Remember all those horrible television ads in the Tim Kaine-George Allen race for the U.S. Senate? It turns out not everyone with those campaigns liked them, either.

Mo Elleithee, a senior strategist for the Kaine campaign, and Boyd Marcus, a senior political advisor for Allen's Senate bid, agreed Thursday that many of those ads were "total crap." Elleithee said the negative ads paid for by outside groups actually helped Kaine. The two spoke candidly for more than an hour at a Virginia Public Access Project forum at George Mason University's Arlington campus. George Mason political scientist Mark Rozell moderated.

The pair — Elleithee is a longtime Democrat, and served as senior spokesman for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid in 2008; Marcus, a Republican consultant based in Richmond, served as former Gov. Jim Gilmore's chief of staff — talked a lot of inside baseball. And judging by the crowd's reaction, that's just what people wanted to hear. Conservative groups like Crossroads GPS, Americans for Prosperity and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce began running negative ads against Tim Kaine in November 2011, Elleithee said. In the end, outside groups spent more than $30 million against Kaine, with nearly $11 million of that coming from Crossroads.

Conventional wisdom usually dictates that negative ads benefit campaigns more than positive ones. But Elleithee said against the backdrop of so many negative ads — and so many of them done poorly — Kaine was able to realize a rise in the polls with positive ads. The outside spending helped Allen make up the difference in one-on-one fundraising against Kaine, Marcus said. But, he added, "a lot of what they spent money on wasn't targeted correctly, or we wouldn't have spent the money that way had we had that money."

"It was crap. It was total crap," Elleithee said. Marcus agreed.

"There were times I would see the ads coming at us from the other side, and I said, 'Thank you. There is no way that ad is going to convince once single voter to vote against Tim Kaine.' And I remember thinking, 'I bet the Allen folks feel the same way,' " Elleithee said.

Marcus added: "There were a couple of them that were decent ads, and followed the themes we were trying to play. But well over half, I'm sure, of the ads that were done independently weren't on our message, weren't on any message we were trying to convey, and weren't very well done." Ads by the U.S. Chamber were "the worst," he said.