Politics is just about the only place where you'll find viciously negative advertising. There are reasons for this - and also a price that we pay for it in the dysfunction of our government and loss of public confidence in the broken system. I think we as progressives and Democrats should be especially concerned about those negative impacts, which tend to hurt us far more than our GOP counterparts.
It isn't a simple problem - for starters, there is a valuable place for negative ads in drawing needed contrasts between candidates. There certainly aren't any simple solutions. Below the fold I'll discuss the issue - but I especially hope to hear from other Kossacks on their ideas about how to tackle negative campaigning and the costs it imposes on our democracy.
We're in the midst of campaign season and it is just about impossible to get away from the negative ads. If it feels like a more negative year, there's a reason -- coverage of a Wesleyan Media Project study indicates that advertising in this year's races is indeed more negative than in 2012 or 2010.
While negative advertising is the dominant feature of political campaigns, it is relatively uncommon in product advertising. I see a couple of major reasons for this.
First, political campaigns have a binary outcome dependent solely on market share. Product campaigns want to increase sales and profits, not simply market share. In politics, if you get more market share than your opponent, you win the office - even if you shrink the market of voters dramatically in the process.
For products, if you shrink the market you and your competitors both lose - and conversely if you grow the market you can both come out as winners. So you rarely see harsh negative ads for other types of products or services. When disaster struck American Airlines with a plane crash in the Queens in November 2001, United didn't see it as an opportunity to attack a rival and boost market share - any negative ad they might have used would undercut public confidence in air travel generally and hurt United. Even those product ads that do go negative (think of the Apple ads that featured the nerdy PC user vs the cool Mac user) typically do so in a pretty mild, playful way - far from what we see in political advertising.
Secondly, many negative campaign ads bend the truth or even outright lie. Because political speech is highly protected under the First Amendment, these falsehoods can be spread virtually unchecked. Media fact checking can help a little bit, but awareness of the fact-checking seems to badly lag the false messages themselves. (In my State Senate district, a blatantly false advertisement has loomed large - falsely accusing a Democratic Senator of supporting public funding for a China junket.)
In contrast, product advertisements have legal limitations on false advertising. As described on the Federal Trade Commision's website:
When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence. The Federal Trade Commission enforces these truth-in-advertising laws, and it applies the same standards no matter where an ad appears – in newspapers and magazines, online, in the mail, or on billboards or buses. The FTC looks especially closely at advertising claims that can affect consumers’ health or their pocketbooks
Of course, negative campaigning has also benefited dramatically from the Supreme Court rulings opening the floodgates for dark money to roll into elections.
Some of the outcomes are just what you'd expect.
It is no coincidence that AP's recent poll shows 88% of registered votes disapprove of our Congress. With the amount of ink, airtime, etc. aimed at demonizing candidates and sitting members, it would be astonishing if folks didn't distrust the Congress [and yes, there are abundant valid reasons to have a negative opinion of Congress regardless of the negative ads].
With public confidence in political candidates low, you would also expect fewer people to vote. As FairVote.org notes, voter participation in the US hovers around 60% in presidential years and 40% in midterm elections - in contrast, to rates of nearly 80% in countries like Sweden, Italy and Austria.
When political campaigns depend on showing your opponents to be horrible, evil, no-good SOBs - it is also unsurprising that the ability to achieve compromise in Congress has been largely lost. Nobody wants to be caught making deals with the devil, and if you make out all Democrats (or all Republicans) to be devils then compromise becomes a dirty word and you get increased gridlock. It becomes legitimate to set your goal to be causing the opposition to fail rather than the nation to succeed, as we've seen with the GOP's attitude toward President Obama.
These are all things that should concern us at citizens, but I'd argue that it should especially concern us as progressives and Democrats. Gridlock and failing government suit the current GOP's goal of getting a government so small you can drown it in the bathtub, as Grover Norquist famously said. In contrast, we believe that government can and should play a positive role in making a more just and generous society - an agenda that DC gridlock can stop in its tracks.
We also know from surveys on key issues that the public in general supports more progressive values but that conservatives are more motivated voters, and so anything that depresses voter turnout usually benefits the GOP and hurts Democrats. In that sense, negative campaigns are another GOP voter suppression tactic - and one that is completely legal.
A Knights of Columbus/Marist survey from 2012 found that Americans dislike negative campaigns, with 78% expressing frustration with the tone of our politics and 64% indicating that negative campaigns are harming our political process. So what can we do about it?
Even if it were Constitional to restrict negative advertising, there are important values that negative ads provide in drawing legitimate contrasts between candidates. For example, when Democrats attack GOP candidates for their "war on women" it is an effort to raise awareness about the truthful anti-woman policies that those candidates support. Candidates of both parties should be drawing those kinds of contrasts.
And negative ads are effective. Pushing up your opponents negatives, in a zero-sum game like our elections, helps bolster your chances of victory. "Unilaterally disarming" by disavowing negative ads is an incredibly risky strategy that could hurt Democrats badly.
Yet the enormous reliance on negative ads to "disqualify" your opponent rather than on positive or issue-driven ads is taking a toll on our system. I'm not sure what the right answer is, and look forward to your comments and ideas - but I'll close with this observation:
In 2008 candidate Barack Obama - while certainly using some negative advertising in his campaigns - built his election narrative around positive themes of "Hope" and "Change You Can Believe In." I was on hand when he accepted the nomination in Denver and ws inspired to volunteer and donate because of what I hoped for under an Obama presidency - not what I feared from a McCain presidency. The electricity surrounding that campaign was amazing. Is it only coincidence that in 2008, the US experienced its highest rate of voter turnout (63%) since 1976?