Negative political ads get a bad rap.
And most of it is well-deserved, as the umbrella of attack ads includes ads that feature personal attacks on candidates, fear-mongering, and ads that are misleading or completely false.
But while most of us could agree that the kinds of ads listed above are bad, you should appreciate the useful information you can glean from a negative campaign ad as opposed to a positive one.
This is partially because positive ads, by and large, are full of fluff. They are laden with claims of how a certain candidate will create jobs or how they supported some popular bipartisan bill.
Negative ads, meanwhile, will at least reveal a candidate’s argument for why you shouldn’t vote for their opponent.
An easy way to think about this is to simplify it to a race for a smaller office like county sheriff.
If the sheriff candidates had enough money to run television ads (they don’t, but if they did), every positive commercial would be about how that particular sheriff candidate is going to keep the county safe. It’s hard for voters to choose a candidate on informed grounds based on positive ads full of candidates in button-down shirts making vague promises and shaking hands with voters.
However, the candidates’ negative ads would tell you which candidate is supposedly underqualified for the position, which candidate has been accused of racial profiling and which candidate has a past full of scandals.
One thing we need to establish at this point is that this whole idea falls apart if the voter watching the ads is extremely biased or undiscerning, and easily fooled by claims that are overblown or outright false.
As long as the voter is thinking critically about the media that they consume, however, they can use negative ads to inform their voting decision by parsing out the ad’s argument, which would be that you shouldn’t vote for a certain candidate due to their scandals, racial profiling, or inexperience.
While an election for county sheriff involves fewer issues than one for a state or national office, argumentative negative ads can be easily found in the major races.
We can see real life examples of this in the current North Carolina gubernatorial race. The republican challenger, Dan Forest, has run positive ads that vaguely describe his “business” background and show him conversing and shaking hands with workers from a wide variety of professions. His negative ads, however, criticize Governor Roy Cooper’s stance on COVID-19 protocols and reveal Forest’s argument: Vote for me if you want the state to reopen immediately and throw virus-related caution to the wind.
Cooper is airing similarly folksy positive commercials, but uses his negative ads to call attention to Forest’s comments about masks and his frequent flouting of COVID-19 guidelines at campaign events. This underscores Cooper’s argument that Forest is recklessly anti-science and that no voter who takes the virus seriously should vote for Forest.
It certainly isn’t ideal that many voters get so much of their information from attack ads that are partisan and polarizing. But negative ads will remain a major source of voter information unless most Americans decide to start doing extensive research on every candidate based on information from credible news outlets, and unless we start having debates that would make Cicero (or anyone else) proud.
Let me know when that happens, but until then, when you see a negative ad, don’t change the channel so quickly.
Photo courtesy of FailedImitator/Flickr
