Negative political ads are like the proverbial car wreck.
No one wants to look, but they can’t help taking a peek.
Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have gone negative in their head-to-head campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are doing the same in the Democratic presidential primary campaign.
The candidates say they don’t want to go negative. They do it anyway.
You might ask: Why? They do it because the voting public remembers negative ads with far more regularity than they remember positive ads.
Indeed, when media folks talk about political ads, they harken back almost instinctively to the negative messages they’ve heard over the years. Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad of 1964? George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ads of 1988? George W. Bush’s “Swift Boat” ads of 2004?
The only positive ad campaign I can recall is the “Morning in America” ads that President Reagan’s re-election campaign ran in 1984.
We have a latent desire to see these negative ads. It’s in our taste buds, our DNA, our psyche.
So it’s no surprise that Trump vs. Cruz and Clinton vs. Sanders would go negative. The polls are tightening prior to those Iowa caucuses.
I guess perhaps it’s time the candidates stop fooling themselves while they try to fool the rest of us. No matter what they say about their loathing of negative ads, they do “approve this message” when they hit their airwaves.
As for those of us out here in Voter Land who also complain about negative political advertising, let’s all confess, too, that we can’t get enough of them.
