The premise of “Tell Thom Tillis,” a series of Senate campaign ads that ran in North Carolina earlier this year, is not particularly complicated. Several North Carolinians, seemingly chosen for their regular-ness, sit in front of a white backdrop and tell Thom Tillis, the Republican challenger for Kay Hagan’s seat, how the policies that he had enacted in his former post as the Speaker of the State’s House of Representatives, which included budget cuts to both education programs and Planned Parenthood, changed their lives.

“I have no textbook to teach from,” Megan, a schoolteacher in Cary, tells the camera.

“You don’t have a textbook?” an off-camera voice asks.

“I don’t have a textbook, no.”

In a different video, Anna, a self-described “middle-class mom” from Black Mountain, also has textbooks on her mind. “Under Thom Tillis’s leadership, they’ve cut textbook funding so much that I can’t help my son with his homework,” she says, before quickly segueing into a statement about how Tillis does not represent people such as herself and only works for billionaires and lobbyists.

Given the rancor in the race between Hagan and Tillis, which, according to most polls, is essentially tied, “Tell Thom Tillis” could pass for a pleasant, positive ad. Whether or not teachers need textbooks in 2014 can be debated, but the campaign’s intent—to find a disappearing object that can easily be identified by voters—is both clear and effective.

The same could not be said about this:

The recent radio ad, put out by the Harry Reid-backed Senate Majority PAC, argues the following: “Tillis won’t fight for us. Instead, he made it harder for communities of color to vote, by restricting early voting and voter registration. Tillis even led the effort to pass the type of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws that caused the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.” (Representatives from the Senate Majority PAC did not respond to a request for comment.)

There’s much to unpack here. During his last year as Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Tillis, indeed, helped to pass restrictive voter laws that many believe disproportionately affect young, black, and Latino constituents (among the proposed cuts was a program that helps to register high-school students). The race between Hagan and Tillis is so close that pretty much every voting base has been targeted in the past weeks. Nearly sixty-seven million dollars of outside funding has come in, making North Carolina the most expensive Senate seat up for grabs. This weekend, amid reports that Hagan’s lead was diminishing, Hillary Clinton travelled to Charlotte and told a crowd “that no matter how much money has flooded into this state, North Carolina is not for sale.” This environment—where the ads never stop, where every voter feels crucial, and where both sides long ago dropped any pretense of a “clean” campaign—makes the occasional distasteful ad seem inevitable.

The Trayvon Martin ad, which is clearly targeted at black voters, relies on a fallacy—that it was Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law alone that compelled Zimmerman to shoot Martin, and, by extension, that anyone who supported a similar law in North Carolina would be enabling future George Zimmermans. (Zimmerman’s lawyers did not invoke “Stand Your Ground” in his defense, though jurors may have considered it in their decisions to acquit him.)

There’s certainly a convincing argument to be made about Tillis’s record on voting-rights laws and his deep involvement with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which crafted the “Stand Your Ground” legislation, and how both might affect black voters. But that argument—whatever it may have been—is being substituted for an attempt to broker political participation through inflammatory talking points. One would hope that such cynicism and willful manipulation would not be inevitable, but, given the stakes in the upcoming week, in which control of the Senate may hinge on whether or not Hagan can hold off Tillis’s late charge, and with millions more dollars from super PACs flooding the state, North Carolinians should expect more of the same from both sides.

Read more analysis and commentary at our 2014 midterms hub.