Does Negative Campaigning Work?

Sometimes.

Gossip spreads faster than good news. We still remember the warnings our parents and childhood friends told us about hot stoves and creepy people in scary houses. And the ads we remember after the dust clears are the negative ones – the Swift Boat Veterans, the Willie Hortons and the legendary Daisy ad, which only ran twice. Something about human nature means we tend to remember the salacious and the dangerous, and that is why despite the public’s abhorrence of negative ads and campaigning, the tactic can work IF it is done correctly.

With fewer people than ever watching the news or reading papers, negative ads are how most Americans learn about the candidates. I never knew about the tax consequences of McCain’s health care plan until I saw the Obama ad discussing it. And many probably knew nothing about Obama’s distant relationship with terrorist David Ayers until the McCain ad ran. With the media focusing on the horse race and little else, this is one of the few places Americans can get relevant information, albeit strictly filtered by each candidate.

But there’s a difference between a negative ad that does its job and one that voters perceive as mean-spirited and mudslinging. It often boils down to attacking the candidate vs. attacking the candidate’s policy. Most Americans dislike personal attacks on any candidate, and those tend to backfire because they’re not seen as relevant to the issues at hand. But attacking a candidate’s policies will always be fair game. And occasionally these two intertwine – what if Candidate A says taxes are too high, but then Candidate B learns that A has not paid taxes in five years? Here’s a 2004 negative Bush ad that was able to thread the needle between personal and policies.

However, if you are running a long-shot campaign against an opponent that you have almost no chance of beating then it is almost mandatory to go negative. That could be the only way you can draw enough attention to yourself to win. But you still need to walk that fine line between raising legitimate points to issues that resonate with voters, and crossing the line into personal attacks that will turn them off.

With McCain down in the polls, it’s unsurprising that he appears to have gone all negative all the time. It shows that he knows that he’s behind, but it’s how he goes negative that needs to be watched. Will he attack the policies or the candidate? If it’s the latter, it may be the final nail in what has become an increasingly erratic and undisciplined campaign.

More Info: A rare positive ad that worked, and was memorable