It only took 60 seconds of footage to make the message clear: “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” American voters were responsible for protecting the angelic toddler counting daisy petals against a full-blown nuclear crisis — and, by implication, a Goldwater presidency. According to the ad, Americans could only do one thing to save the nation from crisis: “vote for President Johnson on November 3rd.”
Since Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign released the first televised negative political ad, “Daisy,” in 1964, so-called attack ads have proliferated in American politics. While Amy Dacey, former CEO of the DNC, maintained to the HPR that negative political ads play an important role in the democratic process by allowing candidates to contrast their platforms with their opponents’, it often seems that candidates use attack ads not to criticize their opponents on policy issues, but as vitriolic tactics that betray an interest in outright partisan warfare rather than in accountability. The hyper-personal and partisan nature of modern attack ads, driven largely by the growing influence of third parties and “dark money” on campaign politics, has exacerbated the divisions within an increasingly polarized and misinformed U.S. electorate. They therefore encourage voters to evaluate candidates based on the wrong criteria and leave many distrustful of the electoral process.
The Political is Personal
U.S. politics saw dirty campaign tactics as early as the election of 1800, when the Founding Fathers slandered their opponents and exposed their extramarital affairs. Yet the advent of televised attack ads marked a new era of negative campaigning. By granting campaigns more access to the public, television gave candidates a powerful new platform. Unlike print news and radio, television allowed them to make visceral emotional appeals, dramatically increasing the populace’s interest in elections.
Early attack ads often portrayed candidates as weak on economic and foreign policy issues. They would also claim that opposing candidates imperiled Americans’ future, often by citing their voting records and policy platforms. Today, however, attack ads attempt to create a lasting impression on voters by instead focusing on issues other than the candidates’ political stances.
Modern attack ads weaponize candidates’ characters and personal lives against them. Although no data conclusively shows that televised campaign ads have targeted candidates’ individual traits more in recent decades, some evidence does suggest that this is the case. Data from the Wesleyan Media Project shows that only one-fourth of political ads aired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign made policy-related claims about Donald Trump. The vast majority of Clinton’s ads attacked his character, asking voters whether they would entrust the nation’s highest office to a “know-nothing candidate.”
These attacks reflect a trend of candidates making the personal intensely political. “There are no rules or guard rails any more,” political advisor Mark McKinnon told the HPR. “Nothing is off the table.” In 2004, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth released a series of ads attacking then-presidential candidate John Kerry for his military record. The ads called Kerry “unfit for command” and accused him of lying about his service in the Vietnam War. Although inaccurate, the ads conveyed a powerful message to the American public: dishonest and unpatriotic, Kerry’s character alone disqualified him from the presidency.
For Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard professor and co-author of How Democracies Die, the growing tendency of candidates to accuse their “rivals of not being legitimate contenders for office” represents a dangerous turn in the electoral process. It also “violat[es] an unwritten rule of our politics.”
In a new approach to delegitimizing the opposition, more recent attack ads have featured candidates’ own family members warning voters against supporting them. This September, six siblings of Republican Congressional candidate Paul Gosar criticized their brother for “not caring” about rural Arizona voters in an ad endorsing his Democratic opponent, David Brill. Also in September, an ad attacking Democratic Congressional candidate Randy Bryce featured Bryce’s own brother, James Bryce, invoking his experience as a police officer while also discussing his brother’s hostility to law enforcement and habitual criminality.
“Family’s more believable,” explained professor Steven Jarding of the Harvard Kennedy School. Jarding described how voters often perceive candidates’ family members as more credible than candidates themselves. Instead of showing traditionally humanizing displays of family unity, political advertising has begun spotlighting candidates’ family feuds as families themselves have come to embody the increasingly polarized electorate.
Dog-Whistle Politics
Like character attacks, dog-whistle politics inflame ideological bases and contribute to a culture of polarization. Even when masked by references to candidates’ policies, the use of “dog whistles,” or racially coded appeals, in political ads serve a clear end: to drive voters to the polls by playing to their prejudices. A staple of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, “dog whistles” have become a favored tactic in U.S. politics.
In 1988, the infamous “Weekend Passes” ad attacking Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis for his “weakness on crime” featured a striking image of black inmate Willie Horton, who had been charged with murder and rape. Making Dukakis’s image synonymous with Horton’s, the ad stoked white voters’ fears and devastated the Dukakis campaign. Two years later, Republican Jesse Helms’s “Hands” ad attacking African American Senate candidate Harvey Gantt depicted a pair of white hands tearing up a job rejection letter, suggesting that Gantt’s alleged support for racial quotas would deny hard-working white Americans employment.
Today, race continues to pervade attack ads in more subtle and dangerous forms. In an analysis of language used by political candidates from 1984 to 2016, researchers at the University of Michigan found that “campaign rhetoric in 2016 included more racial rhetoric, negative racial group outreach, and negative mentions of racial groups than any other campaign they studied.”
