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Swing state voters are burnt out on negative ads. This expert says they don't work

Voters line up in north Phoenix
Sky Schaudt/KJZZ
Voters line up in north Phoenix on Aug. 4, 2020.

It is less than two weeks until Election Day and voters are tired. Especially in swing states like ours, we are getting inundated with ads and emails and campaign messaging. The amount of money being spent on political advertising will likely vault past $10 billion this year. And most of it is negative.

So much so, that Heather LaMarre, an associate professor of Media and Communication at Temple University in our fellow swing state Pennsylvania, says all of this advertising may be hurting candidates more than helping them — not to mention what it’s all doing to the rest of us.

LaMarre joined The Show to discuss.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: I guess I want to start with a little bit of like, condolences, maybe like a high five, right? Like, you’re in another swing state as well. And you know what this is like, just like I do here in Arizona. Let’s talk a little bit about what this has been like in the last several weeks and months in Pennsylvania, in terms of just the election overload and that swing state.

HEATHER LAMARRE: Well, I think everybody is turned off and tuned out. And anyone I talk to — whether it’s neighbors, friends, students, colleagues, research partners — it’s really so exhausting to the point that people can’t take it anymore. So they’ve just starting to completely tune out.

GILGER: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about the advertisements side of that because, I mean, it’s on the news. We’re talking about it all the time. As a journalist, I can’t escape it in that sense, right? But it’s also advertisements everywhere — on TV, on social media, my phone is being flooded with text messages.

It also seems like all of these ads are negative. Talk a little bit about how we got here and why these political ads are so pervasive today.

LAMARRE: So to be fair, they’ve been negative basically since the start. So when we first started doing television ads in the 1960s, they were negative. And the most famous example of that is the Daisy ad. That was Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater.

(Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” advertisement plays)

"Daisy" Ad (1964): Preserved from 35mm in the Tony Schwartz Collection

And that was such a shocking and alarming ad that research now, what we know now about behavioral science, is that it was so shocking and alarming that that was probably what made people tune in to that ad. But at the time it was seen as, “Oh, negative ads work. Let’s run with that.” And they ran with it. I mean, they really ran with it.

We saw just even in this current election, the Wesleyan Media Project is tracking negativity at over 95% of advertising. But we’ve always trended negative. Harris’ campaign has been a little bit more positive than Trump, but some would argue that’s because she has to introduce herself to the country. Truth.

(Positive Kamala Harris advertisement plays)

So a little bit of her advertising has been policy oriented, but overall we’re sitting around 90-95% negativity in this election.

(Negative Kamala Harris advertisement plays)

GILGER: How did that happen? Like, was there a time you said negativity has always been a part of political advertising, but just the pervasiveness of it. Has that been true always, or did anything change to make that happen?

LAMARRE: I think a couple things have changed. There was some early research in advertising in general and in journalism, political journalism, that showed us that people pay closer attention to negative information. I’m probably even a little bit guilty of this in my own research. I did a whole stint of research in the early 2000s, mid 2000s on political satire, where we sort of reaffirmed that notion that satire, which is inherently negative and critical, garners more attention than regular news.

So political strategists have picked this research up and sort of come to the conclusion that more negativity is better, and that’s a false conclusion for them to come to. We actually have meta analysis that show the opposite, but we can see how they got there.

GILGER: Yeah. Citizens United changed this landscape as well. Right.

LAMARRE: What Citizens United did is it opened the floodgates to money, and we moved from having less than about $1 billion. Totally spent an election to this year. They’re forecasting upwards of $10.8 billion, $10.9 (billion). I’ve even seen estimates as high as $15 billion. I’m not sure we’ll go that high, but nonetheless, to go from less than $1 billion to $10-11 billion from the year 2010 till now shows you this trajectory upwards.

And what’s happening is because you have that much money flooding the system — and it is everywhere because of microtargeting. It’s everywhere from your text messaging and your email to your streaming to your television shows. And that amount of money is causing this chronic exposure to advertising.

But since most of the advertising is negative, then it is having this really bad boomerang effect of chronic exposure to negative information 24/7, and you can’t get away from it. And it is just creating an intense level of anxiety and stress across the entire electorate.

GILGER: Right. So there is real kind of exhaustion from this, what it does to us all psychologically. Does it work, though? Does negative advertising have the kind of results that campaigns hope it does?

LAMARRE: Well, no. Actually no. The short answer there is absolutely not. In fact, the science says the opposite. We have a couple really big meta analyzes that have been done in the field by different scholars that have taken all the small, different studies, hundreds of studies collectively looked at them to look at the total overall effects. And it’s a net neutral at best.

So the best case scenario is it doesn’t really move the vote at all. But in a lot of cases, it’s a net negative, meaning voters get so frustrated, angry, they feel like its privacy is being invaded. They feel exhausted, stressed out, fatigued, that it’s causing a boomerang effect where people are either just not going to turn out to vote, or intentionally vote against the person who they feel is violating their privacy in their texting.

GILGER: Interesting. I want to ask you one more question about microtargeting — which you mentioned, this kind of new frontier of advertising in this realm. How specific can they get? How much of my personal information are campaigns able to use to target me?

LAMARRE: So the campaigns are just like any kind of other brand. They can buy information from data farmers, and that can be touchpoint down to where exactly you are in your car, at what time of day on a 9-to-5 drive. They know where you shop. They know what your grocery list is. They know everything about you, and they use this information to create what we call a psychometric profile.

This goes well beyond your party ID and well beyond your vote behavior.

GILGER: So obviously a negative and a psychological kind of impact on all of us, especially those of us here in swing states, right? I guess my last question is, how are we going to get through the next couple of weeks, and is there any end in sight? Does this kind of advertising just stop when the election ends? Does it change?

LAMARRE: Well, I think that it’s going to change. We’re going to have election results. And then what will shift is the focus. The focus of the advertising will become more on policy debates. What I would say as far as how we get through it, if there’s a silver lining in what’s happening, is that it’s strangely bringing people back together against sort of this common enemy.

We live in this very polarized, divided nation, and people are tired of that. And whether you’re on the left or you’re on the right, you’re equally fatigued by this, and you’re equally sort of depressed and anxious about the amount of stress this is putting on everybody: their family, their friends, their work relationships.

And so I think if there is a silver lining to be had, it’s that people can kind of come together and have a sigh of relief when it’s over, and we can all sort of look at each other and say, “Yeah, I know I’m tired of it too.”

And we can move sort of on to things that matter more to us, like going to see our children play in a sports event or celebrate Thanksgiving with family and friends.

GILGER: Let’s hope it’s over by then.

LAMARRE: Please don’t say that.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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