(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to "The Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall.

We're just a few days away from the midterm elections, and the point is, who has the edge right now?

What are the issues?

What has changed over the last several months?

Joining us are Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and Dr. David Jackson from Bowling Green State University's Department of Political Science.

Welcome both of you to "The Journal," appreciate you being here.

David, one of the things that is, the convention is that the party in power, in that first midterm election, loses seats.

Is that what we're gonna see this year?

Or what's the thought on that this year?

Because it seems like, as we talked the last time, convention doesn't matter anymore.

What we take is for granted as this is how this works, doesn't play.

Is that the case with this election?

- Well, what history teaches us and what political science scholarship teaches us is that the party of the president tends to lose a significant number of seats in Congress during the first midterm.

There's a couple different theories for that, one's called the theory of surge and decline.

The beautiful thing about political science, unlike the other sciences, is our theories actually sound like what they are.

(laughs) - [Steve] Oh.

(laughs) - So literally in the presidential election, the presidential party surges to victory on the wave of sometimes new voters, energized voters, or more commonly unfrequent voters.

Then comes the midterm election and those folks don't turn out.

And the other party is much more energized, much more ready to take back control, to overcome what they lost in the previous election.

So basically the presidential party surges to victory, and then their turnout declines.

It's a different group of voters in the two elections.

The other theory says no, what actually is happening is that the first midterm is a referendum on the incumbent president, that it is a vote by the electorate to say whether or not they think the current presidential party is doing a good job.

By both of those theories, the Democratic Party in Congress is expected to not only lose a significant number of seats, but to in all likelihood lose their current, very slim majority in Congress, and possibly as well as in the Senate, because as they say, the headwinds are just so strong.

That the President's popularity is quite low.

[Steve] Gone low, right.

- And in some competitive states it's particularly low, which is problematic.

And then, also the Republican Party is definitely energized to get out and make up for the losses from 2020.

- Right, now and, you know, you mentioned the fact that this is kind of the conventional thing, and that was gonna be my question when you mentioned the second sort of theory is that, yeah, it's a referendum, it's, "How have you done the last two years?"

And the answer right now is maybe not as well as people would like.

That's probably painting it positively.

- Well, there are mitigating factors though, which, so yeah, the tradition, the structure, what normally happens is bad news for the Democrats, but there's a couple different factors that are working in their favor.

And one is there are some not so effective and great candidates who've made it through the Republican primary.

And so to maybe localize things a little bit more in the congressional district with the incumbent Congressperson Marcy Kaptur, J.R. Majewski is a candidate who made it through the Republican primary, but would not be considered a quality candidate by the traditional measures used by political science.

You know, having held previous elective office in the district, you know, things like that, having previous public service experience.

And so this is a phenomenon that apparently has happened in a number of places throughout the country.

We could point to the Senate race in Georgia on the Republican side.

We could point to, even in Pennsylvania, where a candidate on the Republican side has sort of moved there from New Jersey and is attempting to parlay his fame into a Senate seat.

So that actually says that the theories matter, the theories still drive, you know, the outcome, but there factors on the margins that can matter too.

And then, there's a factor of luck.

[Steve] Mhmm, sure.

- In 1980, I just went and participated in a webinar where seven, I believe it was, Senate seats all broke in the Republican's favor toward the end of the campaign, and that sometimes happens too.

- Sure, and, you know, we've talked over the last several months about how things have evolved, and I know that one of the things we talked about, of course, was the Supreme Court decisions that came into play, and then maybe even potential Supreme Court decisions yet to come with this particular court.

And, Nicole, those are factors too that people that, does it seem as if those factors have fallen away compared to what they were a month or two ago?

Or are those still gonna be driving factors for turnout because of those Supreme Court decisions?

- So I think they've fallen a little bit away just because we tend to have a bias towards things that have happened most recently.

- [Steve] Recency bias.

Okay, yep, okay.

- Yep.

And so, yep, they've fallen a little bit away, but I think also a lot of Republican candidates who are getting hammered by those court decisions stopped talking about them.

They moderated their positions, they moderated their websites, they tried to wipe the internet of any previous statements they had that might go against the public opinion, the tides of public opinion essentially.

