Negative Campaigning

The practice of negative campaigning is not new. Candidates took the low road before the American two-party system was born. Even George Washington was not immune from personal attacks. During the Revolutionary War, the British circulated a phony letter from him “confessing” an affair with a washerwoman's daughter. Ben Franklin's grandson and namesake, Benjamin F. Bache, wrote that “the American nation has been debauched by Washington.”

Other presidents, including Bill Clinton, have been the targets of character attacks, as have candidates at all levels. Political scandal is an American tradition—and the grist for editorial cartoonists, comedians, and political consultants, as well as opposing candidates. And even when political figures are careful not to carry personal “baggage” into their campaigns, they may well see their voting records and policy views put under attack or held up for ridicule.

The public dissatisfaction with government that led to a series of wild pendulum swings in the public's support for each of the major political parties was reflected in the tenor of negative campaigning during those election cycles.

When the extended U.S. war in Iraq, the stumbling government response in 2005 to Hurricane Katrina, and the onset of a national economic downturn caused public approval of President George W. Bush to plummet, the Democrats fueled a political surge by tying Republicans in Congress and other offices to the unpopular incumbent.

But when Democrat Barack Obama, elected in 2008 to succeed Bush, presided over a period of high unemployment despite passage by the Democratic-controlled Congress of an expensive economic stimulus plan and also pushed into law a controversial overhaul of the nation's health insurance laws, his public support dropped and Republicans turned the tables, associating Democratic candidates across the country with the president in staging a big rebound in the 2010 midterm elections.

But if negative campaigning is not new, it has flourished in the age of television and the attack ad. political advertising on television, much of it negative, has become the largest single expense of presidential campaigns and a sizable cost for other campaigns of any consequence.

The impact and pervasiveness of negative advertising has been amplified over the past decade as political action committees—many of them organized under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code and thus known as “527s”—raised contributions that were unlimited by federal campaign finance laws (because these groups were generally outside the purview of the Federal Election Commission) and used those funds to run extensive “independent expenditure” political ad campaigns.

These messages technically fit within the definition of “issue advertising” because they did not expressly call for the election or defeat of a specific candidate—the so-called “magic words” laid in a 1976 Supreme Court decision defining what constituted a campaign ad that fell within federal contribution limits. Yet this kind of advertising often consisted of thinly veiled efforts to influence one or more election outcomes, and also often sought to cast individual candidates in a negative light.

As technology advances, candidates and their supporters increasingly are also using the Internet as a medium for negative campaigning against opponents. One tactic that has gained currency over recent years is the production of hard-hitting negative videos aimed at opposing candidates that are posted on the websites of campaigns or political action groups rather than being aired on traditional media.

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