Negative campaigning works

October 13, 3:07 PMProgressive Politics ExaminerKaren Harper

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Who likes negative campaign advertisements?  Who says they like getting emails that smear a candidate?  

In all the conversations I’ve ever had with people on the subject, no one has ever said they liked negative campaigning.  Most disapprove of smear tactics because it is morally wrong.

During this year’s presidential debates, CNN  has had reporter, Soledad O’Brian host a group of undecided voters to watch the presidential debates.  Each voter is given a mechanism with a dial that is attached to a graphing machine.  Voters turn the dial up when they like what a candidate is saying.  They turn the dial down when they don’t like what is being said.  After the debate, analysts can go back and look at the graphs created while a candidate is speaking to see what voters liked and disliked.  

The results are interesting.  During the time a candidate makes a negative statement, the graph reveals that the voters all turned the dial down, indicating they disliked what the candidate was saying.

During last week’s presidential debate, the undecided voters turned the dial down frequently when the candidates made negative remarks.  Senator McCain made frequent negative statements and this showed on the resulting graphics from the undecided voters.  The dials were turned down a lot more for McCain than for Senator Obama.   After the debate, the voters were asked who they thought won the debate and the majority believed Barack Obama won.  

Logic dictates that the voters would probably be leaning towards voting for Barack Obama if one looks at the facts.  The voters believe Obama won the debate.  Their approval rating of his statements during the debate was a lot higher than John McCain’s approval rating during the debate.  And yet when O’Brian asked the voters who they were going to vote for based on the debate they had just watched, the majority said they planned to vote for John McCain.  

There are several ways you can look at this.   The group of voters in this case, were ostensibly “undecided” voters.  And so one possibility is that they weren’t truthful about being undecided. Maybe they just wanted to be on TV.

Another possibility is that negative campaigning works better than any of us would like to believe.  There is evidence that negative campaigning works.  But does it work that well?

 There’s a classic book on statistics called, “How to Lie With Statistics” that should perhaps, be required reading.  Statistics are very important and valuable but they can be manipulated.  They can be used to “lie” to help promote an agenda.  Here is a fictional example:

In the early 1990s, a medium sized city newspaper where I lived ran a headline very much like this one: ‘’Are seatbelts  really safe?  More people wearing seatbelts died in car crashes than people not wearing seatbelts.’

The headline was stating part of the truth.  They used statistics to imply that wearing seatbelts is dangerous.  The statistics came from the state highway safety board.  But the newspaper only told a small part of the story.  What the newspaper should have informed readers was that the percentage of motorists wearing seatbelts had risen to around 87% after the law passed.  In every serious collision that year, motorists not wearing seatbelts were killed but only a small percentage of motorists wearing seatbelts were killed.

People with an agenda use statistics to support their agenda.  Political campaigns are no different.  They do the same thing with facts in general, not just statistics.  Here is an example:  

Candidate A says, “Candidate B voted 95 times to give oil companies tax breaks, but I didn’t.”  The statement is meant to imply that the candidate is helping large oil corporations at a time when doing so might be seen as negative.  What the audience doesn’t hear is that Candidate B voted to give tax breaks only  when oil companies were investing in alternative fuels which changes the tone of the statement completely as alternative fuels research and development is an issue people are positive about.


Less than 50% of Americans eligible to vote, do.  For the Americans who do vote, how they decide on a candidate is not exactly clear.  But one thing that is clear is that negative campaigning works.  The more mud one candidate slings at the other, the more votes he or she seems to get.

Negative campaigning isn’t limited to television and radio advertisements.  The easiest and least expensive means of negative campaigning is through spammed smear email.  And that raises another point.  People say they hate receiving spam and yet millions of them are passed back and forth every hour during an election year.  

The Republican party has negative campaigning honed to a fine art.  I’ve been getting election smear mail spams since the 2000 presidential election.  Every four years, the onslaught seems to grow larger.  This year has been particularly heinous. All the smear mail I’ve received have been against the Democratic candidates and they number in the hundreds at least.  The election spam smears have come from friends, family and associates.

I can’t help but wonder why the Democrats don’t use smear tactics in email spam.  It would probably help them get elected if we can believe the undecided voters who watched the second presidential debate with Soledad O’Brian.

I’ve checked the so-called “facts” contained in the various smear mails against Obama.  None so far has been true.  The emails are written in a way that makes then sound reasonable and factual.  But they simply aren’t.  Some are just plain lies.  But most of the smear mails have taken a line from a speech or a book or a thesis or a few words and declare that Obama or his wife are racist, Muslim, terrorists and other adjectives designed to frighten voters into not voting for him.  

