Is this campaign season less civil than previous ones?
"I think Donald Trump's lack of civility is hurting the political process," California state assembly Republican Rocky Chavez, a 2016 US Senate candidate, told AFP.
"We have serious issues that need to be discussed," he added. "To lower the bar to calling people names is not beneficial."
The amount of smack talk has surprised some observers.
"What's interesting about this election: there's never been somebody like Donald Trump who is so flagrantly uncaring about civility," said Rita Kirk, director of the Maguire Center for Ethics & Public Responsibility at Southern Methodist University.
It is politics as reality TV, Kirk said, fueled by Trump's "swashbuckling, my-way-or-the-highway persona" that he cultivated on the wildly successful NBC show "The Apprentice."
The Republican National Committee, worried about how trashing fellow GOP candidates and popular female and Hispanic TV personalities might hurt efforts to broaden party appeal, warned in July that the name-calling "needs to stop."
"It only worsened," writes
Today's Question: Is this campaign season less civil than previous ones?
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