It’s somewhat ironic that Halloween falls so close to Election Day on the calendar. The inevitable deception, trickery and shenanigans that come with the political season are well-suited to this time of year when mischief takes center stage. This is certainly true in political ads as desperate candidates and their supporters make one last breathless plea for your vote.

Texas is a hotbed of tom-foolery this year. Feminist darling and pro-late-term abortion activist Wendy Davis is running for governor against Republican State Attorney General Greg Abbott. Davis has taken self-humiliation to new heights—or maybe it’s new lows— with one of her recent ads. The ad features an empty wheel chair, making a tasteless reference to Abbott’s disability. He was injured in 1984 when a tree fell on him and is confined to a wheel chair.

Even members of her own party thought that was tacky. But she didn’t stop there. She later accused Abbott, who is married to a woman of Mexican ancestry, of wanting to ban interracial marriage. As if these weren’t enough, she became a Twitter joke last week when she tweeted a picture of some young ladies that she said were some young supporters who had just voted early for her. It turns out that the photo was of a group of young Virginia College Republicans who were campaigning for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie.

Until all these outlandish political stunts, Davis was best known as the abortion activist who lobbied hard against restrictions on late-term abortions in Texas in early 2013. This was around the time that Philadelphia’s own Dr. Evil Kermit Gosnell was on trial for running his House of Horrors for decades on the backs of poor women and their children.

Speaking of horrors, the National Abortion Rights Action League is hitting Colorado hard with ads against Republican senate candidate Cory Gardner. The Washington Examiner calls the ads “cartoonishly bad” and that is a pretty good description. The radio ad is so bad from start to finish that it’s hard to believe they paid someone good money to write it. It features a couple talking about their inability to locate any condoms at any store in town due to Gardner’s so called “banning of birth control”.

Meanwhile, long-time Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu stuck her foot in her mouth by insulting the very people she needs to vote for her on Tuesday. Landrieu, who has been in the Senate since 1997, is in a close race with her Republican rival, and like other Democrats in her situation, she’s not real happy having to defend Obama’s actions. So, she suggested that the South is still racist and sexist and is hard on women and minorities like Obama. Referring to the South in general and Louisiana in particular, Landrieu said. “It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader. It’s not always been a good place for women to present ourselves. It’s more of a conservative place, so we’ve had to work a little bit harder on that.”

She’s been elected and re-elected in Louisiana, as has Obama by the population as a whole. Where is the evidence of sexism and racism?

Continuing the race baiting in an effort to scare Black voters into going to the polls, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) was at a rally to get Governor Andrew Cuomo re-elected. He claimed the GOP was a hate-filled, racist collection of monsters that live as if it were 1862: “Some of them believe that slavery isn’t over and they and think they won the Civil War.”

Huh? They won the Civil War? Which they is he referring to? If only these idiots knew history. As has been documented here on this blog, it was Democrats in the South after the Civil War who formed the KKK, and it was a group of abolitionists after that same war that began what became the Republican Party in an effort get rid of slavery. Apparently, Rangel has long had a habit of comparing Republicans to Confederates…and he keeps on winning his own seat again and again.

So, in the waning days and hours before Election Day, it seems like Democrats keep resorting to the same, tired accusations. They try to get women to vote for them based on abortion and contraception, and Blacks to vote based on the fear of being returned to slavery.

When women, minorities or any other voter, for that matter, continue to choose the same people to represent them, even though they still don’t feel like any progress has been made, maybe they deserve to be tricked and not treated.