Rivals spending millions on attack ads as elections near
As the Midterm elections in the United States approach polling day this week, our reporter on the ground Natalie Akoorie takes the temperature in an often heated and volatile political environment
The big business of political advertising in the United States has sucked up $8.9 million so far in the 2018 Midterm elections, with the number of “attack ads” on the increase.
Candidates, including those vying for the 435 seats up for grabs in the House of Representatives, as well as for the 35 Senate seats, have funnelled the millions of “dark money” into television advertising on health care, taxes, jobs and immigration.
The amount of dark money, which refers to political spending meant to influence the decision of a voter, is more than that spent in the Midterms in 2014 ($8.2m) and 2010 ($7.1m).
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor of political science and communication studies Dr Lynn Vavreck said the volume of advertising was up and the tone of advertising was down, meaning it was getting more attack-oriented.
Vavreck said attack ads were cleverly constructed to point out an opponent’s failings, at the same time implying the policy of the candidate endorsing the ad would fix the issue.
These days the candidate endorsing the attack on an opponent gave their endorsement at the beginning, to try to reduce the negative perception of themselves.
She said political advertising was like an arms race, where each candidate was trying to keep up with his or her competitor in the number of ads shown. “We are always trying to neutralise each other’s efforts.”
This was despite the fact data showed the effects of advertising were quite small and usually disappeared within a week.
Interestingly, Vavreck said data compiled by the Wesleyan Media Project showed most of the ads were not about President Donald Trump. “For an election that’s supposed to be about the President, there aren’t very many mentions of him in these ads.
“These data belie this idea that this election ‘is about Donald Trump’.
“I think it is about the issues that Donald Trump has raised but he himself is not showing up in the candidates’ discourse.
“He himself is showing up in this race. But not through the advertising.”
This week the President tweeted an immigration ad labelled racist after it linked an immigrant convicted murderer with a caravan of asylum seekers from central America heading for the US border and asking “Who else will the Democrats let in?”.
On Thursday the Washington Post said the ad was probably based on falsehood after it appeared Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant given the death penalty in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014, appeared to have last entered the country under the George Bush, Republican Administration.
Vavreck said she believed Trump was unique in being able to be a “bad actor” by making statements later shown to be untrue by groups such as Ad Watch, where journalists were encouraged to check on political ads.
“We’re in a really weird spot in the United States in this moment in time because we have a President who does say things that can be shown to be untrue and the media say they’re untrue, and the watchdog groups say they’re untrue, and then he says the media are the enemy of the people and a certain portion of the country are not only willing to believe that, they’re happy to hear it.
“We haven’t been in a moment like this before, so I think it’s an open question, what kind of institutions and what kind of actors need to emerge to break us out of this equilibrium where we’re in now, where [journalists] try to do their job and the leader of the Free World is basically saying ‘You are the problem’.”
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Your guide to the Midterms A17 Is Trump card trumpable? Editorial A20
For an election that’s supposed to be about the President, there aren’t very many mentions of him in these ads. Dr Lynn Vavreck, UCLA