Many people have observed that political ads have taken a turn for the more negative this year, and now there’s some analytical evidence to back this up. The Wesleyan Media Project analyzed data from Kantar Media and found that 70 percent of the TV ad messages were negative, while at this point in the 2008 election, 91 percent of TV ads were positive.
This trend is spearheaded by the heavily financed superPACs supporting the candidates. At this point in the 2008 cycle, 97 percent of the ads came from candidates. But this cycle, “60 percent of all ads are sponsored by interest groups, which is really, truly a historic number,” says Erika Franklin Fowler, a political scientist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
This follows the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling allowing outside groups to receive almost unlimited funding, It could be argued that the candidates have benefited greatly from this trend.
“As candidates, you do want to outsource some of the negativity, if you believe that there’s going to be a backlash for going negative,” Fowler says. “And there is some evidence in political science to suggest that the backlash will be a little less if the negative ad is sponsored by an interest group as opposed to being sponsored by a candidate.”
The superPACs, which have to disclose their donors, accounted for 83,000 primary-campaign ads, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. But in the general-election campaign, groups that don’t disclose their donors have already run more than 35,000 ads.
Bowdoin College government professor Michael Franz, another co-director of the Wesleyan project, says that while superPACs tend to get their money from people close to the candidate, donors to the non-disclosing groups are different. “They are not as explicitly tied to a candidate per se as they are to a particular party winning the White House,” Franz says. “The stakes are a little higher, so not having to disclose donors becomes more valuable.”
So far in the general election, the top advertisers are President Obama’s re-election campaign, the Democratic National Committee and two conservative groups, Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity. The pro-Obama operation, which discloses its donors, has aired more than 20,000 ads so far, while the two conservative groups, whose donors are anonymous, have run about 24,000.
Source: NPR
