Consultants are trained by experience, and by mentors, to go negative.
There are few more powerful norms among political professionals. When in trouble, when in doubt — whenever, really — attack.
Everyone with a modicum of experience can tell powerful stories about attacks that turned a race around, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. And there’s strong psychological evidence behind the notion that negative works.
As far back as 1988, New York Times reporter and author Hedrick Smith accurately quoted me in his book “The Power Game,” saying that 20 years of research in psychology has demonstrated that negative information is processed more quickly and more deeply than positive information. Evidence for that proposition has continued piling up over the past 28 years.
But going negative can be the wrong move.
Witness Donna Edwards’s Maryland Senate campaign. Full disclosure: I worked for the independent expenditure committee backing her opponent, Chris Van Hollen. Those working for her campaign undoubtedly had what were, in their minds, excellent reasons to attack Van Hollen for allegedly colluding with the NRA.
But the facts are pretty clear.
In our March poll, before the attacks were launched, 54 percent of Democratic primary voters had a favorable impression of Edwards, with only 10 percent unfavorable, and she was behind Van Hollen by just 4 points in the horse race.
By just before primary day, her favorables had dropped 6 points, to 48 percent, and her unfavorables had zoomed up by 21 points, to 31 percent. Van Hollen’s modest lead ballooned to 12 points, using some experimental questions we are working on — perhaps more about the questions another time — which was quite close to his final 14-point margin.
Edwards’s attack backfired. Her image became much worse while Van Hollen actually improved his standing.
No doubt, the criticism of Edwards’s — and her super-PAC’s — inaccurate ads by party luminaries, from President Obama to Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, had an impact. But that’s part of the risk in going negative. Your opponent likely knows what you are coming at them with, but you cannot be at all sure what your opponent has in his or her back pocket with which to respond.
Many years ago I was involved in a Senate primary where we attacked our self-funding opponent for not paying his taxes. Had we known that our opponent knew my client had a tax lien against him from his student days, which he never knew about because notices went to an address he hadn’t lived at for decades, we certainly wouldn’t have used that line of attack.
But we didn’t know. And when the smoke cleared from the artillery exchange, a fellow named Russ Feingold had slipped through the middle to victory running only positive.
None of this should be construed as an argument against ever running negative. No one would make such an argument. But while pushing for positive is the rarer position today, it’s one that shouldn’t be dismissed.
Academic research at least calls into question the efficacy of negative.
In 1999, professors Richard Lau and the late Lee Sigelman, along with their graduate students, performed an analysis of 117 studies and found that negative ads were no more effective — and to some extent less — than positives.
Their analysis was updated in 2007, with no change to the conclusions. Some studies showed a modest impact of negative ads on opponents. Others showed substantial backlash against the attacking candidate, and many found no impact at all.
Earlier this year, an economist and a political scientist from the University of Rhode Island examined ads and election results from presidential, senatorial and congressional campaigns between 1996 and 2008. Their conclusion was unequivocal: “there are no benefits from attacking one’s opponent,” only from “advertising a candidate’s strengths.”
These studies are far from perfect. But they, together with experience, suggest there are at least some circumstances in which we should give positive a chance.
Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has worked for Democratic candidates and causes since 1982. Current clients include the minority leader of the Senate and the Democratic whip in the House.