The warm and fuzzy campaign brochures that announced the start of this year's election season soon gave way to nasty attack mailers in some hard-fought races.

Most of the hit-pieces were not sent by the candidates themselves but by the political parties they belong to.

Such tactics can accomplish the major goals of negative campaigning — to create doubt and suppress voter turnout among the target's supporters — while allowing the benefiting candidate to maintain that they've stayed positive.

"You can always wash your hands of it if somebody yells 'foul,' " said Dan Boylan, a political commentator and history professor at the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu.

That can be important in Hawai'i, where negative campaigning is publicly frowned upon and can be risky for candidates to directly engage in.

"I don't think it was ever as vicious as it's gotten, but it's not as vicious here as on the Mainland," Boylan said.

The residential and political geography of particular neighborhoods can also lend itself to mail campaigns, whether positive or negative.

For example, the high-rise condominiums in the Downtown and Chinatown areas are notoriously difficult for personal door-to-door campaigning but received dozens of campaign mailers for the House District 28 race between Democrat Karl Rhoads and Republican Collin Wong.

Rhoads, an attorney and former legislative aide, defeated incumbent Democrat Bev Harbin in the primary and beat Wong on Tuesday by 208 votes — but he got plenty dirty doing so.

The Republican Party repeatedly sent out mailers that blasted Rhoads and his wife, Cindy McMillan, for their links to a bribery scandal that landed former City Councilman Andy Mirikitani in federal prison five years ago. McMillan once worked for Mirikitani at City Hall and was a key prosecution witness against him. She testified that he awarded her bonuses totaling nearly $17,000 in exchange for funneling some of the money to his campaign committee.

The Republican mailers — which didn't mention Wong — featured images of cash changing hands, and charged that "When Karl Rhoads had a chance to stop a corrupt politician, he stood by and did nothing."

Rhoads and McMillan cooperated with investigators after another former Mirikitani aide told about similar payments he received. Rhoads has characterized himself and McMillan as whistleblowers for their role in the case.

Rhoads said he wasn't particularly surprised at the attack mailers — Harbin had hammered on the Mirikitani case during the primary — and was ready to respond.

"All the social science research indicates that the reason campaigns use negative ads is because they work," he said. "We waited and made a conscious decision not to go negative unless they did. But we weren't going to sit by and take it on the chin if they did."

The Democratic Party sent out mailers attacking Wong for a series of speeding tickets he received in recent years. "Slow down, Collin Wong," the cards demanded.

And Rhoads' campaign directly attacked Wong for being born in New York City and allegedly moving into Chinatown solely to run for office.

Wong said he had indeed received a number of speeding tickets but insisted that they were irrelevant to the House race.

And Wong said the New York mailers — which were designed with a computer program that superimposed his face on a photo of someone else standing in front of the New York skyline — were ridiculous.

Wong said he was born in New York because his parents happened to be attending school there at the time, but that the family moved back to Hawai'i when he was 1 year old. He did move into House District 28 from another O'ahu address just a few years ago, but not just to run for office, he said.

Rhoads, who was also born on the Mainland, said the mailers were legitimate because they did not specifically charge that Wong had moved directly from New York to Chinatown as an adult.

Wong said his campaign chose not to mail any negative advertising, but that he did not believe the mailers from Rhoads and the Democrats were the only cause of his defeat.

"Negative campaigning was a factor, but ultimately campaigns are won and lost by turning out favorable voters," he said. "I'm just concerned that this is the kind of thing that Hawai'i voters respond to."

Reach Johnny Brannon at jbrannon@honoluluadvertiser.com.