Pam Bondi and Dan Gelber

The final days of campaigning for former Hillsborough prosecutor Pam Bondi and state Sen. Dan Gelber to be the next attorney general likely won’t be very polite.

This week, the Democratic Party released a two-minute web advertisement chronicling how Pam Bondi tried to keep a Saint Bernard she adopted after Hurricane Katrina instead of giving it back to its family in Louisiana, which contacted her when they found out where the dog was. The ad featured the family matriarch saying her grandson had dreams about how Bondi “came back to take his dog.”

Bondi also launched her own campaign missile, airing a new television ad that criticizes the Democratic nominee for voting for a 2001 measure called the “Scarlet Letter” law because it required women who were placing a child up for adoption to publish their sexual histories if they could not identify the child’s father. The law was repealed two years after it was passed.

With five days to go before the election, Bondi is leading Gelber in the polls and in money. A poll released last week by the Massachusetts-based Suffolk University had Bondi up 38 to 30 percent, with independent Jim Lewis getting 7 percent.

How accurate the polls are, though, is a looming question. The attorney general’s race gets considerably less attention than the gubernatorial or U.S. Senate contests. In the primary, polls indicated that Gelber and Bondi were in close races with primary opponents, but both won easily.

Gelber defeated fellow state Sen. Dave Aronberg by 19 percent. Bondi topped Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp 38 to 33 percent. Former Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Holly Benson came in third with 29 percent.

“The most important day for us is Election Day,” said Gelber campaign manager Christian Ulvert, noting the discrepancies in the polling for the primary compared to the outcome.

The two candidates are ideological opposites. While Bondi wants the federal health-care overhaul struck down in the courts, Gelber wants the state to withdraw from its lawsuit challenging the law, which was brought by current Attorney General Bill McCollum.

Bondi wants an Arizona-style immigration law; Gelber says that type of law “invites mischief,” meaning potential racial profiling.