Dollarocracy (23 page)

Of course, not all advertising works, which has driven business executives crazy for a century. “I know half of my advertising does not work,” goes the urban legend of an exasperated businessman, “but I do not know which half.” In the commercial world, only on the rarest of occasions have major advertisers actually curtailed their practices sharply absent their competitors doing the same, and this move has been met with declining sales and no enthusiasm by their competitors to pursue a similar course.

The same is true with political advertising. “So much of presidential advertising is wasted money,” noted Mark McKinnon, who made ads for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and worked for McCain in the 2008 primaries. “The ads become just background to a broad architecture the campaigns are trying to create. . . . Easily half of the money spent on TV ads in presidential campaigns is a complete waste and would be better spent online or on other activities.”
⁷⁷
The fact remains, though, that TV political spending is not optional; it is necessary for political survival, not to mention success, in the contemporary United States as much as it is for a commercial advertiser like Coca-Cola or Coors beer or Nike shoes in an oligopolistic industry. Indeed, because of the nature of elections, it is arguably more imperative to maintain a foot all the way down on the TV advertising accelerator.

This point emerged in the 2012 campaign. As the airwaves were flooded with political ads, numerous observers noted that there had to be a declining effectiveness for the money being spent. Nothing short of a fortune was being spent to influence the votes of a sliver of uncommitted voters in a handful of swing states. Why isn't there a better use of resources? According to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the research is clear that voters are more likely to change their minds if they live in “swing states” marinated in political ads than they are if they live in states without much political advertising. Political advertising may not be especially efficient, its impact may be only “marginal,” but as Daniel Adler put it, “it's probably more efficient than any alternative.” And in a “market” where the difference between having a 49.9 and a 50.1 market share is life or death, one scholar noted, “that marginal impact is worth it.”
⁷⁸

Back in the 1990s, there were a handful of major candidates in statewide races who made a virtue of their unwillingness to accept large campaign donations, which meant they could not run anywhere near as many television ads as their opponents. Ed Garvey's 1998 race for Wisconsin governor and Russ Feingold's 1998 Senate reelection campaign in Wisconsin are the most recent and striking examples. The consequences of those campaigns—Garvey lost in a landslide, and Feingold barely won a race he, by all rights, should have won handily—sent a loud and clear message that such a course greatly increases chances of electoral failure. Since then, no major party candidate, not a single solitary one, has dared to emulate them with what is known derisively as “unilateral disarmament.”

There is one crucial area where political advertising differs sharply from commercial advertising, and it is here that the blood pressure rises for the likes of Ogilvy and Spero and their modern-day heirs Caplan and Manning. This is negative advertising, where the purpose is to attack and denigrate the competition. In a commercial marketplace such advertising is of little value. The point of commercial advertising is to protect and promote sales for the advertiser's product and ultimately increase profitability. There are no bonus points for simply decreasing a competitor's sales, and in fact it might just take consumers away from the product category altogether, which would be counterproductive. “Tide could attack Cheer to get a little market bump,” Carter Eskew wrote, “but Cheer would respond, and soon nobody would be buying detergent because things would be, well, a little dirty.”
⁷⁹
Or as one clean election advocate put it, “If car companies did this to each other, people would be nervous about getting behind a wheel.”
⁸⁰

Not so with political advertising. Negative advertising can be tremendously effective, even if it does not generate a single new voter for the candidate (or supportive “independent” group) placing the ad. If it simply takes voters leaning toward the opponent and makes them less likely to vote for the opponent, maybe not vote at all, that is a victory. After all, the point is to get the most votes; lowering an opponent's numbers has the same effect as increasing a candidate's own total.

Moreover, negative advertising can have the delicious side effect of forcing an opponent to respond to charges, no matter how spurious. Negative advertising can amplify spectacularly the classic political move captured by the story of the politician who told his campaign manager to start a rumor that his opponent was a child molester. “But he isn't a child molester, is he?” responded the aide. “Of course not,” said the candidate, “but I want to hear him deny it.”

Perhaps because of this, negative ads have always been a staple of TV political ads. Over the years, though, they have grown in such prominence that they now account for the vast majority of all TV political ads.
⁸¹
The most comprehensive research to date concludes that between 2000 and 2008 the overall percentage of negative TV political ads rose from 50 percent to 60
percent.
⁸²
Two years later, the percentage increased again for a simple reason: the new independent groups formed with anonymous money following
Citizens United
—unencumbered by identification with candidate, party, or even funding source—devoted their resources primarily to negative attack ads.
⁸³
“We're seeing a lot more negativity,” said political advertising researcher Travis Ridout. “When the outside groups are advertising, we're finding that they are predominantly negative.”
⁸⁴

The definition of a negative ad is open to interpretation, so the data are hardly uniform. What all research shows is that the amount of negative TV advertising increased sharply in 2012 and the more competitive the race, the more negative the advertising. A disproportionate amount of the so-called positive ads were run by candidates who were not facing a serious challenge and, using their ample campaign contributions, wanted to keep their name before voters.

