In a perfect world, or even just a pretty good one, candidates for political office would tell us who they are, what they think about the world, and how they plan to fix problems that are important to us. And we’d make reasoned decisions about who to vote for based on those substantive pitches.
Unfortunately, we inhabit a world of truthiness and comically extravagant hyperbole, where the goal isn’t to constructively inform voters but to rip the other dude. Incessantly. Negative political advertising came into vogue during the 2012 Presidential election, and in the cycles since, it has become entrenched as a distinctively American art form.
We have the great fortune this year of living in a so-called battleground state: The race for U.S. Senate between Democrat incumbent Jon Tester and his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, could well tip the balance of power in Congress. Which means, inevitably, that a flood of money has arrived to support campaign media — and much of that is bankrolling attack ads on broadcast television and online video channels.
If you care about democratic function, the results aren’t pretty.
Here’s a recent example. In a Montanans for Tester video that debuted on Aug. 5 and is still running, a woman named “Sarah” says: “We were devastated to find out our baby wouldn’t survive. An abortion saved my chance to have children. Tim Sheehy would take that freedom away and let politicians ban abortion. Even to save a woman’s life or health, including mine.”
Now, Sheehy has made no secret of his “proud” opposition to abortion. But in an interview with Montana Public Radio in May, and in a debate with Tester in June, he clearly voiced support for “common-sense protections for when a baby can feel pain, as well as exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother,” as he told MTPR.
The language of Tester’s ad suggests that leaving the law to states, as allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision — which Sheehy has said he supports — creates the possibility that legislators will limit exceptions to abortion. Um, ok, but that’s a misleading connection, and not much to hang your hat on.
The rules of this game apparently permit the slighted party to return the fire. So, Sheehy’s website proclaims that Tester “supports elective abortion on demand up until the moment of birth.” That claim apparently refers to Tester’s support for the 2022 Women’s Health Protection Act, which failed to pass in two Senate votes.
Tester certainly is pro-choice. But that 2022 bill would have allowed abortion only up to the point of viability — “the point in a pregnancy at which, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, based on the particular facts of the case before the health care provider, there is a reasonable likelihood of sustained fetal survival outside the uterus with or without artificial support.” It made exceptions for situations when “in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”
Which, like, Sheehy supports — right?
The attack circus goes on and on. A current ad from American Crossroads, a Republican “super-PAC,” proclaims: “Jon Tester…cast the deciding vote to allow illegals to take over $500 million in Covid relief.” The legislation in question was the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package (which did, in fact, pass by one vote) that included $350 million in assistance to state and local governments (hefty chunks of which ended up in Jefferson County).
The legislation itself said absolutely nothing about relief for undocumented immigrants, but state and local officials have had considerable leeway in how they spend their grants — and Fox News reported this year that $517 million from the Act had been earmarked locally to financial assistance for that group.
Which is quite a logical leap. Tester’s actual voting record on immigration is, not surprisingly, more nuanced. He has opposed Repubican-led bills that would have barried sanctuary cities from receiving certain federal grants and removed protections for asylum seekers with a credible fear or persecution or torture. But this year, he supported bipartisan (but ultimately doomed) legislation that would have limited the number of people seeking asylum at the Mexican border and added $20 billion in funding for immigration enforcement.
Meanwhile, numerous Tester ads have called out Sheehy’s support for “pure privatization” of health care – “a plan that could destroy VA services and shut down rural hospitals.” The reference is to an audio recording obtained by the news site Semafor of Sheehy speaking to a group last August in Glasgow. In the recording, Sheehy says: “Our hospitals have been built around federal healthcare subsidies. In my opinion we need to return healthcare to pure privatization.”
That certainly suggests a policy direction, but it doesn’t amount to a plan that would put rural hospitals and VA services under the knife. For the record, Sheehy’s camp says, “We must keep our commitment to every Montana senior to protect their Social Security and Medicare benefits.”
It’s all an insane farce. And in the face of this persistent barrage of negativity, one wonders: Are ads like this actually effective?
Many people with Ph.D.s after their names have studied this question over the years, and the results aren’t conclusive. There seems to be agreement that attack ads work better with men than with women, and not so much with older voters. A 2022 study found that “attack ads did cause greater harm to the evaluations of the attacked candidate than to the attacker” — faint praise, but still. And widely cited research by Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar holds that “negative advertising drives down voter turnout — in some cases dramatically — and that political consultants intentionally use ads for this very purpose.”
But a 2007 survey by Richard Lau and Lee Sigelman, among others, reported that “the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign.”
And in 2016, Liam Malloy and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz concluded that “it is never efficacious for candidates to run attack ads, but running positive ads can increase a candidate’s margin of victory” — though they cautioned that positivity works only when the ads are persistent and when candidates outspend their opponents.
(Side note: A study by Yale researchers examining the 2016 Presidential campaign found that the billions of dollars spent on TV ads that year did little to persuade voters, either way.
Whatever the intent, these attack ads are reprehensible. They foster fear and polarization, and they retard rather than advance informed voting.
So, please: When you see these ads in the coming weeks — and if you breathe and own a screen, you surely will — just turn the volume off. If you are a man, switch to WWF or football.
And take comfort in the fact that, whatever happens, all this will stop on Nov. 6.
Contact Keith Hammonds at keith@boulder-monitor.com.
