“If your ears are ringing and your eyes are bleeding now, just wait.”

Local TV newscasters might not have been quite that graphic in recent years, but that’s the message they conveyed warning viewers about the sheer volume of negative ads filling up station breaks as Election Day approached.

Brace yourselves.

While Colorado doesn’t hold the battleground status it’s enjoyed for the last three presidential elections, it’s the site of a key U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Cory Gardner and his Democratic challenger, former Gov. John Hickenlooper. It could determine which party wields the gavel after the November election – and both sides have already sunk millions into the contest, with nearly four months to go.

It usually isn’t until closer to Labor Day that the onslaught of negative ads start to inundate viewers. This year, however, they started in June, in the run-up to the Democrats’ primary between Hickenlooper and former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, and they show no sign of letting up.

It’s been six years since Coloradans statewide were subjected to this level of menacing tones and scary depictions of politicians.

Sure, Democrat Jared Polis and Republican Walker Stapleton faced their share of negative ads in last cycle’s gubernatorial battle – the Polis campaign at one point even got a TV station to pull an ad run by a secretive group of Stapleton backers – but viewers probably saw more ads attacking Hickenlooper and Gardner during the last week of June than they saw in the last month of the 2018 election.

The stakes, simply put, are higher, with control of the Senate in the balance and national interests prepared to pony up what it takes to win it.

This year more closely resembles the 2014 contest between Gardner and then-U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent he unseated by about 2 percentage points in one of the closest and most expensive races in the country that year.

In that election, independent expenditures topped $70 million, with the vast bulk of it going toward advertising. The totals spent in opposition to the candidates outweighed spending in support of either of them by more than three to one.

For the first time in a Colorado Senate election – the first mid-term after Supreme Court rulings had given the green light to unlimited spending in federal elections by outside groups – the outside spending positively swamped what the candidates spent, though they certainly pulled their weight, with Udall shelling out about $20 million and Gardner spending about $12 million. (In the previous Senate race, in 2010, outside spending totaled about $35 million, and the two nominees spent about $18 million, including the costs of protracted, hard-fought primaries.)

The biggest spenders in 2014 were the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which spent nearly $10 million to trash Gardner and around $650,000 to make Udall look good, followed by Republican-aligned Crossroads GPS, which spent its entire $8.6 million budget in Colorado going afer Udall.

NextGen Climate – billionaire Tom Steyer’s organization – spent $7 million soiling Gardner and about $400,000 supporting Udall. The National Republican Senatorial Committee spent $6 million against Udall and just $300,000 boosting Gardner, while the national Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC dumped $5 million into negative ads aimed at Gardner and $900,000 on positive ads about Udall.

The 2016 Senate race between Michael Bennet, the Democratic incumbent, and Darryl Glenn, his Republican challenger, didn’t draw nearly as much independent spending for several reasons, primarily because Bennet wasn’t considered as vulnerable as Udall and because national Republicans pretty much abandoned Glenn after the conservative underdog won the nomination.

That year, outside spending in the Senate race totaled $4.5 million, just barely more than the $3.8 million Glenn managed to spend, but far short of the $16.2 million spent by Bennet, who won by about 5 percentage points.

So far in this year’s race, Gardner and Hickenlooper have spent about the same, at least through the pre-primary campaign finance period, with Hickenlooper spending $6.6 million and Gardner spending $6.4 million. Only about $7 million has been reported spent so far by outside groups, though most of it has been focused on Hickenlooper, with $2.5 million spent to bring him down and $3 million spent to prevent that from happening. Unreported, dark money groups have spent millions drubbing Gardner since last fall, and others have just started lashing Hickenlooper.

There’s nothing unusual about negative ads flooding the airwaves in a high-stakes race. In 2014, the Udall campaign aired its first TV ad blasting Gardner in April, shortly after the then-congressman jumped in the race and secured the nomination, beginning what would be a steady drumbeat aimed at the then-Republican congressman’s changing positions on abortion and contraception.

But the sheer number of attack ads clogging the airwaves, digital platforms and other venues the year this early appears to be unrivaled.

So far, the candidates themselves have aired mostly positive ads, starting in mid-May when Gardner went on the air with an ad about his work during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. He has stayed on the air since, briefly rotating in an ad that mocked Hickenlooper’s protests that he wasn’t cut out for the Senate but then returning to positive territory this week with an ad about conservation legislation he steered through the Senate.

Hickenlooper has done the same, not even mentioning Gardner in an ad that began airing this week about the Trump administration’s attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act, though outside groups are making sure that Gardner’s vow to overturn Obamacare is in front of voters.

Continuing an attack it started during the Democratic primary, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released an ad blasting Hickenlooper for an array of public-private partnerships established during his years as governor, or what the GOP group calls “pay-to-play on steroids.”

It’s an attempt to build on a portrait the NRSC and other GOP-aligned groups are assembling of Hickenlooper as “the most corrupt Governor in Colorado history.” They also cite a ruling in June by the state’s Independent Ethics Commission that Hickenlooper violated a state gift ban when he accepted a rides on a private plane and in a fancy car.

The ethics panel also found Hickenlooper in contempt for defying a subpoena to testify on the complaints, which were launched more than a year ago by Republican operatives.

Whether Hickenlooper’s violations peg him as the state’s “most corrupt governor” could be open to question. After Republicans began hurling the charge, Westword reporter Conor McCormick-Cavanaugh did some digging and came up with Clarence Morley, who served a term as governor in the 1920s, belonged to the Ku Klux Klan and was later sentenced to five years in prison for mail fraud offenses committed after he was in office.

As for the attacks on Hickenlooper’s character, a spokesman for the Democrat’s campaign said: “Republicans know they can’t defend Cory Gardner’s toxic record of standing with President Trump and are desperate to distract voters from Gardner and Trump’s failed response to the coronavirus pandemic.”

And that’s the gist of ads that will likely continue to pummel Gardner into November: Gardner, who ran on his willingness to stand up to Republicans – “When my party is wrong, I’ll say it,” he vowed in a 2014 ad – has instead bound himself lightly to the deeply unpopular Trump.