And so they've tried to focus far more on issues that resonate with voters, like gas prices or crime, rather than abortion or women's rights.

And so I think you see the public opinion kind of responding a little bit to that.

It doesn't make the issues any less important.

It just means that we're being primed to think about different things at election time by design, because the issue of abortion is not a winning one for Republicans right now.

- Yeah, and just as if, then the Democrats don't really wanna talk, well, they don't wanna talk about the economy too much.

They find pieces where they say, "Well, look, this is better and this is whatever."

But, overall, that's not their message.

Their message is, "The other guys are scarier than we are," I guess is kind of the message a little bit.

And that's what we kind of see with advertising too.

And we've got just a couple of minutes here, as we've always talked, you see some positive ads for a candidate, "This is what I've done, this is what I will do."

But still, overall, it seems as if, and maybe we're just more attuned to it, do we notice the negative ads more or are there actually a lot more of them every time?

Or is it just that we notice that we wanna hear bad things about people?

I wonder if it's a psychological thing somehow.

- There are a lot more negative ads.

[Steve] Are there?

Okay.

So it's not just me then?

Okay, all right, okay.

- No, no, no.

We know that negative ads typically turn people off, but they're also far more effective than positive ads.

Politics is complicated, particularly economic politics.

Those aren't easy issues, and so it's a lot easier to make people remember a negative ad.

And those typically just are far more effective, even though people say they turn them off from politics.

If you actually look at what works, the negative ads do.

And once one candidate goes negative, typically, you know, their opponent follows suit.

- Has to to counter the, yeah.

- So we see a lot more negative ads, and I think of very different tone than we did historically.

- Okay, that's what I was gonna ask.

I know we've got just a moment here when we can come back to this, but, and again, maybe when you're younger, you don't notice the negativity as much, but there simply is more of a lean toward doing negative ads than maybe there was in 1960, '64, '68, '72.

Although, there were negative ads, but they weren't as maybe directly focused as being negative.

They were subtle in being negative maybe, like implying something versus, "The other guy is gonna kill your children," which seems to be what you get sometimes now, which is really amazing, because we know you can say anything in an ad, you're not held to any standard of truth.

- Well, I mean, there's a 1968 Democratic ad that's 15 seconds of laughter about the concept of the Republican vice presidential nominee.

- Oh, okay, yeah.

- So politics has always been, pretty brutally negative.

- Down low, yeah.

- I'm teaching a course right now on politics and mass media that covers the concept of bias in the media.

And I spent some time looking at the evidence for liberal or conservative bias.

But where the research lands is that the bias is in favor of negativity and incivility, even in regular media coverage.

And there's even an argument to be made that the reason for that is, of course, because people watch it, people pay attention to it.

And there actually might be an argument that there's something about us evolutionarily that makes us pay attention to things that are negative more than things that are positive because they're warning signs for dangers.

- So we tune it, we catch that.

- Yeah.

- Hmm, okay, when we come back, we can talk a little more about the ads that are going on to some degree.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and Dr. David Jackson from the BGSU Department of Political Science here on "The Journal."

Thanks for staying with us, "The Journal."

We're talking about the midterm elections.

We're now just a few days away.

In the last segment, we talked a little bit about the tenor of the ads, and I know Dr. Jackson, you mentioned the fact there's negativity, and Dr. Kalaf-Hughes said, you know, that things have changed in the way the negativity is portrayed.

It used to be what now would be considered almost not even effective, very subtle, but there, now it's just more blatant.

We just say, "The other guy is really, really bad.

He's scary, he's dangerous.

She's this, she's that."

There's no positioning other than, "My opponent is worse than I am," that seems to be the case.

Like "I may bad, but they're a lot worse than I am."

- Well, yeah, and I think what's really interesting is if you think historically about what famous negative ads or famous, you know, ads that have gone down in history, like the Willie Horton ad or the Daisy Girl ad, they were so aggressive from an advertising perspective that they've actually stood out.

And those are the ones we talk about, regardless of how much you were paying attention during that election time.

But I think now so many of them have that tone that it becomes really difficult to isolate which ones are the most negative, that it just becomes kind of a wash. We talk about how Bush was criticized for the Willie Horton ad, because both the racial dog whistles that were in it and how negative it was, and that I would consider to be far more tame than a lot of the ads that we see today, and a lot of the images that are in the campaign ads today, both in the midterms and presidential elections.

