Eric (at the always excellent Pulpit Bulls) makes a smart point about the utility of responding to negative campaigning:
I’d like to take this in a different direction and use the above spot to note that advertisements rebutting your opponents’ smears is incredibly underused. That’s not to say it’s always smart — in many cases you don’t want to highlight and repeat a smear against your candidate, especially considering how many casual commercial viewers would presumably just catch the smear and ignore the surrounding content. This is a concept that television writer Alex Epstein recently explored on his screenwriting blog, by suggesting that people don’t remember “not” very well. Epstein suggests that when people hear Barack Obama is not a Muslim or Richard Nixon is not a crook, they deduce it to Obama is a Muslim and Richard Nixon is a crook.
The empirical data on the efficacy of negative campaigning is really interesting. On one hand, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that negative campaigning – and smears in particular – are very memorable. In their meta-analysis of 111 studies containing 294 pertinent findings, political scientists Richard Lau, Lee Sigelman and Ivy Brown Rovner concluded that, true to what you would expect, negative campaigning is indeed a fantastic way of making your opponent look bad. But, as they note, that is an extremely short-sighted view of campaigning. After all, the broader goal of a campaign isn’t to tar your opponent as a “draft dodger” or a “flip flopper,” it’s to win. And as they repeatedly stress, there isn’t much evidence to suggest that negative political campaigns “work in shifting votes towards those who wage them.” In fact, contra the conventional wisdom, negative campaigning is no more effective than positive campaigning, even though negative campaigns are far more memorable and more likely “to generate somewhat greater campaign-relevant knowledge.”
If this has any political relevance, its exactly what Eric proscribes later in his post, namely, that it is often in the best interest of the candidate to explicitly push back against negative campaign messages. What’s more, there are plenty of real-life examples of this approach working: in the Old Dominion, a commitment to positive campaigning and an explicit push back against negative campaigning helped Tim Kaine win the governorship in 2005, and played a decisive part in Tom Perriello’s upset win against Virgil Goode last year in the 5th district congressional election. On a separate note, I am a little curious as to why campaigns continue to go negative. This analysis was published two years ago, and it only reaffirms the results of a similar analysis performed nearly a decade earlier. In other words, we’ve known about the limited efficacy of negative political campaigns for awhile now. So, what’s the deal?
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