Negative election ads will probably increase in future

Do negative election ads really work?
Not surprisingly, we saw plenty of that in the recent October 14 vote, and while most people will say they really don’t like to see attack ads or negative ads, the facts are that most people listen or read them, and the information usually remains in the brain at some level.
That is what many studies have concluded, going back decades when attack ads began to ramp up. Today, you cannot expect to see an election without plenty of those ads, nor does it appear this trend is going to change.
One researcher determined negative ads are used because they can make the recipient angry, and anger is considered the most effective emotion to get people involved in an issue, such as going to vote. You can be sure those running the marketing for candidates are aware of that, and it means there is no reason to do a negative ad unless it has a real pop to it.
Another result from several national studies is that positive ads simply do not move the needle very much. If the ad supports their candidate, they are happy, but if a positive ad supports a different candidate, it does very little to make a voter change their plan in the ballot box.
One University of Georgia professor who authored a study said that while negative or dirty ads definitely have been proven to work, a candidate has to be careful “not to go too dirty, because if you do that, the ad will boomerang and have the opposite intended effect.”
Negative ads come in different degrees of intensity, with many of them taking an ounce of fact about a candidate and spinning it as far as possible. We saw some of those ads in our parish elections when one basic fact was used to make it sound like a candidate had done something terrible.
In several of those ads, there was enough truth in the ad that several candidates were able to get away with them, but still claim it originated in fact.
Watching the results of our parish elections it did seem that some negative ads made a difference, particularly in a few key races. And maybe that’s a reason a candidate with the best intentions about advertising still needs to accept the fact they will probably need to get in the mud a little bit.
In the past elections, we saw some who did and some who didn’t, which makes you wonder about how it may have changed the eventual winner and loser.
If history is anything to go by, negative ads will be with us forever, and in the future, you might see more candidates realize the need to take negative ads to a higher level than they might ever planned to.
It’s the nature of the elections we now have and is clearly not going to change anytime soon.