In the days before Tuesday’s D.C. Democratic primary, some mayoral and council candidates are going negative, attacking their opponents through TV and digital ads and mailers.

       Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who is seeking a third term, ran a video ad over the weekend aimed at one of her opponents, Council member Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large). In the 38-second video, a narrator declares that White has delivered “broken promises” and “bad ideas” before Bowser appears, touting herself as a trusted leader. “I keep my promises. I do what I say I’m going to do, and I don’t waffle,” she says in the clip, taken from a mayoral debate.

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       An earlier negative mailer from the Bowser campaign includes the phrase “Robert White wants to send our kids away to boarding school” inscribed on a red backpack, a reference to White’s proposal to create more public boarding schools in the city for students whose turbulent home lives could interfere with their education.

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       White, the best-funded of Bowser’s three opponents, has taken aim at the mayor in his own ads, with negative mailers and last week a video ad on what he characterized as Bowser’s failure to deliver results on housing affordability, crime and education.

       “She is asking for four more years, but we cannot accept the status quo,” White says in the video.

       White’s campaign manager, Luz Martinez, said in an interview that the Bowser campaign has directed a deliberately misleading campaign against White, including lambasting his proposal to create boarding schools. She said Bowser is targeting White because she views him as a strong contender.

       “She sees that we have a strong campaign, we have momentum, and it’s going to be an extremely competitive race down to the line,” Martinez said.

       “The only misleading things are Robert’s bad ideas — from government-run boarding schools, to creating 10,000 government jobs without a plan to pay for it, to his opposition to hiring police officers — that do not appear on his campaign website or in his mail despite him saying them on the campaign trail,” Bowser’s campaign manager, Malik Williams, said in response.

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       Williams said the negative approach is nothing new. “Voters have been barraged with negative ads this entire election season about the Mayor’s record,” Williams wrote in a statement, adding that the campaign wanted to show voters the difference between Bowser and “those who have bad ideas, no record and are already running away from their own campaign promises.”

       D.C. political strategist China Dickerson, who has worked on previous Democratic campaigns in the city, said candidates are using negative campaigning to distinguish themselves, especially during the primary, which in this deeply Democratic city generally determines the winners of the general election in November.

       “Just touting what you will do is not effective in D.C.,” Dickerson said. In an race among Democrats in a heavily Democratic city, voters are prone not to pay close attention, thinking that ultimately somebody from their party will win, she said. “People are confused about how you’re different, [so] you might have to say how the other person will be bad for the city or the community.”

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       Attacking an opponent is not new, she said, and it is even more expected among candidates who — like Bowser and White — have a long history of working alongside each other, she said. “Because they have worked together, they are able to pick on each other,” she said.

       Some of the council campaigns have gone negative as well. In Ward 1, Council member Brianne K. Nadeau launched a website connecting her leading opponent, former police officer Salah Czapary, to the Republican Party. Czapary’s former campaign chairman, William Pack, had ties to Republican organizations, including the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. Czapary, who was registered as an independent until earlier this year, said he removed Pack in mid-May when he learned of the ties.

       And in Ward 3, one candidate made a video about Eric Goulet after he turned a question about increasing diversity in the ward into a criticism about housing vouchers during a D.C. Chamber of Commerce debate last month.

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       During the debate, Goulet said that “there’s been a significant increase in the housing voucher program, which is bringing largely African American residents and families into the neighborhood without support and really without any hope of then connecting [them] to jobs and getting them into D.C.’s middle class.”

       Ben Bergmann released a video on his Twitter account last week attacking Goulet for his answer.

       Goulet did not respond to phone calls requesting comment. Bergmann has since dropped out of the race, urging voters to vote for Matthew Frumin and not Goulet, after another candidate, Tricia Duncan, did the same.