Politicians and political groups will spend so much money on advertising this year that it's likely to backfire and irritate the very voters the campaigns are trying to reach, according to political experts who spoke Friday at the University of Georgia.

President Barack Obama, Republican nominee Mitt Romney and outside groups like super PACs will spend $5.5 billion on the campaigns, said Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader who's formed a new socially-conservative group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, since his disgrace in the Jack Abramoff casino scandal.

"Quite frankly, we don't know what this tsunami of money is going to do," said Cynthia Tucker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist and editor. "We've never seen this before."

Whatever all that money does, it won't do it to very many people. Almost everyone has already made up his mind, panelists said. Only 6 percent of voters are undecided, and another 6 percent might be persuaded to change their minds "if something extraordinary happens," Democratic consultant and commentator Jamal Simmons said. "You're really talking about a very small number of people in a small number of states," he said.

The deluge of ads probably won't have the desired effect as voters in battleground states the ads are aimed grow sick of them, Reed said. "They're going to tune out these attack ads because they're mutually-assured destruction," he said. "They're going to turn off the television."

Rather than run ads on a loop the next two months, Reed advised the Romney campaign to put more money into tactics like door-to-door campaigning to turn out supporters, which Tucker called his biggest weakness.

The GOP and Democratic national conventions, which just wrapped up Thursday and last week, respectively, won't move the needle much, either, because viewers were mostly already fans of one candidate or the other, Tucker said. Nor will social media change minds because, as Simmons noted, swing voters are too busy working or taking care of their children to spend time on Twitter.

For people who follow politics closely, though, the Internet has opened up a whole new world of information and entertainment, said Republican speechwriter Mary Kate Carey. For example, Twitter users were taking bets on how many times Vice President Joe Biden would use the word "literally" during his convention speech, she said. "I think the electorate is extraordinarily engaged," she said.

As Romney and Obama court the tiny pool of undecided voters, they're also working to boost turnout among their most avid supporters. That's what the conventions were all about, said Tucker.

Obama leads among women, especially educated and working-class unmarried women who feel like he understands them better, Tucker said, but Romney has closed 2008 GOP nominee John McCain's gap by appealing to married women who are more conservative on issues like abortion, in spite of Democratic efforts to paint Republicans as extremists, Carey said. "Don't be fooled—it doesn't make that much difference in this election," Tucker said of Senate candidate Todd Akin's recent comments on rape. Instead, women care most about their pocketbooks because they do the shopping and fill up the family car, she said. For Romney to win, he needs at least 44 percent of female voters, which he's close to getting, but the negative tone of the campaign on both sides disgusts women, Reed said.

Thirty-nine percent of white voters support Obama, compared to 43 percent in 2008, which will make it hard for him to win Virginia, North Carolina and Florida again unless more minority voters turn out, Reed said. Conversely, polls show that Romney has virtually no support among African-Americans, even less than the 8 percent or so of the black vote that usually goes to Republicans, Simmons said. But black turnout could decline this year due to new voter ID laws and other restrictions, he said.

The panel discussion was part of the UGA School of Public and International Affairs' 10th anniversary celebration.