This trend seemed particularly manifest during the 2018 midterms. Earlier this year, for instance, an attack ad against African American Congressional candidate Antonio Delgado included selected portions of his rap music. Appealing to an 84 percent-white district, the ad among other things cited his music’s “profane lyrics” and claimed that Delgado’s songs were “laced … with extremist attacks on American values.” The ad went on to claim that Delgado could not represent his district in Congress as a result.
Alongside rhetoric, campaigns have used media optics to fuel racial politics. A study by Stanford University involving an analysis of over 100 ads from the 2008 presidential election showed that attack ads against Barack Obama used darker-skinned images of him. This trend suggests that advertisers intended to invoke racial stereotypes in attempts to delegitimize Obama’s candidacy.
This negative racial messaging has become more effective since the 1980s because it has become more subliminal, with studies suggesting that less explicit race-based appeals are more likely to impact voters. “It’s disgusting and unsconsiencable but the reason that they do it is that it works,” said Jarding, recalling a notorious 2006 ad which attacked African American Senate candidate Harold Ford. Jarding considers these race-based ads “the darkest form of political maneuvering.” As long as dog whistles remain effective, however, campaigns will likely continue to use them in their ads to tactically exploit racial divisions among voters.
Dark Money and Mass Media
Many voters may not realize that the attack ads they watch are produced not by campaigns but by super PACs. The outsized role of “dark money” in political advertising has been a primary driver of the hyper-partisan and polarizing nature of modern attack ads, providing both a boon and a burden for political candidates.
Negative advertising from third parties can elevate candidates while insulating them from responsibility for pernicious attacks on their opponents. Even candidates who claim to run all-positive campaigns often benefit from the attack ads produced on their behalf. “It’s somewhat duplicitous,” remarked Harvard Institute of Politics Fall Fellow and Former Congressman Joe Heck, who noted to the HPR how such candidates may refrain from denouncing or requesting the removal of outside attack ads.
Yet in trying to uplift their preferred candidates, third parties diminish those candidates’ ability to control the media narratives of their campaigns. Since FEC regulations prohibit coordination between political candidates and super PACs, candidates theoretically have no knowledge of or participation in the ads produced on their behalf until they are released — although the weakness of these regulations has admittedly enabled the two groups to work precariously closely together. Still, Heck explained, third parties may develop ads intended to boost candidates that do not align with a campaign’s strategy or objectives.
Despite having no role in these ads’ production, candidates are expected by the public to respond to them, especially when the ads attack their rivals. Heck lamented that this causes candidates to stray off their message since they must react to the ads instead of proactively discussing their desired issues.
For third party producers of negative ads, social media provides a unique opportunity to expand these videos’ reach. Super PACs benefit not only from the ability to target specific voter demographics on social media platforms but also from the platforms’ natural promotion of their content. Nathan Rifkin, Digital Director for the Randy Bryce Congressional campaign, explained to the HPR how social media channels’ algorithms “reward a negative-based attack.” As negative ads tend to generate substantial commentary, they are often amplified by social media platforms seeking to connect users with popular, attention-grabbing content.
Beyond amplifying their reach, social media allows third parties to retain a degree of anonymity that can increase the efficacy of their advertising. Whereas televised political ads disclose sponsors, identifying ads’ sponsors proves more difficult on social media. Jian Zang, a Harvard graduate student and creator of the Political Ads Library, explained to the HPR how super PACs often fund ads across multiple social media pages so that voters may not even realize when they are being targeted by PAC-sponsored ads. Priorities USA Action, for instance, sponsors ads on the “Nuestra Florida” Facebook page. By creating a kind of “echo chamber,” these pages can amplify singular campaign narratives that feed directly into voters’ preconceptions of the opposite party.
Democratic Breakdown
By substituting policy discussion with severe attacks on candidates’ personal traits, negative political advertising may lead voters to question not only the legitimacy of their candidates but also the legitimacy of the electoral process itself. With the influence of third parties further calling electoral legitimacy into question, some people, including Jarding, believe that American democracy is under serious threat.
The proliferation of attack ads weakens the potential for bipartisan politics in the U.S. legislature as well. Although it is hard to objectively measure overall levels of bipartisanship, and some metrics indicate that bipartisanship is not declining, much evidence does suggest that Congress is becoming less bipartisan. Research published in PLOS One in 2015, for example, shows a substantial increase in the polarization of Congress, with a majority of legislators now voting strictly along party lines.
Attack ads can exacerbate this trend by sowing distrust among candidates of opposite parties before they even reach office. “There is a holdover even if the ad is done by a third party,” stated Heck. For Jarding, this “holdover effect” also entails an indebtedness of elected candidates to the third parties who propped up their campaigns. A resulting focus on catering to donors over serving the public, Jarding believes, has effectively “neutered” Congress.
Time for Action
Modern attack ads are both symptomatic of and contributive to an increasingly polarized political climate, and erode the electorate’s faith in the credibility of political candidates. These ads also damage candidates’ faith in the sincerity of their political opponents. Jarding puts the onus on voters to step up and combat this problematic political culture: “For anybody that thinks democracy is invincible, it’s not. You have to work for it.” Without a collective effort to address the issues illuminated by modern attack ads, the public’s perception of the legitimacy of elections may continue to deteriorate.
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