If everyone hates them, why do politicians run these "attack" ads? At the risk of sounding like I'm defending attack ads (and let me reassure you, I'm not), let me take a stab at answering that question.
I have been fortunate (or, depending on your perspective, unfortunate) to know politicians of all shapes, sizes, stripes, parties, levels, and ego. And with those associations, I have been able to ask them questions about the political process that have vexed me. So, over the years I have asked city, county, state, and federal level politicians why they run negative*** ads on t.v. (obviously, some of the small-town politicians don't need to run t.v. adds, but they do put out literature pieces).
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***A tangent, here, to make sure we're speaking the same language. "Negative adds" or, "contrast adds", are designed to illustrate how the "other guy" has a poor position on an issue. I.e. "Bob Brown voted to raise your taxes. Vote against Bob Brown." Contrast/negative adds should be distinguished from "Attack Adds" that go something like this: "Bob Brown beats his wife, and cusses at his neighbors."
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Back to my question to politicians about "negative" (or, contrast) adds. The universal answer from them has been: "negative adds are the only ads that will move numbers. The numbers don't lie." They will also hasten to add that they would rather not run them, but again say, numbers don't lie.
Moving numbers come in a bunch of forms through polling data. Primarily:
1) your supporters
2) your opponents supporters
3) undecideds
Obviously, the battle is to move those undecideds away from the other guy, and into your camp. The way you do that is to measure your "positives" and your "negatives", and the other guy's "positives" and "negatives".
If you've ever been polled about a candidate, you have most likely been asked: "do you have a positive, negative, or neutral opinion of such and such candidate?" If the other guy's negative numbers are high, the undecideds will flock to your candidate. That is what you want.
So, when you see "negative adds" about "Bob Brown" (our fictional candidate), they are intended to leave the voter with a negative impression of Bob Brown. If the add is effective, follow-up polling data will indicate that Bob Brown's negatives are up. So, they keep running the commercial. If the add is ineffective, the negatives won't move, and the add is pulled from circulation.
So, while many genuinely profess to dislike negative adds (and the candidates who run them), the numbers don't lie. There are apparently many, many more voters out there who do like them, or do respond to them. Positive adds rarely (and I mean rarely) move numbers. Negative adds (unless it's just a terrible add altogether) almost always do.
Another common complaint about campaigns is that they are all conducted around short sound bites. Debate rules allow for 90 second answers to questions, and 60 second responses. Commercials are 30 second spots. And news coverage offer a range of 5 second sound bites to a couple minute discussion on those sound bites. Why is it done that way? Because the attention span of the average American voter is apparently, and sadly, about 30 seconds long. Supply and demand. The people demand the sound-bite coverage, and the media supplies that.
If you disagree with that assessment of the average American voter, go check the ratings of C-SPAN. C-SPAN coverage of the Senate, House, White House briefings, Pentagon briefings, interviews of politicians, etc. are generally dry, long, uneventful, and terribly informative. But there are only about 13 people who actually watch it (myself among those lonely viewers).
My conclusion: Politicians will go to where the voters are, and will employ tactics that will "move" the voters. The effective politicians win, the less effective politicians lose.
I wish the average American voter would watch more C-SPAN and less Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. When they start doing this, we'll all begin to see the type of campaigning we'd all prefer to see. However, I don't suspect it will happen. Why? Because throughout the American, British, French, German, Japanese, Roman, and Greek histories of politics that I've studied, the masses are generally attracted "fireworks" and "drama" of politics. Not the boring, but important tedium of policy development.
Perhaps that's why the Founders of our country established the buffers of "electors" between the voting masses and the President; the buffers of the State Legislatures and six year terms between the voting masses and the Senators (as the Constitution was originally written); three or four layers of buffers between the voting masses and the Judicial Branch of government; and the body of government that is closest to the voting masses (the House of Representatives elected directly by the people every two years) is generally recognized as the weakest body of government - with the Senate acting as a buffer between the House and the Presidency.
That, however, is just a working theory of mine. Still not quite sold on it.
I'm starting to meander. Have a good one, and watch more C-SPAN ;)
