In the final weeks of the 2026 election, Rep. Ashley Hinson, a Republican running for Senate in Iowa, began running a direct-to-camera television ad with a startling message.

“This week, I had to explain to my boys, ‘No, mom does not protect pedophiles,’” Hinson says in the ad.

It was a response to an attack by her opponent, Democrat Josh Turek, on a subject that has become increasingly fraught for Republicans.

Across the country, Republicans are facing attacks from Democrats saying that they have sided with pedophiles, rapists and sexual abusers. Many of these ads target Republicans, like Hinson, over votes related to the release of files connected to the infamous, late child sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, who was close friends with President Donald Trump for a decade. Others discuss personal connections to or official actions that GOP candidates took to reduce sentences for sex criminals, including pedophiles.

Political campaigns have always been negative, but increasingly they are raising emotional and upsetting issues that past candidates would have shied away from putting on television. What once was verboten is now part and parcel of politics. And not without reason.

“It’s new in the sense that the amount of attention being paid to this particular sad topic is much more than normal,” said John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and author of “In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns.”

“But it’s also in the era of Jeffrey Epstein and all the efforts to keep his files from coming forward in the public and that’s stirred up lots of concerns,” Geer added. “So, the issue is salient and therefore it’s being raised in a lot of different quarters.”

In a number of high-profile races, attack ads mentioning pedophilia or other sex crimes go beyond Jeffrey Epstein and mention actual actions taken by the candidate to help criminals convicted of these crimes.

An ad from Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC backing Democrats, goes after Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton for giving Adam Hoffman, who was accused of sexually abusing his son’s friend from the ages of 6 to 10, a deal that allowed him to plead guilty to misdemeanors and be sentenced to 29 days in prison, including time served, and kept him off the sex offender registry. The ad notes that Hoffman’s case was represented by the same lawyer who separately represented Nate Paul, one of “Paxton’s biggest donors,” and characterized the situation as an “Epstein-style deal to let a pedophile walk free.”

Paxton’s role in securing a plea deal for Hoffman as Texas attorney general overseeing the case is also featured in an ad declaring “we don’t need any more pedophile protectors in Washington,” from Paxton’s Democratic opponent, state legislator James Talarico. Paxton’s office has long claimed he reached the deal with Hoffman because the victim did not want to testify again after the first trial ended in a hung jury.

In Arizona, Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has been hammering her opponent, GOP Rep. Andy Biggs, over his role as a state legislator in killing legislation that targeted police corruption connected to fundamentalist preacher Warren Jeffs. Jeffs, who ran a polygamous cult in Arizona, was convicted of child sexual abuse in 2011. Biggs has denied that his opposition to the legislation had anything to do with Jeffs and was solely due to opposition from the Fraternal Order of Police. Hobbs’ ads targeting Biggs link the Jeffs allegations to the congressman’s votes against releasing the Epstein files.

Former North Carolina Republican Party official Harvey Lee West, who in 2000 pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse before coming to lead the 1st Congressional District Republican committee in 2019, has become a flashpoint in races in that state. Democratic Senate candidate Roy Cooper is running ads targeting GOP candidate Michael Whatley for appointing West to two party committees when Whatley served as state party chairman. A Democratic Party organization is also targeting Republican House candidate Laurie Buckhout over her past ties to West. (West maintains his innocence and claims he only pleaded guilty to avoid a potentially longer sentence.)

In Nebraska, Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts faces an attack from the Nebraska Values PAC over his pardon for a man who pleaded guilty to raping his now ex-wife. The ad features John Arias’ victim, Jody Snogren, describing the rape and then-Gov. Ricketts’ vote to pardon Arias after he served his sentence.

“Because of Pete Ricketts, my attacker is now allowed to own a gun and had his name removed from the sex offender registry,” Snogren says in the ad. “I have no idea why Sen. Ricketts chose my rapist over me.”

Democrats are also running ads in Texas hitting Rep. Monica De La Cruz for being cited by a court as being “cruel and aggressive” to her stepdaughter and GOP candidate Eric Flores for acting as defense counsel for a man accused of child sexual abuse. And in Virginia, former Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello is running an ad attacking GOP Rep. John McGuire for voting to keep child marriage legal.

“It’s possible that part of the reason why these ads are in the conversation is because they’re hard to look away from,” said Alexander Coppock, a political scientist at Northwestern University who has studied the impacts of negative emotional political advertising.

Republicans have fired back with similar lines of attack. Biggs has claimed that Hobbs vetoed legislation that would have targeted child sex abusers. Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, insinuate that Talarico’s past statements in support of transgender youth are evidence that he should be suspected of pedophilia. North Carolina Republicans have attacked Cooper for political connections to a man who was convicted of child sexual abuse.

But what stands out most about the attacks referencing heinous sexual crimes is how Democrats are turning the tables on Republicans.

During Trump’s first term, the conspiracy movement known as QAnon fomented a belief among Republican base voters that elite Democrats ran child sex rings and that Trump was working from the inside to break them up. The conspiracy emerged from the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy when an anonymous poster on the website 4chan claimed to be a super-secret undercover agent nicknamed “Q” and made claims about a global pedophilia ring run by Democrats that Trump, also claimed to be a super-secret undercover agent, was working to stop.

Since then, Republicans have increasingly insinuated that Democrats are on the side of child sexual abusers in both ads and rhetoric to appeal to this growing conspiracy cult in their base. This included promises to release Epstein’s files held by the government since his death by apparent suicide in prison in 2019.

But that went awry after Trump came back to office in 2025. As all public reporting had shown for years, Trump, Epstein and Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell were close friends and frequently partied together with young women — and when Republicans failed to follow through in releasing the files upon returning to power, it prompted accusations of a cover-up. His administration did not release the files until Congress was forced to pass legislation requiring it to do so. Even then, lawmakers claim that documents referencing Trump were redacted while various agencies continue to withhold other crucial documents.

“It’s because of the mishandling by the Republicans,” Geer said. “If they’d handled it a little differently, it probably wouldn’t be hurting them as much. But there’s also some concern that maybe the information in those files would have been devastating. They had to choose their poisons.”

This gave an opening to Democrats. They have slammed Republicans with ads referencing the Epstein files and the choice of GOP candidates like Paxton and Whatley provided additional storylines about child sexual abuse that connected to the Epstein issue.

This is reminiscent of the 2006 midterm elections, when a late-breaking scandal erupted over sexual relationships that then-Rep. Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, engaged in with underage congressional pages. Foley was forced to resign and GOP leadership was embroiled in questions of their efforts to cover up his actions. Democrats ran ads mentioning child sexual abuse to attack Republicans, while Republicans did the same to deflect from the unfolding scandal.

The Foley scandal fed into a larger narrative about a culture of corruption surrounding Republicans, as it hit amid high-profile lobbying and earmarking scandals dragging the party down. Democrats won back both chambers of Congress that year.

“After [the Foley scandal], the national story was corruption, and Republicans were unable to get any traction with a message,” GOP consultant Mike McElwain told Inside Elections in 2016. “Foley was the final straw that tied everything together.”

The same is true with the Epstein scandal today. It was not just one of child sexual abuse, but a story about how a wealthy pedophile used the young and underage women he abused to gain power and influence from politicians and intellectuals. It’s additionally resonant during an election cycle in which corruption has emerged as a major issue for voters on both sides of the political aisle. A Quinnipiac poll from this summer also found that 38% of voters considered the Epstein investigation important in deciding who to vote for in November.

With less than two weeks until Election Day, campaigns and outside groups from both parties have poured $70 million into ads mentioning Epstein, sexual abuse or pedophilia, according to a report by Axios.

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