We like to blame politicians. But sometimes they are not the villains of the piece. An example of this is negative ads. Everyone says they hate negative ads. And the conventional wisdom is this campaign has seen an all time low, e.g. more negative ads than ever. So who is responsible for this sorry state of affairs? The conventional answer is that it is the politicians. But politicians are just following the adage in the title of this piece. Negative ads work. They work not because of any action or inaction by politicians but because of the action of voters, namely us.
Political campaigns are actually marketing campaigns. They follow the rules of marketing. There is an old saw in the marketing business: "first you sell yourself then you sell the product". This idea is that a good salesman tries to make an emotional connection with the customer. If nothing else, it makes it harder for the customer to say no. So if you can make an emotional connection with the customer you can move into the "pitch". This is the part where you extol the virtues of the product you are selling. This is important but it is not the most important part of the sales process.
The most important part of the sales process is the "close". The close is where the salesman moves the customer from having a positive attitude toward the product to committed to purchasing the product. A lot of salesmen can connect with the customer and most salesmen figure out that this is important. And a lot of salesmen are good at the pitch. But what separates the successful salesman from the wanna be is in their ability to close the deal.
Consider car sales, for instance. Most people do not have to make a car purchase. Or, if they must, they don't have to buy the car from a particular dealer right now. Moving a customer having a positive attitude toward the salesman and the car gets the salesman a long way toward closing the deal. But the customer can always go down the street or wait a week. It turns out fear is one of the best ways to get from "positive opinion" to "done deal". It turns out that "I'm a good person, better than the other guy" is a much less effective argument than "I may not be all that good but the other person is really bad". And it turns out that the best time to spring the "the other guy is really bad" argument is at the last minute when there is no time for the other guy to effectively respond. So initially negative ads were sprung at the last minute, typically in the last week or two of the campaign.
Now everyone knows this. But our emotions take over and we go to the polls and vote against the "really bad" guy. That's how it used to work. But it turns out that it is really hard to counter a negative ad from the other side. It usually turns out that the negative ad is at least partly true. So you are countering a simple message ("he's bad") with a complicated message ("it's complicated"). Even a totally bogus negative ad turns out to be effective to an extent. So negative ads have been showing up earlier and earlier in campaigns. I have been making effective use of the "fast forward" feature on my TiVo to skip nearly all political ads, positive and negative, so I really don't know. But my impression is that this campaign season has gone negative early and stayed there.
What should be done? Negative ads are used because they work. The obvious thing to do is say "candidate is using a negative ad against candidate y". I am going to vote against candidate x and for candidate y solely because candidate x used a negative ad. But few voters did this. Early in the process when most candidates did not use negative ads and when negative ads only showed up late in the campaign this strategy would have been effective. But that time has passed. Now everyone uses negative ads and they use them early. So we no longer have the option of supporting candidates who do not use negative ads because all candidates use negative ads.
The only strategy left is to ignore all ads. And in fact a lot of people are using this strategy. They pick their candidate early and use non-traditional methods to find candidates to support. This actually makes a great deal of sense. The mainstream media has essentially stopped covering politics. The media in my area has pretty much abandoned covering government at the city, county, and state level. So it is very hard to get a clear picture of the politicians that occupy these offices. The national media spends a lot of time on politics. But they cover the bomb throwers from the fringes (they are colorful and colorful = ratings) and they do horse race coverage. I always know which party is up and which is down. What's actually in a proposal or whatever a policy is likely to work or not, or create a good result, that kind of coverage is almost completely nonexistent.
The right abandoned the mainstream media years ago and developed alternate channels for communicating with their base. I think the left is in the process of doing the same. In theory this strategy should actually work fine. But there is a lot of dumbth out there. And far to many people have abandoned the traditional media (for the most part sensible coverage but way too little of it) for channels that have coverage that is on point but misleading, incomplete, and in far too many cases completely wrong.
Saturday John Stewart held his "rally to restore sanity". He has the right idea. But I am afraid he will turn out to be "a voice calling out in the desert" that will get little traction.
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