Will the people who send and receive such smear mails bother to check the actual facts?  Apparently not.  One of my cousins has been regaling me with smear mails about Senator Obama and his wife.  Normally, I, like other reasonable people, simply delete such smear mails automatically.

 This year, I decided I would write back to her in my own words, to combat the canned messages that stem from gutter of the Republican campaign. First, since several emails attacked Michelle Obama, I wrote back and told her that Cindy McCain had stolen drugs from a charity she supported and that she had gone out with John McCain while he was still married to his first wife.  I also pointed out some of the troubling information about how McCain’s first marriage ended.  My cousin got my email and wrote back that she thought that McCain’s private life should be private, that what his wife did shouldn’t have anything to do with the election.  I wrote back and asked her why Michelle Obama’s private life wasn’t private and why was it okay to attack her.  My cousin answered that ‘we just don’t think alike.’    

Then I told her she should check out the Urban Legends website to discover what was true and untrue in the bulk spam smear mails she sends to everyone.  The Snopes website was created in an effort to stem the tide of urban legends that were floating around the internet in the mid-nineties.  Snopes researches email rumors, spams and legends and post the results to the public.  Not only do they mark which are true and untrue, they also try to find where the email first originated though that usually isn’t possible.   My cousin hasn’t written back.  

 If you check the Snopes site today, you will see that the largest number of circulated rumors by email today are about  Barack Obama.  The long list of email smears about him are marked with a red, green, a red and green, or yellow circle.  The red means the email is completely false, green indicates the email is true.  Red and green together indicate that it is partially true and a yellow circle means the smear mail's truth is undetermined.  Partially true usually means that some word or two or a line has been taken from something and inserted into the email with connotations that are not appropriate.  The partially true ones are perhaps the most heinous.  They are like the newspaper headline that implied that wearing a seatbelt was dangerous.

It is ironic that the conservative right wing of the Republican party are the ones who utilize negative campaigning and smear tactics the most.  They claim to be on the moral high ground.  They declare their Christianity and high morality at every turn and yet they don’t seem to have a problem sinking into the gutter to lie and spread rumors.  Perhaps their high morals are meant for everyone else.

The negative campaign against Barack Obama has become disturbing. Apparently crowds of morally superior conservatives listening to Sarah Palin speak at rallies shout the word, “Kill”  when she mentions Barrack Obama’s name in a speech.  Supporters at McCain/Palin rallies are violent.  They shout, "Off with his head", "Terrorist", "Kill him" and more.  Neither McCain, Palin or the Republican party seems to mind inciting a mob.  The result is more hate-mongering.  Admittedly, I have only been alive long enough to remember the 1980 presidential campaign but I can't recall ever seeing so much emotion and violence.  Some are wondering if this roiling pot of hate showing up at McCain/Palin rallies stems from racism.  It may be true, I hope not. 

Senator McCain can't make up his mind whether he likes the negative comments he makes about his opponent or not.  In one sentence he admonishes his supporters at a town-hall meeting and states that he knows Senator Obama is a good man and that there is no reason to be afraid for him to be the President.  Then McCain went on to  stretch the truth to the crowd saying Senator Obama is linked to terrorists.  McCain tells crowds Obama is a fine man and then turns around and claims Obama is friends to terrorists.  How can Senator John McCain stand in front of crowds who are shouting "kill him" about Senator Obama (or anyone for that matter) as if this is acceptable or normal? 

As a Democrat, I am disturbed by the vitriolic anger I feel from conservative Republicans these days.  If you are brave enough to watch one of these rallies or have the stomach to listen to right wing radio and television, you will find that these people actually hate people who don’t agree with them.  It is bewildering and frightening.  I would be afraid for my life in a crowd like McCain/Palin attracts.  The glassy eyed mob is eerily similar to the mobs who loved Hitler. 

The right wing Republicans believe they have high morals and yet they spread lies and innuendo to sabotage their opponents.  The term fascist has gone out of favor.  But in truth the right wing Republicans of today’s Republican party are fascists. 

If you are an undecided voter and are concerned that Barack Obama is a muslim, or that he thinks there are 57 states in the US, check the Snopes website for the truth.  The Snopes site is an impartial jury.

If you really do disapprove of negative campaigning, fight it.  Check the facts.  Don’t assume that what you read in an email is true.  Don’t assume that what you see on a television ad is true.  Don’t assume that what you hear during the debates is all true either.  Check the facts, think for yourself.