Does anyone actually find negative political ads persuasive? To me, they just seem more cheesy than anything else. I suppose someone must be effected by them - politicians poll religiously, and if the things didn’t work campaigns wouldn’t burn money on them.
So, has anyone here ever been seriously effected in their political views by a negative ad? If so, how and why?
I find that negative ads rarely have anything of substance in them. A lot of them distort facts and rely on the viewers ignorance of the situation to be effective.
For example, there was a recent ad by MoveOn.Org about Bush. It said “This is what Bush should say when he goes before the 9/11 Commision” and then it showed a menacing looking picture of Bush, and played a ridiculous caricature of Bush’s voice saying “Before 9/11 I was obsessed with Iraq, then I used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq.” I was disgusted that they stooped so low as to put words into their opponents mouth just to make him look bad.
A recent ad put out by the Bush campaign to make Kerry look bad was completely distorted. They took his one vote on an Omnibus spending bill to make it look like he didn’t care about funding our troops. Then they played a clip of Kerry saying “I voted for it before I voted against it.” To the average person, this looks like doubletalk. But in reality, Kerry DID vote for it before he voted against it. He supported a nearly identical version of the bill that didn’t rely on (what he felt was) irresponsible deficit spending. But of course the ad conveniently omits that fact to demonize Kerry and make him look like he just doesn’t care about our troops. To add icing on the cake they made it appear like he voted “No” on 4 separate funding issues when all of them were packed together into one big bill.
It depends on the message. If somebody says something like “My opponent voted against a bill that would have XXX”, my immediate reaction is to think “Yeah, what ELSE would the bill have done” or “How exactly was that bill going to do that?” And assume the guy either didn’t think the good outweighed the bad or that there was a better way to accomplish the goal.
But if the ad is speaking towards something more cut and dried (“My opponent was convicted of mail fraud in 1988”), then I’m glad that the ad is out there, informing me of this.
-lv
I’ve wondered about this, too. I can’t say an ad has necessarily changed my mind about a certain politician, but it has affected my views. I view the negative ad as a mark against the camp running the ad. If I look at the negative attention given to Kerry’s military career, I find I learned more about him (medals he won) as opposed to what I knew before the negative attention was given. It ended up being a positive, I might not have been aware of. The rebuttal, added a negative to the Bush side, I wasn’t aware of, regarding his own service.
The same thing occurred regarding Cheney’s recent speech with over ten minutes spent criticizing Kerry. It hurt the Bush/Cheney ticket in my eyes. When Kerry was given an opportunity to respond, and didn’t use the same tactics, it raised him once again, in my thinking. I don’t necessarily take any of the ads at face value, and would rather research the claims made on my own. If I find the ad was grossly misleading, that affects my thinking as well.