Because I live in a state that tends toward the same political party every Presidential election, I don't get to see that many ads for national office. But I did live in a "swing" state for 9 years, and pretty much every election at every level got nasty as the spring gave way to summer gave way to November. So it was a bit of a throwback visiting my family in said swing state and hearing the attack ads against the two main Presidential candidates. (I won't dignify either side by embedding the ads here.)
As I considered the ads, I did some quick checking for articles about negative ad campaigning and its effects on voter choices. My special interest was in the most notorious ad from the first time I was eligible to vote for President, 1988: the Willie Horton ad. This was an ad produced by supporters of Republican nominee George H.W. Bush that depicted Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis as soft on crime, symbolized by Dukakis's furlough program while Massachusetts governor. The symbol of Dukakis's dangerous liberalism was that of convicted felon Willie Horton, who committed more horrific crimes while released from prison on a furlough. The ad notoriously preyed on White America's fears of Black crime.
But most of what I discovered in my quick research is that the claims that the Horton ad doomed the Dukakis campaign are very much myths, that Dukakis had been losing ground to Bush before the ads came out. Some further research via academic databases uncovered a number of studies that demonstrate that negative ads have no effect on voter selection, that at most, they merely discourage participation in the electoral process by creating an overall mood of pessimism that "they're all no good, so why bother going to the polls?"
In many respects this makes sense: when I see an ad attacking a candidate I support, I tend to tune out the negative message, dismissing it as propaganda. And I think most of us are like that: we've already made up our minds at least in a general sense of our political values, so ads are not so likely to sway us. Although there are always numbers of voters who tell pollsters they are undecided, there is still no evidence that enough of them are swayed one way or another by an ad campaign to change the fate of an election.
So why does the negativity continue? Why spend all this money tearing down your opponent if it doesn't translate to more votes?
I suspect that that the medium has a lot to do with the continued presence of negative ads on our tv screens and radio speakers. These media thrive on drama and conflict. Angry ads get our attention, no matter what the context. We can say that we hate ads all we want, but we still watch them. ESPN Radio talk show host Colin Cowherd often makes this point on his program: everyone says they are tired of hearing about this or that star but the numbers don't bear it out. When we talked about Brett Favre's final years, where he was leaving, not leaving, retiring, not retiring, etc., our numbers were up. Everyone loves to talk about a Cinderella story at the NCAA basketball tournament, but when tiny George Mason made it to the Final Four, the ratings for their game were the lowest in years. We can say that we love stories like George Mason, but for the big games, we want to see Duke, UConn, Kansas, and Carolina.
I still wonder of course if the point of negative ads is not to change anyone's mind. The ads contribute to the overall structures that govern the society. They help reinforce a lot of our perceptions about the process, and help maintain the status quo, no matter who wins. Would the lives of Americans have been measurably better if Michael Dukakis had won the election? With all respect to those who support the Democratic party, I'm not so certain. What the ads succeed at is contributing to a common sense of our political system, making it seem as if it were some "natural" thing like the weather, when it of course a careful, elaborate construction.
In such a system, most of us will lose.
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