So I think what we see has changed, and I think what people are interested in seeing has changed.

And like we pointed out in the last segment, negativity sells, it sells even if you watch your local news.

The first seven to 11 minutes are the world's worst things that have happened in your community, and you don't get to fluffy, happy high school sports until the very end.

- Right, and that's a good point.

And I guess when you look at that too, even general entertainment television, a lot of the channels are focused on, well, look at this dysfunctional family or look at this dysfunctional group.

It's really a lot about negativity even there.

So as maybe as you were saying too, David, that's sort of where we are with all of the things we take in media-wise or in other ways.

We're just sort of evolving toward that, where we want to see, or somewhere we wanna see bad things, we wanna hear bad things about other people or like, "Wow, that person's a lot worse off than I am."

And maybe that comes now through in the ads that you can pretty much say whatever you want about your opponent.

And we know that with political ads, they don't have to be truthful.

There's no bar for that.

So whatever the level of negativity is, just keeps getting lower because you can pretty much say whatever you want and you can say, "Well, it's not true."

It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it's out there now and people say, "You know what I heard?

I didn't know she did that when she was a congressman."

She may not have done it, he may not have done it, but now it's out in an ad, "Well, you know, they did that."

So how do we get through all of that though?

Are we just on a downward slope to whatever that ends up being?

I mean, if it's this bad right now, what's it gonna be two years from now, four years from now, 20 years from now?

- You know, we just covered an article a few weeks ago in my politics and mass media class that deals with local TV coverage of crime.

And it's an experimental project that showed people who watch a lot of local television have an elevated fear of crime beyond the likelihood of their being a victim.

Also though, in the entertainment media, we find that a character in an entertainment broadcast, generally speaking, has a much higher probability of being the victim of a crime than a real person does.

So a notion has developed called sort of video malaise that people who are connected the most to their televisions, both because of the negativity bias in the news and the sometimes disproportionately violent nature of entertainment television, end up with a very different perspective, a very skewed perspective on what the world is actually like.

Now in defense of negative ads, there is some scholarship over time that suggests that we should differentiate among positive ads, negative ads, and ads that we would refer to as a contrast ad.

And a contrast ad is where the candidate shows what's different between them and the other candidates.

And sometimes the research suggests that negative ads or contrast ads actually do a better job of transmitting information to potential voters.

Voters are, of course, skeptical of the sunshine, and lollipops, and rainbows everywhere ads that candidates put out about themselves.

And so the contrast ads may seem more credible and may actually, by some content analysis- - [Steve] Be more credible.

- Be more credible, and show more actual information.

- Yeah, and it's funny, because now it used to be you would hear say, "Wow, I just wish they wouldn't, tell me more about why I should elect you, not why the other person's bad."

But you don't really hear people say, at least anecdotally, I don't hear people say that anymore.

They just, whether they've passed through that and now they know it's not gonna happen, so they know it isn't a point of even discussing.

But that use to be the case, so people would clamor for, "Well, tell me why I should vote for you, not why I should vote against the other person."

And yet that now seems to be off the table when we talk about this stuff, nobody goes there anymore.

So I don't know.

- I think a lot of it has to do with the ads generally are priming you to think about whatever the campaigns want you to think about.

And so often for campaigns, they want you to not vote for the other candidate.

Our system means that we're gonna get two major-party candidates and we're not gonna have any competitive third-party candidates really.

And so the idea isn't so much as why you should, like you said, why you should vote for them, but why you shouldn't vote for the other guy.

And it's a lot easier to prime someone to be really concerned, say about crime, when crime rates are far lower than they used to be, but that's not what we're primed to think about.

And so it's a lot easier to communicate those kinds of easy issues rather than complicated policy.

And so I think it's as long as the media, whether it's news coverage, whether it's campaign ads, whatever it is, they're priming you to think about that when you go to vote.

Campaign slogans work the same way.

And so I think as long as they're trying to, is that's the goal, why you should vote for someone, doesn't matter nearly as much as the hummable tune from why you shouldn't vote for- - Vote for the other person, wow.

