"Attack ads work perfectly"?

Via Sullivan, the American Psychological Association Monitor has a nice piece up describing some current research in the use of campaign advertisements. Most of the findings in there emphasize just how modest and ephemeral advertising effects are. That's not to say that there are no effects, just that the effects are small and usually wash away after a few days, but they could matter in a very close race. This strikes me as the appropriate interpretation, and it's consistent with much of what I've seen on the topic within political science. But then there's this part:

In the past, campaigns have been wary of deploying negative ads for fear of backlash, says [political scientist Travis] Ridout. However, that may be changing as campaign operatives see evidence that negative ads can break through party affiliations and also sway independent voters. A case in point: Mitt Romney’s February landslide in the Florida Republican primary came on the heels of the “most negative advertising campaign in history,” according to the nonprofit Campaign Media Analysis Group. The week before the primary, 99 percent of Romney’s ads were negative, while 95 percent of Newt Gingrich’s ads were negative. 

“I wish candidates wouldn’t use them, but attack ads work perfectly,” says Joel Weinberger, PhD, a psychology professor at Adelphi University. “Democrats know it, Republicans know it, and it’s going to get ugly this year.”

A few points here. First, I have a hard time believing that the Florida Republican primary was the "most negative advertising campaign in history," although I guess it depends on how we're defining our terms. History's pretty long. But more importantly, just because a lot of money was deployed by Mitt Romney and his allies against Newt Gingrich and Romney won hardly proves that Romney won because of the negative ads. It's possible -- John Sides has some tentative evidence suggesting that the ads mattered -- but we'd need a lot better data than we currently have to prove that negative ads swayed independent voters away from Gingrich and toward Romney.

And then there's Weinberger's sweeping conclusion that "attack ads work perfectly" and that everyone knows it. Yes, a lot of people are convinced that they work, but that's far from proof that they do. To cite Sides again, "We haven’t remotely arrived at a place where 'research' suggests that negative ads 'work.'" Quite a bit of research suggests they don't do much at all.

Negativity and the Denver Mayor's Race

Michael Hancock won yesterday's election for mayor Denver, beating opponent Chris Romer in the runoff by a 16-point margin. This comes after a poll last week showing Hancock with only a ten-point lead. An earlier poll showed only a four-point lead for Hancock, and Romer actually had more votes than Hancock in the early May first-round election. How did Hancock do this?

It's a good question, but the consensus answer from Denver's political elites -- that Denver residents turned against Romer because of his negative advertisements -- almost certainly has to be wrong.

For one thing, for advertising to have moved a race from a four-point gap to a 16-point one would be a shockingly large campaign effect. Advertising effects are difficult to measure, although Alan Gerber, James Gimpel, Donald Green, and Darron Shaw came up with a pretty good experiment. In their large-scale field experiment, they found that roughly $2 million in TV and radio advertising could shift roughly five percent of the vote as measured by tracking polls, although this effect was very short-lived, lasting only a few days to a week. Conversely, Hancock's lead over Romer was not only larger than that but grew over time. Keep in mind that the Gerber et al experiment was ideal in many senses. Most campaign advertising is far less effective and is often countered by the opposing campaign.

Second, this purported campaign effect was in the wrong direction. Romer's negative ads (and yeah, they were pretty negative, although to my knowledge they didn't fabricate anything) are alleged not only to have had no effect on Hancock's numbers, but to have boomeranged and pulled down Romer by 12 points. This is highly improbable. In a multi-candidate race, it's possible for a negative ad to be effective but for voters to lose interest in the candidate running the ad, as well. (Arguably, this is how John Kerry won the 2004 Iowa Democratic caucus -- Gephardt and Dean, who had better initial organization, tore each other down with negative ads, and the voters transferred to Kerry.) But in a two-candidate race, it's far less likely that the attack ads will harm the candidate running them, unless the ads are completely off the wall (which these really weren't). It's not impossible for this sort of boomerang effect to happen, but it's rare, and the notion that Denver residents are so fragile that they can't see a fact-based negative ad without clutching their pearls and fainting is rather silly (and, personally, at least slightly offensive).

Let me suggest a more plausible story: Romer's internal polling numbers last month suggested he was in serious trouble. Despite his win in the nine-way first-round race, there was a clear ceiling on his support, while many other voters who had not voted for Hancock initially were at least open to the idea of doing so. Romer realized the only way he could win this was to pull down Hancock's favorability ratings. Hancock, meanwhile, provided Romer with some convenient flubs, and Romer made the best out of them. Flubs rarely cost a candidate an election (recall George W. Bush?), but that was the best Romer had to work with. The ads just didn't work. Meanwhile, Hancock stuck with his ground game of turning out supporters, and that did work.

I don't have the direct evidence to back this up (at least not yet), but this strikes me as eminently more likely than one of the largest campaign effects in human history occurring in the wrong direction.

Update: Some solid analysis here from Patrick Doyle. He makes some reasonable suppositions about the stability of the vote from the May to the June elections, although an exit poll would be really helpful.

Direct mail and accountability

A while back I wrote about some of Denver mayoral candidate Michael Hancock's recent campaign flubs, including one in which he he said that intelligent design should be taught in schools. (He quickly retracted that.) Not surprisingly, his opponent, Chris Romer, has put together some direct mail pieces hitting him on this. You can see a picture of one of them at left.

Here's something I found innovative: you see that QR code on the center left? It links to a video of Hancock's debate appearance in which he made the offending statement. Say what you want about negative ads, but this is about as well-sourced as they get.