There is nothing quite like the sweet silence of the airwaves after another negative campaign season has come to pass.
I’ve often thought that voting booths should double as shower stalls. The election judge hands you a ballot and a towel. You disappear behind the curtain and vote for your slate of candidates while simultaneously washing away the muck that has been hurled at you over the last two months by multi-million dollar character assassination campaigns. I happen to live in what is now the scorched earth of “Duckworth-Roskam-land” so maybe I was dumped on more than most, but the vitriol seemed particularly intense this cycle.
All PR pros should be thankful that consumer marketing doesn’t operate like political marketing. Imagine Suave shampoo going after its competition with the same venom: “Head and Shoulders: Bad for Your Hair, Bad for America.” Or a Ford attack on Volvo: “The Chairman of Volvo caught driving while intoxicated! How safe do you feel now?”
On any given weekend, Hollywood movie studios spend millions to market their newest flick. But they don’t spend a dime telling us how bad the competing movie is. Imagine if they did: “A real stinker!” “Atrociously acted!” “Don’t waste your time.” Granted, that kind of assault marketing might have spared me from Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman, but in most cases it would be a big turn-off. Why are communications about movies or shampoo more honorable than our communications about public policy?
Here’s my theory: Negative ads do work in swaying opinion, but they also turn people off the entire process. The problem is, in politics it doesn’t matter. Even if only three people are left with the stomach to vote for any candidate, there will still be a winning candidate smiling on election night saying that “the people have spoken”.
Product marketing, of course, is different. If Hollywood just trashes the competitor’s movie, I’ll probably not see any movie. Then the entire industry loses. This is not a conscious behavior by the studios, mind you, but a permeating attitude that trashing each other’s product hurts everyone in the long run.
How do we fix this problem? We could appeal to the candidates’ sense of decency and selflessness by convincing them that negative campaigns hurt the political discourse and count on them to do what’s in the best interest of the democratic process over their own personal ambitions. Ba-dum-bum - rimshot!
But seriously, one radical idea would be to take a page from the consumer sphere and make voter apathy punishable by non-representation. For example, if a congressional district doesn’t get at least a 50 percent voter turnout, they don’t get a representative to Congress. It sounds harsh, but it might be just the subliminal “everyone loses” motivation politicians need to avoid alienating huge swaths of their constituency.
Equally radical: I’ve always thought it would be terrific if the American public could band together and lie to pollsters when surveyed about the campaign horserace. Imagine if we always told pollsters, no matter who we actually supported, that we supported the incumbent. It would deconstruct the entire political spin machine. “News Flash - Senator Smith is 70 points ahead in the polls even though he was just arrested for fraud. The thinking among political circles here is that the poll numbers are citizen sabotaged.” Without cold data, candidates wouldn’t have anything to calculate against. How fun!
More practical, of course, is a reformation of messaging, something we PR people know something about. I would like to see candidates start to give voters a little more credit. I’d like to see candidates position themselves as the “anti-negative candidate”. First, go negative on negative. Create a disincentive for politicians to go negative by spinning negative campaigning negatively. Then go positive with a clear, concise view of their positions on key issues.
I’ve been a political junkie all my life and it’s too bad that I’m embarrassed to admit it during campaign season. Political campaigns should be times of societal reflection, honest disagreements and good faith dialogue. Rather than getting robocalls at all hours about how much the other guy is in favor of letting terrorists cheat on their taxes, I should be getting factual position pieces in the mail that clearly spell out the philosophies of candidates.
And if we can rid ourselves of negative ads, we could then attack the other problem: the empty positive message. Said the earnest fellow with a shirt that is a bit too starched: “I believe in families.”
Michael McGrath is senior vice president at Financial Dynamics.
