How often have you flipped the candidate you will vote for upon seeing a political ad? If you’re like most Americans, the answer is “never.” Yet estimates are that $7 billion will have been spent on political advertising by Election Day.
Are you tired of seeing candidate ads, especially attack ads? The number of ads each election cycle grows, especially now with multiple cable and online platforms. The percentage of negative ads grew from 29 percent in the 2000 election to 64 percent by 2012.
While some research suggests negative ads can have a very limited effect, mostly close to Election Day (when there is little time to disprove them), the bulk of studies over decades show that such ads move hardly any voters. People tend to vote primarily based on their partisan identification, no matter who the candidate is. Even “independent” voters, studies suggest, are mostly “closeted partisans.” If you were to ask them if they regularly cross party lines at the voting booth, the honest answer would be “no.”
So why is all this money spent and so much of your time taken up seeing ads – many of which you’re exposed to for days on end? One answer: the more ads people see, studies show, the more likely people are to vote. Thus, there is some marginal impact on turnout, and turnout can matter. Just ask Al Gore, who found that out in 2000 and Hillary Clinton who found it out in 2016. Is that enough reason to suffer through the ad barrage?
Candidate ads in some cases may provide information to prospective voters, but the accuracy of that information must be carefully verified, which is not easy. In most cases, ads are designed to provoke emotions. Research suggests that when a candidate says positive things about herself in an ad, it tends to produce positive feelings about the ad. Positive images of candidates with their families, friendly voters, and “people just like me” prey on the psychological persuasion technique called “liking.” We tend to vote for people we like. Eisenhower certainly benefited from the slogan “I Like Ike.”
Negative “attack ads” also prey on emotions, often using the principle called “loss aversion.” If they scare us into thinking we have a lot to lose if the “bad” candidate wins, that may trigger our vote for his opponent, who will “save us” from losing (our jobs, safety, money, health care, guns, etc.). There’s a risk for going negative, however. When a candidate does that, the reaction may well be to have negative feelings about the ad. Since that can be dangerous to a candidate, it’s usually PACs and political parties that run negative ads, not the candidates themselves. The candidates can thus distance themselves and insist they are “staying positive.”
Yet negative ads may have some “advantages” for candidates. They can be viewed as more believable, in part because they usually cite “sources,” even if those citations are deftly edited or even unethically used. Research also shows that negative ads, especially those that provoke anger, produce physiological responses (of which the viewer may not be aware) consistent with preparing to move away from the candidate who is attacked.
“Going negative” may also be helped by the “sleeper effect.” Research, still somewhat controversial because counterintuitive, suggests that people who see disturbing ads my initially discount the message, especially if they suspect the source. Yet, later, they tend to remember and give more credence to the content, and they may even forget who sponsored the ad.
Still, negative ads don’t impact turnout much and have significant downsides for society and our government. Since a large share of the cost of such ads is borne by interest groups, PACs, and other sponsors not officially part of the campaign, we must also wonder what these sponsors look for in return if their candidate wins. Negative ads do not necessarily encourage or produce careful thought by or among voters about issues that matter. There is some evidence, instead, that ads just polarize an already polarized electorate. That polarization, which we are experiencing, leads to gridlock at best and violence at worst.
Research at the Political Communication Lab at Stanford University also suggests that when both candidates “go negative,” it may sour voters on both of them, leading to the oft-heard expression that “I didn’t vote for X as much as against Y.” It can also lower overall turnout and depress belief in the political process and the sense that being active politically matters.
We pay a high price in dollars, civility, and national progress for our tolerance of excessive and negative political advertising. This is not likely to change. The First Amendment’s free speech protections and the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision dramatically expanding funding for political ads presently seem to offer no avenues for considering ways to heal our politics. We may from time to time enjoy the raucous and sometime hilarious ads that attack political opponents. They may give us self-satisfaction about our chosen candidate, but it’s likely that in the end we’re all losing even when our candidate wins.
Photo Credit: Steve Houghton-Burnett - unsplash
