbook."
Super PACs spend big
Iowa and New Hampshire, the first states to vote this year, pride themselves on retail politicking, with many voters sizing up the candidates in person.
GOP contenders still in the running are now crisscrossing South Carolina, meeting voters at rallies and in restaurants.
But for every hand they shake at a Lizard's Thicket diner in Blythewood, near Columbia, thousands more see them on the local TV station's report on that meet-and-greet.
"We're shaking hands out here with these satellite trucks," said former South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson last week, pointing to the Charlotte TV trucks that had shown up for an appearance by his candidate, Texas Gov. Perry, at a restaurant in Rock Hill.
TV ads are also more predominant in the South Carolina leg of the campaign. New Hampshire voters saw about 2,800 ads. As of last week, S.C. voters already had sat through nearly twice that many.
Super PACs have accounted for 69 percent of all the TV ad spending. They are private groups that can spend unlimited amounts of cash without having to disclose who their donors are.
They are also supposedly independent, though most are headed by friends or former staffers of the candidates they're promoting.
These super PACs can now "do the dirty work, (while) campaigns are able to rise above it and not put their names on stuff," S.C. GOP strategist Scott Farmer told The State newspaper in Columbia. "They have completely rewritten the rule book this (election) cycle."
In Iowa, Romney, Perry and their super PACs bought most of the ads. Anti-Gingrich spots from Romney's Restore Our Future were so effective that Gingrich's lead in the polls evaporated and he finished fourth in the state.
Gingrich's super PAC, Winning Our Future, is now getting its revenge in South Carolina. Its 28-minute film - "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" - features people who say they lost their jobs because of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney once led.
"Mitt Romney and them guys," says one man featured in a TV ad culled from the film, "they don't care who I am."
'TV comes to you'
Gingrich and Romney have lots of company battling on the airwaves in the Palmetto State.
"South Carolina is absolutely fully engaged - definitely more so than Iowa and New Hampshire and over a shorter period of time," Goldstein said. "With only a week and a half campaign, everybody's got their feet in the water there."
The reason: The stakes are high in South Carolina for every one of the candidates.
Romney, the front-runner who's been demonized and lionized in many of the spots, is spending heavily on the air waves in hopes of making it three in a row, after wins in Iowa and New Hampshire.
A victory in South Carolina, which has anointed the eventual nominee in every GOP contest since 1980, would likely put him on a glide path to an August coronation at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.
Romney's rivals, frantically trying to break his momentum, are putting all their chips on South Carolina in the form of hard-sell TV ads casting themselves as the true conservative in the race and attacking Romney as everything from a flip-flopper to a pro-abortion "Massachusetts moderate."
Though it's the age of the Internet and interested South Carolinians could surf a hundred political websites - including the one showing the 28-minute film about Romney's time at Bain - TV is still the best way to reach the undecided voter, Goldstein said.
"People have to go to the Internet; TV comes to you," he said. "People reading political websites probably already have a dog in the fight. But TV is the way to reach more passive voters - people still undecided."
The lighter side
Nasty has long been the hallmark of S.C. campaigns. And many of the ads are so riddled with hyperbole and half-truths that they continue in that tradition.
But there also have been a few things to laugh about.
One Gingrich-paid ad casts Romney as a Massachusetts elitist by showing him speaking French. A Romney PAC ad features a photo-shopped Gingrich in a sort-of airport terminal waiting for his "baggage" - suitcases representing the $1 million he got from Freddie Mac and his other past political sins.
And on Friday, there was a report from ABC News that Charleston-born TV satirist - and now-announced pretend-presidential candidate - Stephen Colbert would soon show up in TV ads purchased by his super PAC, Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.
The PAC, controlled by "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart, has purchased $7,600 in ad time on a Charleston TV station, the report said, and was negotiating a "substantial media buy in the Columbia market."
Adam Beam of The (Columbia) State contributed.
