Many political ads online, but who sees them?

The most clever local political ad you've probably never seen started with a couple of ticked-off musicians in North Carolina.

In August, members of the defunct band Squirrel Nut Zippers cut a catchy tune — "Have You Had Enough?" — in hopes of helping progressive candidates. The song took on a life of its own, passing among bloggers across the country until it became the basis for an ad targeting incumbent Republicans.

Last month, a version aimed at U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, was posted on YouTube.com by a supporter of his opponent. It is the kind of parody rarely seen in grim network TV ads, with vintage cartoon images and swinging trumpet riffs.

Despite the effort, it's been viewed all of 2,081 times.

That's the rub with the growing phenomenon this campaign season of Internet video sites like YouTube. No matter how witty or provocative, political ads on the Web are — at least for now — largely an inside joke among political junkies.

"I think the jury is still out on their ultimate effectiveness in actually generating votes," said Randy Pepple, a former GOP campaign manager and CEO of Rockey Hill & Knowlton, a public-relations firm in Seattle. "They have had some results generating money. But we haven't seen them generate votes."

That has not stopped candidates and their supporters in the most-contested local races from posting videos, including Democratic incumbent Maria Cantwell and Republican Mike McGavick in the U.S. Senate, and Reichert and his Democratic opponent, Darcy Burner, for the Eastside congressional seat. Everything from homemade hit pieces to banal stump speeches to candidates' gaffes is up for viewing on the Web.

What creators of those videos want, said Peter Mitchell of the boutique ad agency Mercury Seattle, is for them to go "viral." That happens when a video fills e-mail boxes across the country like a contagion.

In 2005, a cartoon parody of President Bush at JibJab.com went viral, with 2 million views within two weeks. Video of Sen. George Allen, R-Va., calling an opponent's campaign volunteer "macaca" — the name of an African monkey — has been seen more than 250,000 times since he made the remark this summer.

"I absolutely think the viral stuff is where you will change people's opinion," Mitchell said. "If you are sitting in your living room and see a mudslinging ad on TV, you can say, 'It's only political people.' When something goes viral, it will come to you from a friend."

His firm, working on behalf of Seattle City Council candidate Richard McIver last year, built a Web site poking fun at McIver's opponent, Dwight Pelz. The site (www.whatwilldwightdonext.com) featured a Magic 8 ball; each click spit out a new race that Pelz, now chairman of the state Democratic Party, had considered entering. McIver won the race.

The site wasn't seen very many times, but it was seen by "the right people" in political circles, Mitchell said. "I wouldn't measure success in the number of hits and megabits. Success is whether you changed the debate, whether you changed the discussion."

The "macaca" episode — with Allen using the term to describe the volunteer of Indian descent — has shown the potency of the gotcha video.

Reichert supporters recently posted on YouTube video of a silly dance between a Republican trying to tape Burner at a campaign event and a Democrat holding a piece of paper in front of the lens. That video, however, has been seen less than 1,000 times.

Political blogs are the most common source for turning a video viral, but bloggers acknowledge that most of their readers are already political insiders.

It won't be until campaigns can send e-mails to narrowly focused groups — such as all the independent voters in the Reichert-Burner race — that Web videos will really take off, said John Wyble of Moxie Media, a left-leaning political consulting group in Seattle.

"It's one thing to have political insiders looking at these. It's another for it to become viral and penetrate down to swing voters," he said.

Even if they are not yet critical to campaigns, Web sites such as YouTube and Google Video are repositories of political ingenuity. An ad by Yvonne Ward, a Democrat in Auburn running for the state Senate, replicates the legendary Rainier beer motorcycle ad, with the candidate on her bike.

The ad using the Squirrel Nut Zippers' "Have You Had Enough?" has been such a hit that it has been recut for about 18 races across the country. In it, cartoons are spliced with images from an old Dwight Eisenhower commercial while singer Rickie Lee Jones urges voters to "throw the rascals out."

Andrew Tsao, a network TV director in Bellevue and a Burner supporter, posted it on YouTube last month after asking bloggers for a copy tailor-made for Reichert. "Any campaign in America today that does not pay very careful attention to the use of viral media does so at their own peril," Tsao said.

On that point, Tsao and Republican campaign strategist J. Vander Stoep, an adviser to McGavick's campaign, can agree.

"There's going to come a day when ... it will be demonstrated that campaigns' actions on the Web are decisive," Vander Stoep said. "Is it this year? Nobody knows. Talk to me after the election."

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com