The 2015 article “Comparing the Effectiveness of Positive and Negative Political Campaigns” by Peter A. Gregory (found in Inquiries Journal) posits an interesting premise: Negative political ads hurt the attacker more than the attackee.
Gregory analyzed research going back to 1991, though he uses a more narrow definition of “negative” than most of the studies. He includes any ad that points out something “bad” about the opposing candidate even if that something is true. He found some of the studies show attack ads help the attacker; others showed they hurt the attacker. A couple of the studies Gregory summarized showed people were more likely to think poorly of the candidate sponsoring the attack ad than the candidate being attacked.
One particular 2004 study Gregory found suggested that negative ads are more likely to mobilize voters, but the author also noted “evidence supporting the idea that negative campaigning discourages voter turnout comes primarily from experimental research, whereas evidence supporting the idea that negative campaigning encourages voter turnout comes from survey research.”
What’s the difference between the two types of research? Surveys are based on voluntary response and measure what people say they will do. Experiments measure what people actually do and tend to be more reliable for establishing cause and effect. In short: When asked, people said that negative and attack ads got them fired up and ready to vote, but when it came to actually showing up on Election Day, people were more likely to avoid the polls because they were turned off by all the negativity.
That goes along with a 2005 study that found 82% of respondents said “negative, attack-oriented campaigning is undermining and damaging our democracy,” and four additional studies from 1991, 1996, 1999 and 2004 that suggest when campaigns get ugly, voters stay home.
Negative campaigning — smear ads, mudslinging, attack ads, etc. — is nothing new. We can trace it all the way back to the election of 1800. But we’d argue the far reaches of radio (starting around 1920) and then TV (around 1950) took campaigning to a whole new level, and brought the negativity directly into people’s homes.
According to data from the United State Elections Project, voter participation started declining after 1900, but it took a sharp nosedive between 1916 and 1926. From then on, national voter turnout hadn’t been more than 63% (and that was the year JFK was voted into office) — until the 2020 election, which we look at as an outlier given that so many voters believed the nation’s entire future hinged on that election.
From the variety of data to our own observations, we’d say Gregory has a point. Attack ads don’t gain the attacker voters’ respect, and if they accomplish anything at all, attack ads just disenchant voters more. Elections are steadily becoming less about which candidate you like best and more about which candidate you hate the least.
It’s truly a shame that America’s democracy is no longer an exercise in choosing the best leaders in the nation, but one of reluctantly voting for the candidate you believe is the lesser of two evils.
