Negative Political Advertising

It would seem a good bet that if you went out to the street and asked any random person their opinion of political advertising you would likely be told that they are tired of how negative it is. Just a few minutes ago I was listening to the radio and the father of an old classmate of mine who happens to be the Sandoval county election something or the other was talking about how negative the campaign was and how it seemed to be the most negative campaign he has ever witnessed. For someone who is close to sixty years old that is quite a statement. In reality I seriously doubt that any election can really be considered to be the most negative ever mostly because of evolving standards and short term memory.

I will make the bold statement that I have never witnessed an election that was not negative and did not contain an absurd amount of negative advertising on most every advertising medium. Certain races certainly don’t lend themselves to it in any given election, take for instance the perfectly civil and boring race for land commissioner, but when considering an entire election, negativity abounds.

Why is this? Using the assumption from the above thought experiment most everyone at least publicly would disavow negative advertising; one would think that it would be advantageous to not be negative. But that isn’t the case for the very simple reason that negative advertising works, and it works both ways. Thanks to the multitude of ways the internet provides for a user to research, claims can be analyzed and either reinforced or discarded based on a user’s perception. Conversely, negative advertising can be used to create an image of a candidate, to define them in the mind of the uninformed voter; this is very useful in the case where a candidate is not an established quantity.

Take the case of one Jon Barela, running for the House of Representatives. Barela has never run for nor held elected public office although he has experience working for former Congressman Joe Skeen and served as an assistant attorney general. In the 90s Barela worked for Intel as a community and government relations manager. Intel is an international company with operations that span the globe. In his role, Barela worked with (surprise!) government and registered as a lobbyist as a result of some of his work. Incumbent congressman Martin Heinrich and various democrat interests have seized on these jobs to paint Barela as a “Politician” and “Lobbyist” who lobbied to send jobs to other countries. This is their campaign, to create an image of Barela for the public using the fact that Barela once worked for Intel in government communications (for its Albuquerque location) and because Intel hires people in other countries to work at their locations in other countries, Barela is therefore a lobbyist to send jobs to other countries explicitly and is a politician because he served in unelected public sector positions. Get it?

Every claim made by the loose associations presented by the democrat point of view are demonstrably false but because they are loose associations the fact that they are unserious can be downplayed by democrats. Catch-22 time. For democrats, it’s simple to promise not to negatively advertise because they are, in their own words, not guilty of it because everything they say is true because they are on the side of everything right and true. And everything said by a Republican is false and negative because they are evil and wrong. Take Heinrich for example, he is a politician by means of incumbency and attempts to paint his opponent negatively as a politician, the logic is impossible to deconstruct. And I wonder, what will come of Heinrich is he loses? Will he return to a private sector in which he has no experience? He could follow the path taken by other former democrat politicians, and become a lobbyist, but what is the politically correct term for a democrat lobbyist? After all, hearing it from them, they are on the side of right and good so in that affect if a democrat is a lobbyist they aren’t really a lobbyist just like they aren’t really politicians.

Negative advertising is rampant because it works. It just does. The people that are turned off by it have already made their minds up mostly and as a result it would take a lot for their candidate to offend them. This election is a mid-term and as such there are both a lot of high profile races and many initiatives on the ballot and only so much time in the day and all of these line items are competing for time and attempting to make an impression. Sometimes negative ads just stick long enough to limp a candidate or idea past the finish line. I doubt much new ground has been recently broken in this realm or that we will one day witness a world with no negative advertising.