Ready, Aim, Fire!

In recent elections, people were equally divided on which ticket's ads were too negative, but not this time. In the new NEWSWEEK poll of 1,035 registered voters, 70 percent of respondents said McCain-Palin ads were "too negative or nasty," compared with 41 percent who thought Obama-Biden ads were. And 58 percent of those who have seen the GOP ticket's ads found them "misleading or distorted," while 36 percent thought that about the Democrats' ads.

So does a blizzard of negative ads keep disgusted voters at home on Election Day? Such was the thinking as recently as the 1990s. In lab experiments, volunteers who are shown actual attack ads say they are less likely to vote. But just because that's what people say right after being bathed in sleaze doesn't mean that's what they will actually do come Election Day. In fact, comparisons of turnout after races with many or few negative ads suggest that people are not so disgusted that they withdraw and vow a pox on all their houses: in races that bombarded people with negative ads, there was either no effect or an uptick in turnout. "It's a mistake to infer that attack ads depress turnout," says Krosnick.

Although the question isn't settled, wrote Paul Martin of the University of Virginia in a 2004 study in the journal Political Psychology, "studies demonstrating a mobilization effect seem to have the upper hand." The reason is that human beings have been honed by evolution to be more motivated to avoid a negative than to seek a positive. Early humans who failed to find lunch went hungry, but those who failed to avoid a lion became lunch. Failure to respond to messages conveying danger or threat or other negatives was therefore eliminated by the steady hand of natural selection. "The same psychological mechanism that attracts our attention to immediate dangers also draws our attention to negative ... information" such as that in political ads, argues Martin. Negative ads typically incite anger or anxiety, both of which stimulate attention and engagement. Where attention leads, response follows. We are wired to react more to negative information, says Stanford's Krosnick: "When voters dislike a candidate, they are more motivated to go out and vote," to keep that lying, cheating reprobate out of office.

The power of negative information to draw our attention explains in part why negative ads are (with exceptions we'll get to) effective: because people pay more attention to a message that seems threatening, they are more likely to remember the information in that message. Take the 1964 "daisy" ad, one of the most noted attack ads ever (even though it aired exactly once). It showed a little girl counting petals she plucks from a daisy, while an announcer counts down from 10. At zero, an image of a nuclear explosion fills the screen, and the voice-over says, "These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God's children can live or to go into the dark … Vote for President Johnson on November 3." It never mentioned Barry Goldwater, Johnson's opponent, but the implication was clear: the GOP senator was a dangerous warmonger whose finger should not be allowed anywhere near the nuclear button. You can't credit (or blame) the ad for Johnson's victory, but it helped, probably by strengthening support for Johnson among those already leaning toward him rather than by swaying undecided voters. "Think of attack ads as serving to reinforce the support of the already converted and to energize them," says Krosnick. "It can get your supporters to turn out, which can have just as big an impact as moving the undecideds."

The social and economic climate during a campaign can, however, dilute the power of negative ads. The parlous state of the nation today is unique in the lifetimes of every voter born after the Great Depression. As a result, says political psychologist George Marcus of Williams College, efforts by the McCain campaign to link Obama to William Ayers, a Chicago education professor who in the 1960s belonged to the radical Weather Underground, and to Chicago financier and convicted money-launderer Tony Rezko, are unlikely to gain traction. "Who cares about that when the country is going off the rails?" Marcus asks. In contrast, McCain ads early in the summer linking Obama to his controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and painting him as a lightweight, smooth-talking, style-and-no-substance celebrity had an impact, says Marcus, keeping Obama's support in the 42 to 43 percent range. Still, says political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, McCain has little choice at this point but to go negative. "Positive ads for McCain are a waste," he says. "People are only going to support him if they reject Obama," and only ads attacking him have a prayer of making that happen.

Even those who admit the effectiveness of negative ads typically bemoan how they drag the noble pursuit of democracy into the gutter. Not Vanderbilt's Geer. Analyzing his database of ads in presidential campaigns from 1960 to 2000, he finds that "personal attacks are flat over the last 50 years," he says. "It's attacks on views that are rising."