In October 2012, Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, whose research is held in high regard by the ad industry, calculated that 84 percent of the broadcast TV ads for the 2012 presidential race were negative.
⁸⁵
A similarly respected operation, the Wesleyan Media Project, determined 86 percent of Obama's and 79 percent of Romney's advertising was negative, compared to a combined negative rate in 2008 for Obama and John McCain of 69 percent and a combined negative rate in 2004 of 58 percent for John Kerry and George W. Bush.
⁸⁶

Yet even that seems to understate the situation, perhaps because the notorious third-party ads are undercounted. When a number of ad buyers analyzed all the political spots aired in all the swing states on July 12, 2012, they determined that every ad was an attack ad.
⁸⁷
When National Public Radio commissioned Kantar Media to assess all the TV political spots in Colorado Springs, Colorado, for a week in September 2012, it determined that only 50 of the 1,500 spots were positive.
⁸⁸

If political advertising is effective, negative political advertising can be especially effective. Obviously, campaigns have to take into careful account tactical and strategic considerations as there is always a risk that negative advertising could backfire.
⁸⁹
Some research suggests that negative ads work best in moderation, that overexposure can become counterproductive.
⁹⁰
Even then, research from the 2008 primary campaigns suggests that negative ads that are
widely regarded in exit polls as having been unfair can still be effective, and candidates can still win the votes of the people regarding their ads as unfair. Such advertising can sow doubt in people's “guts,” and that can determine how a person votes.
⁹¹
So it is not clear how damaging an “unfair” negative ad campaign, or “excessive” exposure, can be to a campaign. The ones usually cited, like Jack Conway's accusation in Kentucky's 2010 U.S. Senate race that Rand Paul acted weirdly as a college student, come from candidates who are almost hopelessly behind in the polls, and these accusations are akin to a “Hail Mary” pass in football.

But when done smartly and when fueled by piles of cash, negative advertising can drive the talking points in a campaign like nothing else. Defenders of political advertising twist themselves into pretzels to demonstrate the value they see negative ads providing. Some argue the ads mention legitimate issues, like jobs or deficits, while avoiding the fact that the actual statement about the legitimate issues is mostly inaccurate, decontextualized, and/or misleading.
⁹²
Some emphasize that voters can learn from these ads and that they often provide citations for their charges. We find this line of reasoning unconvincing, but this much we do concede: negative attack ads are more memorable and entertaining than the standard issue “positive” ad featuring a politician playing Frisbee with his dog and holding hands with his granddaughter, or the endless empty “issue” ads where the candidate says she is for jobs and education and health care and veterans and clean government and against crime, corruption, and terrorism. We understand why people in the money-and-media election complex favor them and why viewers would remember them. “In the final analysis everyone complains” about negative ads, Stanford's Shanto Iyengar noted, “but that doesn't mean they don't listen.”
⁹³

So negative ads tend to work, even when people say they despise them. Drew Westen showed a group of voters an anti-McCain ad by Obama and an anti-Obama ad by McCain from the 2008 presidential campaign.

           
The voters we surveyed claimed to despise both ads, describing them in focus groups as “pandering.” They insisted the ads would backfire with them. But using a well-established method for assessing which words the commercials activated unconsciously, we discovered that although voters consciously disliked both commercials, the ads were nevertheless highly effective. Both “stuck,” triggering negative associations of Obama and McCain in the minds of most voters, including those who thought they were unaffected.
⁹⁴

Researcher Dianne Bystrom of Iowa State University reported, “What we find is, even when they say they hate them (ads), there's a movement in the needle.”
⁹⁵
“When asked in focus groups about what they think about candidates,” veteran North Carolina political reporter Rob Christensen noted, the same people who “almost universally say they hate negative ads” will “often play back the negative messages they have subconsciously absorbed in commercials.”
⁹⁶

The recent political ads that have caused electoral upsets have usually been negative and more often than not entirely bogus. In Wisconsin, the 1986 U.S. Senate race provided a chilling example. Democratic challenger Ed Garvey had a solid lead over incumbent Republican senator Robert Kasten two weeks out from Election Day. Kasten then ran a series of TV ads charging Garvey with embezzling money from his days as head of the National Football League Players Association. Garvey was low on money and could not afford TV spots, so he never effectively responded—even as the news media emphasized the charges were unproven and probably bogus. Garvey lost the election by a hair, and shortly thereafter Kasten's campaign apologized for the misleading and inaccurate ads. But Kasten, not Garvey, went to Washington for a six-year term.

Arguably the most famous example came two years later in the 1988 presidential race between Democrat Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, and George H. W. Bush, the vice president. In late summer, Dukakis held a seventeen-point lead and was doing especially well with women voters and traditional Democrats. Under the aegis of Lee Atwater, who worked with a staff that included soon-to-be Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the Republicans test-marketed attack ad ideas with a focus group of “Reagan Democrats”—traditional white working-class Democrats who could be pried away if the discussion got away from economics and core government programs like Social Security and Medicare. Atwater was legendary for his conviction that exploiting white racism was the best way to appeal to such voters.
⁹⁷
The research hit the mother lode when Atwater saw how negatively the focus group responded to the story of how Governor Dukakis had provided a weekend furlough to Willie Horton, a black man, who jumped his furlough and went on to rape a white woman. Atwater boasted, “By the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name.”
⁹⁸
“The only question,” remarked
Ailes during the campaign, “is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”
⁹⁹

Willie Horton did indeed become a household name.
¹⁰⁰
It is unclear how decisive the Willie Horton TV ad was in sandbagging the Dukakis campaign, but by all accounts it played an important role. What is also noteworthy is that the story about Dukakis was entirely decontextualized. The story conveyed nothing distinct about Dukakis that would have bearing on his conduct as president and the policies he would have pursued. What came through was a scary black guy was raping white women and Dukakis seemed to be his un-apologetic wingman. The message was directly out of Rosser Reeves's playbook, and it worked. (Shortly before the forty-year old Atwater died of brain cancer in 1991, he is reported to have apologized for the Horton ad and the racist flames it so triumphantly stoked.)