Yeah, and I guess, you know, and it's interesting you mention that, because I always talk about this story about my son moving to New York City.

And it's like, "Oh my, New York City," you know, you think horrible things are gonna happen.

Then you have to come to the conclusion that there are tens of millions of people in New York City that go to work and do whatever they do every day and never are the victim of a crime.

But yet you have the perception that, "Oh, there's horrible crime in New York and what will happen to him or her?"

That kinda thing, it is that same sort of thing.

It's like because you hear only the bad things it seems most of the time, and so it does skew you to think things are maybe worse or the other person is worse than they really are.

And then, as you said, that goes across all the media, all the media that way.

When we come back, let's talk a little bit more about that, and maybe some of the local stuff, and how we see the state shaking out a little bit too.

Because, you know, we talked about redistricting the last time a little bit, and that obviously is gonna play in the way we thought it would.

So back in just a moment with Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and Dr. David Jackson here on "The Journal."

Thanks for staying with us on "The Journal."

We're talking about the midterm elections, now just a few days away.

My guests are Dr. Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and Dr. David Jackson.

David, we're now it's a few days away, the ads that are out there, and especially some of the local ads, you know, the one swing district it looks like in Ohio, the one that's really kind of up for grabs maybe more than most of the other ones, which, because of we know we talked about redistricting and how that pretty much sort of settled who's gonna win in certain places in Ohio, is the ninth district, it covers, you know, Northwest Ohio, an upper chunk of that.

That race was thought to be non-competitive.

And nationally, some of the groups have maybe pulled, we believe pulled money out of the Republican side of it.

But there's still plenty of ads going back and forth in that campaign, and some people will tell you that the race is tighter than they believe and all of that.

And so what's the feel for that right now, in your opinion?

Where do we stand with that one?

Since it's gonna be the only, seems like the only really competitive district in Ohio, congressional district.

- Yeah, you don't see a lot of polling on specific congressional district races around here.

So you have to go by, you know, secondary measures to try to figure out, you know, how competitive the race actually is.

I think the best evidence for the fact that the race is competitive, you know, is twofold.

Number one is the basis of the district is a Republican, you know, plus three or plus four district, whatever, I've seen different numbers in terms of, you know, registrations.

And then, the fact that the 40-year incumbent, Representative Marcy Kaptur, is spending a boatload of money on advertising, as are, I'm sure, the groups who support her.

And one can, you know, hypothesize from that, that the spending is happening because they may have internal polls that show things aren't so great.

And so I would expect it to still be a fairly competitive race even though, you know, the candidate quality issue is so extreme between the two, between relatively, one would say, effective member of Congress versus somebody who has no public service, you know, experience and has, you know, a significant problem it appears in terms of having overstated the significance of his military experience.

- But, you know, and Nicole, we've talked about this at other times, you know, going back years and years, that while those are all things that normally would really drag a campaign down and maybe actually eliminate the person from being competitive, that doesn't seem to be as important now.

So, I mean, because like you say, you look at that and go, usually somebody who would allegedly, in this case, because, you know, they go back and forth about the military record, was it this or was it that?

Normally, even that kind of discussion, the hint of that would've turned a lot of voters off to that candidate.

But those kind of things don't seem to matter.

It almost seems like you come down to, "Yeah, but he's still better than that other person.

I really don't want that other person, because," for whatever reason.

And yet, these should be things that should undo a campaign and don't anymore.

- Yeah, historically, lying about your military service or debates about your- [Steve] Misrepresenting or whatever.

- Yeah.

Debates about your role in an attempted coup would kind of end your candidacy pretty early, but not anymore.

And I think it's important that we remember that this district that has been pretty secure for Marcy Kaptur for so many years was designed to be a Republican pickup.

They drew the district specifically to get her out of office, and so it does lean Republican by design now.

But the candidate that won the primary, as my colleague said, was not the most traditionally strong as defined by political science metrics of candidate quality.

And so I think you do get that really interesting tension.

Regardless, there are some people who are going to vote for their party's nominee no matter what.

And it doesn't matter who it is, it doesn't matter what their history is, it doesn't matter what they've said, it doesn't matter what their experience is, as long as they have the party affiliation attached to their name, some people are going to vote for that person.

