Rubin 1
Duke University
Television and Presidential Campaign Ads: A History of Negativity
Isaac Rubin
Game Theory and Democracy
Professor Hubert Bray
12 November 2013
Television and Presidential Campaign Ads: A History of Negativity
Negativity has been a central part of American democracy since the early days of the Republic. In the election of 1820, a pro-Adams newspaper warned that if Thomas Jefferson were elected “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes” (Swint 184). Persistent name-calling directed at Andrew Jackson’s wife during the election of 1828 eventually led her to fall into a depression, become ill, and die not long after. Jackson blamed his political opponents for her death (216). By comparison, the negativity seen in contemporary elections is rather tame.
The history of negative campaigning on television began with the election of 1952 between Eisenhower and Stevenson. The advantages of the platform were obvious: television allowed the candidates to reach more voters simultaneously than any other medium and exercise complete control over their message. Democrat Adlai Stevenson refused to appear in his campaign’s “spot ads” and remained a staunch opponent of the use of television advertising in politics (“Living Room”). Eisenhower’s campaign immediately embraced television and took to the airways, earning resounding victories against Stevenson in 1952 and 1956.
The election of 1964 between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater marked the beginning of negative advertising on television. In his book “Mudslingers,” political science professor Kerwin Swint argues that “Johnson’s campaign invented the negative TV spot—or at least perfected and brought it into the big time” (31). The Johnson campaign managed to capitalize on Barry Goldwater’s tendency to make controversial statements by using TV ads to exaggerate their frightening and undesirable implications. The famous “Daisy Girl” ad, widely regarded as the mother of all negative campaign ads, played into voters’ fears of nuclear warfare and played a large part in convincing the public that Goldwater could not be trusted (Mann 133). The Johnson campaign strategy’s influence on future presidential races is undeniable: nearly every presidential campaign since has attempted to exploit its opponent’s gaffes for political gain.
The 1988 campaign is widely regarded as one of the most negative presidential races in recent history. The famous Willie Horton ad was a powerful condemnation of Dukakis’ weak stance on crime and punishment.Dukakis all but ignored the Willie Horton and other damaging negative spots, figuring that voters would see the fallacy and unfairness of Bush’s charges (Swint 158). This decision was a death sentence for the Dukakis campaign, and it “proved once and for all that negative campaigning works if not responded to” (Mark 201). Contemporary presidential campaign teams have clearly taken this to heart; today’s presidential races consist of persistent back and forth attacks, strategic jabs and parries on an ever-growing stage.
Negative advertising is a target for widespread criticism. However, because candidates will not voluntarily voice their shortcomings, it is the opposition’s job to bring their opponent’s flaws to the public’s attention. Without a clear understanding of each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, voters cannot be expected to draw a clear distinction between the candidates and make an informed choice on Election Day. In a 2012 NPR interview, political science professor John Geer commented that negativity is essential to democracy: the party out of power must criticize those in power to convince the electorate why they should be replaced (“Putting”).A study conducted by Geer found that negative ads tend to be more accurate and truthful than positive ads by a margin of sixty percent (“Putting”). Empirical evidence and observations of historically significant campaigns strongly suggest that negative television advertising is an inevitable and potentially beneficial consequence of democracy.
Television and Presidential Campaign Ads: A History of Negativity
Voters and analysts often voice their concerns about the prevalence of negative campaigning in presidential campaigns. For the 2012 election, Barack Obamaand Mitt Romney collectively spent two billion dollars in campaigning. Obama and Romney’s campaign teams each spent more than four hundred million dollars on campaign advertisements, which were overwhelmingly negative. Roughly ninety percent of campaign ads were negative “attack ads” seeking to undermine the opposing candidate (“Mad Money”). Though spending on negative campaign ads reached an unprecedented height in the most recent presidential election, the election’s adversarial tone was hardly new to the American political scene.
Negative campaigning before television
“Thomas Jefferson is a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father… raised wholly on hoe-cake made of course-ground Southern corn, bacon and hominy, with an occasional change of fricasseed bullfrog.”
-An 1800 Federalist handbill
Today’s negative campaign advertisement does not come close to the slanders and personal attacks of the United State’s early presidential elections. The 1800 election between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams is often referred to as the first real campaign.Merely calling it “negative” would be a gross understatement. A pro-Adams newspaper warned that if Thomas Jefferson were elected, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes” (Swint 184). Such outrageous claims were commonplace, and even these paled in comparison to the slanders and personal attacks of election of 1828.
It is difficult to imagine a more negative campaign than the 1828 presidential race between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. In his book “Mudslingers,” author Kevin Swint writes that Jackson was at turns called “a murderer, a drunkard, an adulterer, a petty thief, and a liar.” Adams was labeled “a tyrant, a gambler, a spendthrift, and a pimp” (213). Adams supporters even resorted to insulting Jackson’s wife Rachel, calling her an adulteress and a bigamist. Rachel learned of the insults despite Jackson’s attempts to shield her from the name-calling, fell into a depression, and became seriously ill. Though she lived to see her husband win the presidency, she died not long after. Jackson blamed his political enemies for her death (215). It is fair to say that contemporary presidential elections never reach this fatal caliber of negativity.
