With the polls closed, the Tuesday, Nov. 6, election is now behind us. In an already hyperpartisan nation, this year’s midterm was one of the most divisive in recent memory.
No matter who wins at the state and federal level, we can thankfully bid adieu to campaign ads for the next few months.
Many of the candidates themselves ran mainstream election ads, but the political action committees and Super PACs that supported or opposed the candidates and ballot propositions were nasty, vitriolic and hyperbolic.
One mailer we received suggested that voting for a federal candidate would result in the nuclear destruction of Phoenix. No, seriously, it was a 3-D ad that showed downtown Phoenix, then a mushroom cloud overlaid on the same image. The thick 3-D card stock was obviously not cheap and went out to tens of thousands of voters, paid for by an out-of-state PAC.
Another ad suggested that a vote for a federal candidate on Tuesday, Nov. 6, would result in all health insurance immediately skyrocketing to bankrupting levels on Wednesday, Nov. 7.
One mailer for a congressional candidate was from “The Arizona Sun News” — which is a wholly fake publication masquerading as a real newspaper — that contained nothing but pro statements about the candidate and attacks on the candidate’s opponent. It’s nonsense like this by candidates for public office that erodes trust in legitimate news media.
Sponsored ads appeared not just in our mailboxes and email inboxes, but at the start of YouTube videos, in Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds, in the middle of websites, even those that have nothing to do with politics.
I don’t own a television, so I’ve avoided the brunt of the worst election ads, but have heard from my staff about the type of ads they’ve seen over the last few weeks.
Negative ads are not new in politics. In the nasty presidential election of 1800, Federalist President John Adams ran for reelection against Thomas Jefferson, his Democratic-Republican vice president — the 12th Amendment that made the president and vice president run on a same party ticket wasn’t ratified until 1804.
One Adams supporter attacked Jefferson, claiming if he were elected “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution,” while another published a claim that a nation led by Jefferson would be one in which “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”
Meanwhile, Jefferson’s supporters claimed Adams was a “rageful,” lying warmonger, a “repulsive pedant” and “gross hypocrite” who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”
Attack ads have become less colorful in the last 218 years, but are still heavily used by campaigns. Studies by evolutionary biologists show that negative ads tend to prompt the brain to react to a threat response posed in attack ads, making them more memorable.
Secondly, negative ads are more psychologically complex than positive ones. Negative ads tend to include an implied comparison, causing the brain to process the information presented more slowly than a straightforward positive ad as it makes the connections between the ads’ claims and the voters’ established opinions.
Voters overwhelming say in polls that they hate negative ads. Yet campaigns run them because political scientists believe effective ones can influence elections, albeit only by small margins, which can be decisive in close elections.
Yet, according to a 2007 study published in the Journal of Politics, even though these ads were more likely to be recalled, they didn’t really affect voter choices.
Before the next election, as we take a reprieve from the election cycle, we can decide to ignore these ads, to tell our own candidates not to run them or even go so far as to punish candidates and vote against those who run them. If campaigns believe they work, whether they really do or not, we will see more and more in the years to come, making our nation more partisan and divided than we already are.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
