Following some previous lines of thought held by the author on the role of politeness and related phenomena in face-to-face electoral debates, this article deals with a series of linguistic devices frequently used by participants in this adversarial genre, and commonly characterized as mitigated aggression, in order to determine their main strategic values in the context of both current politics and the mass media spectacle. By making use of a methodology which combines both qualitative and quantitative analysis, it is demonstrated that the meaning and context in which these resources appear in electoral debate often contradict their literal meaning, and hence weaken the moderating function which is operative in non-adversarial genres. This, as well as other structural facts discussed in the article, allows us to understand some apparent contradictions in the fact that more aggressive participants could make the greatest use of both polite and impolite strategies; or that apparently polite strategies appear mainly in the core phases of the debate where aggressiveness and rudeness are the norm, and much less in the peripheral parts, where the dialectic war tones down.
