In the commercial sector there are legal requirements that mandate “truth in advertising.” General principles are outlined on Business.gov, the site of the US Small Business Administration.

Advertising laws are aimed at protecting consumers by requiring advertisers to be truthful about their products and to be able to substantiate their claims. All businesses must comply with advertising and marketing laws, and failure to do so could result in costly lawsuits and civil penalties. So before you start an advertising campaign, it’s important you understand some basic rules.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the main federal agency that enforces advertising laws and regulations. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act:

• Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive;
• Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims; and
• Advertisements cannot be unfair.

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This means that if I were to start canning and marketing my mother’s spaghetti sauce, there are limits on what I can say to convince people to buy it instead of my competitors products.  I could talk about taste, because that is based on a subjective judgement. I could say all kinds of good things about my ingredients of cooking process.

But I couldn’t claim It was because I use garlic grown in the ashy soils of Mount Vesuvius, if that wasn’t the case. More importantly, I couldn’t promote my sauce based purely on the deficiencies in my competitors’ products, particularly if my claims were not based on fact. I couldn’t claim those other sauces cause cancer, use rat meat instead of beef, or are owned by people with ties to organized crime if none of it was true.

Any yet in political campaigns few such requirements exist.

If the charges made in a campaign are reckless enough, one could be sued or prosecuted under libel or slander laws, but there is considerable time, effort and costs involved, and the bar on what constitutes those offenses is pretty high, and even more so in an election season. Obviously candidates seek to undermine the credibility of one another to some degree.  It is an election, after all. Simply lying about your opponent is not enough.  

But it goes too far when you get advertisements like this:
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