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Candidates
Go Negative in Campaign Ads |
Posted:
10.30.06
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In this election year, politicians are utilizing negative advertising
to reach voters, despite the risk that such tactics tend to annoy
the very people they are trying to impress.
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With the elections only weeks away, politicians are using negative
advertisements to cast doubt in voters' minds about their respective
opponents.
And because control of Congress is at stake, this year's crop
of negative ads are sparing no punches and leaving nothing to
the imagination.
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Going negative |
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A negative political ad is one in which the focus is not on the
positive aspects of a candidate but rather on the negative aspects
of a candidate's opponent.
 Even
though many Americans claim to have a strong distaste for negative
ads, political experts contend that they are more effective than
positive ads.
"People sometimes tune out positive ads but a negative ad
draws more attention," said Henry Kenski, a professor at
the University of Arizona and the director of Senator Jon Kyl's,
R-Ariz., Southern Arizona office. Kenski is a co-author of "Attack
Politics: Strategy and Defense."
Going negative in a campaign can have unintended consequences
and, in some cases, can actually backfire. According to Kenski,
this can happen in two ways: when the claim that is made in the
ad is excessively negative, or when the person making the claim
is not credible.
"When people are turned off and the [ad] has gone over the
top, the claim is not credible," Kenski said.
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Willie Horton
and Daisy Girl |
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A classic example of an effective negative political advertisement
is the Willie Horton television ad from 1988. In the ad, presidential
candidate George H.W. Bush successfully portrayed his opponent,
then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, as soft on crime.
The ad detailed how Horton, a convict in a Massachusetts prison,
escaped and murdered two people due to Dukakis' policy of allowing
prisoners to go on weekend "furloughs."
The ad was denounced by some as unfair to Dukakis because it
insinuated that, if elected, he would let prisoners out of jail.
However, it also garnered a tremendous amount of media attention
and helped shape the public's negative perception of Dukakis.
Perhaps the most infamous political ad was Lyndon Johnson's Daisy
Girl television spot.
Shown in 1964, during one of the darkest periods of the Cold
War, the ad showed a young girl picking the petals off of a daisy
before being obscured by video of a nuclear mushroom cloud explosion.
The ad was extremely effective in portraying Johnson's opponent,
the hawkish Senator Barry Goldwater, in a negative light by playing
on the public's fear that he would start a nuclear war if elected.
Despite the fact that it was only shown once, the Daisy Girl
ad permeated the news media after its airing.
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The 2006
elections |
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Even though there is no presidential election this year, negative
political ads are still playing throughout the country.
In Florida's 22nd House District, Democratic state Senator Ron
Klein has attacked his opponent, Republican Representative Clay
Shaw with a TV ad that features the mother of a U.S. soldier serving
in Iraq slamming Shaw for his support of the war.
In Tennessee, the Republican Party ran an ad against Democrat
Harold Ford so loaded with innuendo that even Ford's Republican
opponent, Bob Corker, denounced it.
John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University,
told NPR that the commercial made "the Willie Horton ad look
like child's play.
In Kenski's opinion, this year's ads have reached a new low in
terms of negativity. He said he believes that politics have become
"more negative" in recent years and that this "makes
it more difficult to pull together and run the government down
the road."
But Kenski also noted that often the effectiveness of a negative
political ad has little to do with its likeability.
"We know from psychological research that people are more
likely to remember a message in a negative ad than in a positive
ad," he said, even if the viewers are disgusted by it.
Despite the fact that Americans don't particularly care for negative
political ads, candidates have discovered that they are effective
at planting seeds of doubt about their opponents, and may even
make people excited for Election Day, if only because it means
an end to the barrage of annoying commercials.
--Compiled
by David Schultz for NewsHour Extra
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