Negative campaigning in these early days appeared in newspapers, handbills and speeches. Though widely circulated, these mediums never had television’s capacity to reach an enormous number of voters. It was only one hundred and twenty two years later that political advertisements in presidential campaigns first appeared on television.
Political advertising on TV
Political advertisements in presidential campaigns saw their debut in the 1952 election between Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson. The advantages of the platform were obvious: television allowed the candidates to reach more voter simultaneously than any other medium and exercise complete control over their message. Despite televisions’ upsides, not everyone was in favor of its use in the political arena. Democrat Adlai Stevenson refused to appear in his campaign’s “spot ads” and always remained a staunch opponent of the use of television advertising in politics (“Living Room”). Eisenhower’s campaign immediately embraced television and took to the airways, earning resounding victories against Stevenson in 1952 and 1956.
Eisenhower’s campaign pioneered the use of short, twenty-second spot ads. Most campaign strategists at the time (including Stevenson’s) favored thirty-minute television blocks of candidates delivering speeches. Eisenhower’s team favored short ads appearing before popular television programs like “I Love Lucy.” Two-thirds of the ads aired for the 1952 election were negative (Kaid 112). However, Eisenhower’s attack ads were generally rather oblique and vague. In one spot, a voter asks Eisenhower if the Democrats had good intentions despite some blemishes on their record. Eisenhower responds with a light-hearted analogy: “Well, if a driver of your school bus runs into a truck, hits a lamp post, and drives into a ditch, you don’t say his intentions were good, you get a new bus driver” (“Living Room”).Stevenson’s negative advertisements were more pointed, but retained a humorous and light-hearted air. Stevenson’s campaign aired several animated cartoons and jingles that criticized Eisenhower for flip-flopping on important issues andhis close relationship with former president Robert Taft (“Living Room”).
The 1960 race pitting John Kennedy against Richard Nixon demonstrated the steady development of negative advertisement. Kennedy’s campaign produced a wide variety of ads, including one that undermined Nixon’s claims of experience by using footage from an Eisenhower press conference. When prompted by a reporter, Eisenhower admits to being unable to think of an instance when Nixon proposed a policy that was later implemented. Nixon’s campaign scrambled to repair the damage by airing an ad in which Eisenhower testified to Nixon’s pivotal and influential role in the White House (“Living Room”). This back and forth provided an early example of a campaign directly responding to an opponent’s advertisement. As recently as the 2012 election, President Obama’s campaign was forced to respond to a Romney ad quoting an Obama speech that seemed (as portrayed by the Romney ad) to undermine small business-owner’s responsibility for building their businesses (“Living Room”). The evolution of campaign advertisement has become increasingly back and forth. No matter how unfair or ridiculous a competing ad may seem, the wide exposure of viewers to political advertisements demand that competing candidates immediately respond to unfavorable claims made in negative ads.
The mother of all negative ads
1964 was a watershed year for negative campaign ads in presidential elections. President Lyndon Johnson (D) opposed Barry Goldwater (R).Perhaps the most notorious negative advertisement of all time is the famous “Daisy Girl” spot run by the Johnson campaign. The ad shows a young girl counting the petals on a daisy. As the charming scene progresses, a loud male voice is heard counting down from ten to zero. The camera zooms in on the girl’s eye, and reflected in it is a massive nuclear explosion. Johnson’s voice over is powerful and simple: “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live or to go into the darkness. We must either love each other, or we must die” (“Living Room”). Goldwater is never mentioned in the ad, but viewers knew that it intended to portray Goldwater as an extremist who might use nuclear weapons. Tony Schwartz, the creator of the ad, said “the commercial evoked a deep feeling in many people that Goldwater might actually use nuclear weapons. This distrust was not in the Daisy spot. It was in the people who viewed the commercial” (Mark 41). Due to public backlash and heavy criticism from the Goldwater campaign, the Johnson team eventually pulled the ad.
Feedback about the ad was totally consistent with the aims of the Goldwater campaign. Jack Valenti, an adviser to the president and later director of the Motion Picture Association of America, sent a letter to Johnson outlining the campaign’s plan of attack in September of 1964. He appealed to Johnson at the beginning of the campaignto“make [Goldwater] ridiculous and a little scary: trigger-happy, a bomb thrower, a radical, absurd to be president… the herald of World War III” (Mann 133).The Daisy ad played into this strategy by appealing to viewers’ fears of what Goldwater might do in the presidency.
