Way back in 2008, when I was running for Congress, my media guy told me we were lucky, because compared to the Denver TV market, airing political ads in Colorado Springs would be quite cheap. He and I had different definitions of “cheap,” as being up on the air in my town would cost roughly $65,000 per week. I think about those costs these days pretty much any time I turn on the TV, because our local airwaves are being flooded with ads for our upcoming April 4th election for mayor and city council.

I find it remarkable any mayoral candidate has the funding to be up on TV in any large way, given the costs involved. Yet Wayne Williams and Sallie Clark have become almost ever present in ads that, well, have alternative facts involved. Oh, and they are also all over YouTube, which I know to be cheaper but still not inexpensive. And the tones of these ads are quite interesting (and you can skip to the end if you want to know how much money they are raking in).

You see, Colorado Springs is a town entirely owned and operated by Republican elected officials, as is the larger El Paso County. Simply put, no Democrat is going to win a citywide election, so the Republicans have to fight it out among themselves for the mayor’s office.

For the past eight years, John Suthers has been mayor. And frankly, as a life-long Democrat and former chair of the county Democratic Party, if I must have a Republican as mayor, I’m reasonably happy it was Suthers. My sense is he is a good man, always doing what he thinks is best for the city, even when we disagree. But term limits prevent him from running for an additional four years. He is out, and a fascinating campaign to replace him is nearing its end.

Voters in Colorado Springs will now choose from a candidate list of a dozen folks who qualified for the ballot. Technically the is a non-partisan election, but it isn’t really, with the words “conservative” and “liberal” used in place of party names. It’s quite the list, with a range of serious candidates to more, well, nutty candidates, but most observers think the race is down to a choice between two people well-known to Springs voters: Williams and Clark. I know each of them a bit, and frankly they have always been nice to me.

Both leading candidates are part of the regular GOP establishment that on the one hand decries government and on the other, passes the various county elective offices around, year after year. But now there is room for only one, and it has been fun (from an old poli sci professor’s point of view) to watch the campaigns turn on each other.

When they first went up on TV, both Clark and Williams were overall pretty positive and touted their previous experiences, bragging about adding more cops and firefighters. The ads, and the claims therein, were basically exchangeable: vote for me, I do good stuff and keep taxes low.

But then a more vituperative air crept into the campaign, largely from the Clark campaign…

The first negative ad I noticed was from Clark, attacking Williams over the carnage that was Colorado Springs: crime, homelessness and other nasty things, all while Williams was on the city council. But this ad also, albeit obliquely, attacked Suthers, who had been mayor during those apparently terrible times (note: I was here then, didn’t notice any carnage). Clark then put out amended ads that suggested the terrible stuff was in our future and we might become, gasp, like (dare I say it?) DENVER!

Williams has remained mostly positive and, taking a tip from the traditional GOP playbook, hasn’t really mentioned Clark. In most of his ads, Williams just appears in promos that run from a few seconds on YouTube to full TV ads in which he appears with nice Colorado Springs backgrounds behind him while he states platitudes about keeping Colorado Springs a nice place to live.

My absolute favorite ad from Clark had to do with continuing her claim that Williams is not, somehow, in spite of years of being a rightwing guy, a true conservative. Dog whistles from the Trump world anyone? In the ad, Clark opens in a bleak warehouse-y kind of place, and states that Williams is not, in fact, a true conservative like she is. Her proof? She shows a few seconds of a TV advertisement in which Williams appeared with Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. That ad was a very nice bit of bipartisan reassurance our elections are safe and secure, but Clark decided to twist the meaning and see if she could scare voters with the “L” word.

Oh, and in case it was too subtle, a large “LIBERAL” label is pasted over Griswold while Williams is labeled as not being a conservative. Interestingly, Clark does not have that ad (or other attack ads) in the “gallery” of her campaign website. Not proud of those perhaps? And her choice of that video clip does make me wonder a bit if she is an election denier as well? But I digress…

Context being important, that public service announcement was to assure Colorado voters, from the point of view of the current and a former secretary of state, that our elections are safe and secure. I admire Williams for being willing to appear in such a PSA, given the efforts by all too many in the Republican Party to make people think a certain election was stolen (spoiler: it wasn’t) and voting is somehow now insecure (spoiler: it isn’t). But Clark thought that a few seconds grabbed from an actually noble public act might help her campaign because, gasp, Williams has been willing to work with Dems, oh my.

The other 10 candidates try to get some attention, but frankly, the big bucks backing both Williams and Clark are keeping those two, at least apparently, on the top of the heap. Those opposed accuse both Williams and Clark of being in the hip pockets of various developers in the area. Both have taken big bucks from developers, including Williams getting $250,000 from the political action committee, Colorado Springs Forward, as well as $50,000 from the Housing and Building Association of Colorado Springs. Clark got $100,000 from the O’Neil Group, which is a private equity company that buys real estate in Colorado Springs. Remember the donation limits that apply to many candidates at the federal or state level do not apply to the mayor’s race, unfortunately. Heck, Williams’s single quarter-of-a-million dollar donation is a bit more than I raised in total from hundreds of donors when I ran for congress, sheesh!

So, stay tuned. Next week, on the 4th, the ballots will be counted to decide which of the dozen folks running will be our next mayor. We’ll see whose big donors get a win, and which candidate will come out on top in another round of GOP musical chairs.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.