Joe and Kamala are telling you to vote for Joe and Kamala, not against Trump.
Peter Hamby has a terrific piece up in Vanity Fair on the Fellow Americans 501[c] (4) group, made up of veterans of the Obama campaign’s digital operations. I’ve always suspected that everyone in America has already made up their mind about our corruptor-in-chief and that all the “clever” ads by groups like the Lincoln Project or Meidas Touch were just wastes of time and money that preached to no one but the choir.
But in fact, the Fellow Americans group argues that their research shows that attacking Trump at this stage actually increases support for Trump, or at least decreases support for Biden.
Ads that directly attack Trump, using his voice, news clips, or even just his face, have the effect of turning off not only persuadable voters, but also the Democratic-base voters whom Joe Biden needs in November. “The scary, doom-and-gloom, negative campaign spots that you typically see in an election year not only aren’t working with people that we want, they’re causing backlash among the people that we need,” said Jess McIntosh, a veteran Democratic communications strategist. “Trump is so saturated. You can make the case that you want to make without even saying his name. The point of ads that seem to work is not centering him, either with audio or visually. And that’s how people seem to be most receptive, which is sort of the exact opposite of what you saw in 2016, and even so far in 2020.”
Fellow Americans made an ad right after the infamous gassing at Lafayette Square. It’s a powerful ad that makes Trump’s raw authoritarianism plain and clear. Their research shows the ad was actually counterproductive.
“We assumed it would be a mover spot, and it just wasn’t,” McIntosh said. The video had the adverse effect of pushing away not just moderate voters, but also many Democratic-base voters, particularly young people, who find politics tiresome and irrelevant to their lives.
Basically, persuadable voters simply see these ads as more “politics as usual” and it causes them to get more disgusted with the whole process. That either leads to them being less likely to vote at all, or even more likely to vote for Trump out of sympathy or just plain disgust with a system that Trump is implicitly promising to end.
Everyone in America has already made up their mind on Trump’s character. Some think he’s done nothing wrong, and those people are pretty much lost. The ones who think “He’s a bastard but he’s my bastard (or that they’re all bastards),” are the ones that can be won over.
The article states that a full 25% of the ads the Clinton campaign ran in 2016 were more likely to increase support for Trump than they were for Clinton. That includes the famous “Mirrors” ad that showed young women looking in the mirror while Trump’s sexist and degrading statements played over them.
So what does work? What does their research say gets voters on the fence to turn out for the Democrats? Positive ads about what Joe Biden can do for America.
Its best-performing ads had a few things in common: They were optimistic; they included President Obama; they used simple facts and figures; or they starred regular people rather than politicians. Messages about Biden performed best when they avoided Trump contrasts or featured testimonials from young people who portrayed him as a bridge builder and focused on his unifying message.
That’s not to say that there can’t be negative ads. They did find that talking about the problems America is facing right now (including COVID or race relations) can be effective, as long as Trump’s role in making these things worse is left reasonably implicit.
One of Fellow Americans’ most powerful videos was called “Evie,” which featured a woman talking about her mother, a Holocaust survivor, who died of COVID before her daughter could say goodbye. It ended with some simple text onscreen: “Tell the Trump administration to take care of our elders.”
Nothing about Trump being a sociopath. Just saying that the Trump administration has failed to protect our elderly.
The good news here is that the Biden campaign seems to know this. Most of their ads have been about Joe, his empathy and his working class roots. They’re also about what Biden can do for America. Even when Biden goes after Trump on COVID, he says he doesn’t blame Trump for causing COVID but he does blame him for not doing something to stop it. He keeps the emphasis on how the Trump administration has failed America and not on why the Trump administration has failed—which is that Trump is an incompetent, psychopathic conman. We know that, but the “persuadable” voter doesn’t want to hear it.
Now I’m not accusing the Lincoln Project or anyone else of secretly being in the bag for Trump. They believe that their ads are effective by whatever means they are using to measure them. (And since this article doesn’t mention anything about Congressional races, their ads against less-well-know Senators may well be very effective.) But we need to remember around here that most of these “This New ad is DEVASTATING to Trump’s chances” probably isn’t doing any good at all and may in fact be harmful. There’s no harm sharing them around here, where everyone has already made up their minds. But when you put them on social media where persuadable voters hang out, all these ads are doing is making people disgusted with the process and feel sympathy towards Trump.