And there's been some research and some evidence that suggests in recent years, rather than selecting the party that matches our preferences, we now match our preferences to the party.

So that as parties, particularly the Republican Party has moved far further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left, that voters have actually moderated their views to match up with where Trump has taken the party, rather than, you know, becoming more independent or keeping their views consistent.

And so I think as long as you have Republican candidates or Democratic candidates who are taking specific positions, voters are gonna moderate to match that rather than cross party lines.

Now that's not true for everyone.

But for a lot of voters, it doesn't matter who that candidate is, they will do the mental gymnastics necessary to overcome any cognitive dissonance.

[Steve] To rationalize, yeah.

- Yep.

- And then you have, I know too, and polling, of course, obviously has been a little difficult over time.

And I can remember a Toledo mayoral race years ago where exit polling was being done and the exit polling said, "This person's gonna win by 15 points.

No, this is over, this is over."

And then, the other candidate won.

And I remember that because people would, as I think you said, Nicole, they didn't really want to admit they were gonna vote for somebody, but they had aligned their view to say, "I'm gonna do this, I'm just not gonna admit it in public to somebody," and so you have some of that.

That's why the polling has been so tricky.

I think people don't necessarily, they may not like a lot of things about their candidate, but it's their party's candidate.

They don't like the positions, maybe they don't like the comments, so they're not gonna say in public maybe, "Oh, I'm behind this person because it doesn't feel good," but they're still gonna go in and vote for them and not tell the pollsters that that's what they're going to do or what they did afterwards.

- Well, no doubt polling has taken a hit since the 2016 election.

Although, I would say, you know, the surveys do give us over time when you accumulate enough of them, a relatively decent picture of where things stand.

So right now in Ohio, we have a situation where it's almost an unintentional experiment in the importance of fundraising and messaging.

Because in the governor's race, there's, based on the average I've seen from FiveThirtyEight, something like a 55-36 difference between DeWine and Whaley.

Whereas on the Senate side, it's maybe a 1 1/2 or two percentage point difference.

And, of course, there's some significant differences in those campaigns and in those races.

So on the Ryan side, he's not getting as much money as he would've wanted from the Democratic Party nationally, but he's been very, very successful in fundraising overall.

He has a long history of being elected in a larger place in Ohio than Whaley does.

She's been a mayor, he's been a member of Congress.

And then, the candidate quality on the other side matters as well, because essentially, JD Vance is a celebrity candidate, who made his name off a book that was made into a movie, probably hasn't really spent as much time in Ohio lately as Tim Ryan has.

And Tim Ryan has run a very moderate campaign coming out and saying he stands with Trump on trade.

- Which is pretty unusual for a Democrat to say anything like that, yeah.

- Right, but his hope there is to pull in some moderates.

Democrats used to be competitive in some parts of rural Ohio.

A county I've looked at extensively for different reasons is Tuscarawas County in East Central Ohio.

Obama carried that county with a plurality, I believe twice, and then Trump carried it maybe 70-30 since then.

So in places like that, if he can switch it to 60-40 while still holding onto, you know, the Democratic strongholds, he may have a chance.

- Yeah, and one of the things that I know, Nicole, we just got a moment or two, it is interesting that, as you said, Dr. Jackson, that Ryan has said, "I've stood with Trump on this," which would that maybe alienate some of the people?

Or are we that say, "Hey, he's still the Democratic candidate.

I know why he's doing that.

Does he really mean it?"

But to some people that would sound like, "Well, wait a minute, I've got a Democrat saying nice things about Donald Trump?

How does that work?"

- It might, but I think he's being very strategic in when and how he's using that.

He is a very experienced politician.

He knows what he needs to do.

And, historically, if you look at his record, he hasn't always been lockstep with the majority of the Democratic Party.

So I don't think it comes from a place of dishonesty at all.

I think it comes from knowing rural Ohio.

- Ah, okay, well, okay, good.

Well, I appreciate both of you being here and we'll see what happens, you know, in a few days, because, as I said, we're doing this a few days before the election and we'll see how it all plays out.

I guess we never should be surprised anymore I guess is the way this works out.

So appreciate you taking time to be here with us today.

You can check us out at: wbgu.org, and watch us every Thursday night at eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

And we will see you again next time, good night and good luck.

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