The Daisy Girl ad was a breakthrough in negative campaign commercials. In his book “Mudslingers,” political science professor Kerwin Swint argues that “Johnson’s campaign invented the negative TV spot—or at least perfected and brought it into the big time” (31). The Johnson campaign managed to capitalize on Barry Goldwater’s tendency to make controversial statements by using TV ads to exaggerate their frightening and undesirable implications. Their strategy’s influence on future presidential races is undeniable: nearly every presidential campaign since has attempted to exploit its opponent’s gaffes for political gain. Johnson’s brilliant campaign strategists effectively brought negative television advertising into the modern era.
The 1988 election: America, meet Willie Horton
“I’m going to scrape the bark off of Michael Dukakis.”
-Lee Atwater, George H.W. Bush campaign czar
The negative TV spot has since become a mainstay in American presidential elections. Presidential candidates have found television to be an indispensable and potent tool for gaining the favor of the electorate. The powerful influence of negative advertisement was never felt more strongly than in the Bush campaign’s brutally effective campaignagainst Democrat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. The election is widely agreed to have been the most negative campaign in the modern era.
The Bush campaign took a scientific approach to their battle over the airways. The team gathered focus groups of voters and ran unfavorable aspects of Dukakis’ resume past each group. They found that their reaction to certain points was off the charts negative and applied these findings to their ad campaign (Swint 157). This sophisticated approach is testimony to a general trend toward greater attention to creating effective negative television advertisements.
One infamous ad from the campaign is known as the “Willie Horton” ad. The thirty-second spot referenced the weekend furlough program in Governor Dukakis’ home state of Massachusetts. The ad displays a picture of Willie Horton, a criminal who received a lifetime sentence for first-degree murder. A low-voiced announcer explains that Horton fled during one of his weekend furloughs and proceeded to stab a man to death and repeatedly rape his girlfriend. The words “Kidnapping,” “Stabbing,” and “Raping” appear in bold white text contrasted against a dark blue background (“Living Room”). Though a PAC ran the ad, many suspect it was actually created by the Bush campaign (Swint 157). Some insist that it was intended to stir up racial fears. Regardless, it was a powerful condemnation of Dukakis’ weak stance towards crime and punishment.
The major lesson from the 1988 campaign was the necessity of replying to charges laid forth by an opponent’s negative ads. The Willie Horton ad was true, but the case it presented was atypical: the furlough program actually boasted a 99 percent success rate. Even so, Dukakis all but ignored the Willie Horton and other damaging negative spots, figuring that voters would see the fallacy and unfairness of Bush’s charges (Swint 158). This decision was a death sentence for the Dukakis campaign, and it “proved once and for all that negative campaigning works if not responded to” (Mark 201). Dukakis’ failure to fight back indicated that successful campaigns must respond to their opposition’s ads and retaliate with attack ads of their own. Contemporary presidential campaign teams have clearly taken this to heart; presidential races today often consist of persistent attacks that lead to a downward spiral of negativity.
Concerns with negative campaigning
“Negative advertising is the crack cocaine of politics.”
-Senator Tom Daschle
The Dukakis example provides clear evidence of the threat negative ads pose to opposing candidates, but to what extent does the mudslinging commonplace in presidential races threaten democracy?Concerns about negative campaigning arise (at least partially) from its prevalence in recent campaigns. Even though there has been a general increase in the proportion of negative appeals in televised political campaign ads over the last few decades, negative campaigning has always been a part of American democracy. Historically speaking, contemporary campaigns are relatively mild in their use of negativity. At a minimum, the personal attacks prevalent in many nineteenth century elections were more often hostile and blatantly false than contemporary examples. In a 2012 NPR interview, political science professor John Geer commented that negativity is essential to democracy: the party out of power must criticize those in power to convince the electorate why they should be replaced. Geer contends that “there is no democratic country in the world that doesn’t have negativity in it because it’s kind of a foundational aspect of such a system” (“Putting”). Furthermore, the negativity seen today does not begin to rival that of elections during the early nineteenth century. Negativity is nothing new, and it may be an unavoidable consequence of democracy.
Negative advertising may even be beneficial to democracy. In his book In Defense of Negativity, Geer provides convincing statistical evidence that negative TV spots add to political debate. As the proportion of negative ads has increased since 1960, there is a correlation of strength .93 with advertisements about issues (rather than personal attacks). Geer’s findings that negative ads tend to be more issue-oriented are reinforced by other scholars’ findings (Kaid 18). Augmenting the strength of this claim, Geer illustrates that themes in negative appeals are most often about issues important to voters (86, 99). Furthermore, negative ads play a vital role: pointing out the shortcomings of opposing candidates. “No candidate is likely to provide a full and frank discussion of his own shortcomings,” writes Northeastern University political science professor William Mayer.“Such issues will only get a proper hearing if an opponent is allowed to talk about them by engaging in negative campaigning” (Mark 11). As such, negative TV spots play an invaluable role in democratic elections by exposing each candidate’s weaknesses.