With the next state campaign finance reporting deadline not until July, negative attack ads are ballooning ahead of the June primary in Nevada.
However, that’s just the beginning. Given that overall political spending is estimated to top $12 billion in this election cycle nationally, it’s hard to believe a sizable portion of that sum won’t be used to create even uglier, nastier and more unbearable attack ads as we officially move into the general election.
According to a Nevada Independent analysis, at least 20 new PACs and political nonprofits were registered with the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office since the last deadline — meaning there are plenty of organizations currently spending money to influence Nevada primary races that clearly don’t want to deal with the state’s pesky transparency requirements until after votes are cast. Due to a 2017 change in campaign finance laws, such organizations don’t have to disclose their financial details until July.
On both the federal and local level, such organizations routinely engage in far more aggressive negative messaging than candidates themselves — effectively acting as a way for candidates to outsource their “dirty work,” as the American Journal of Political Science once put it.
Certainly, the lack of transparency and accountability inherent in such a system is a legitimate point of frustration for voters and journalists. However, it’s hard to swallow the idea that such legal loopholes are disproportionately responsible for negative campaigning — even if they do influence when those nasty ads start arriving in our mailboxes. After all, political attacks and dirty tricks have been a staple of the electoral process for as long as there have been democratic institutions.
As the Brookings Institution highlighted all the way back in 2016, American history is, itself, replete with examples of grotesque ad hominem attacks, political slanders and uncouth campaign tactics. “Fake news,” outright lies and hyperbole are nothing new to our political ecosystem, even if the television spots, social media ads and political mailers are.
In the 1800’s, for example, The Federalists relentlessly attacked Thomas Jefferson as an atheist who not only hated the Bible but would also work tirelessly to undermine the Constitution and unravel our burgeoning democracy. There was even a smear campaign aimed at exposing Jefferson’s illegitimate sexual relationship with one of his slaves — which goes to show that even sex scandals aren’t anything unique to our current moment of political absurdity.
Indeed, the dirty politicking and personal attacks were so commonplace and egregious in the early 1800s that it wasn’t entirely unheard of for political rivals to exchange fisticuffs or challenge one another to a duel.
While political disagreements haven’t always ended up with candidates literally killing each other, nasty campaign rhetoric has nonetheless proven highly resilient to changing cultural norms. By the mid-20th century, political messaging routinely preyed on the anti-Catholic, racist and homophobic cultural norms of the time — leading to attack ads and dirty campaign tactics that seem unimaginable by today’s standards.
Throughout much of our history, such repulsive politicking has been a central component of electoral strategy. And the reason why is simple: Despite voters claiming to dislike negative messaging, we still tend to respond to it in a way that actually rewards those who engage in it. We’re psychologically hardwired to respond to negative framing — and, let’s be honest, there’s no shortage of ways to frame current politics negatively.
This isn’t to say that negativity is the only way a candidate (or independent organizations who support a candidate) can gain support from voters. As candidates such as Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama demonstrated, uplifting messages about hope, optimism and excellence can be powerful motivators for the general public.
However, crafting such positive messages is often far more difficult than merely painting a political opponent as a boogeyman — which is why a great many pundits, politicians and political organizations seemingly do the latter as a matter of standard practice. Denigrating the opposition, as it turns out, is simply more energy efficient than concocting a message of “hope and change” that portrays our nation as a “shining city on a hill.”
Making matters even worse is that negative campaigning — particularly by independent organizations and political nonprofits — is one of the few tactics that has remained relatively profitable as everything else in the world of political strategy consistently changes. As we’ve seen in dramatic fashion with the rise of Donald Trump, what brings electoral success isn’t always what “experts” would have normally predicted. What works and what doesn’t work in politics is perpetually in flux, even leaving experts perplexed about what messages, advertising strategies and marketing tactics might resonate with voters in any given year.
Negatively portraying one’s rival as cartoonishly unfit for office, however, is a tactic that has largely stood the test of time and requires far less communicative creativity — especially in politically divided times such as ours.
Unfortunately for us voters, that means the recent increase in negative ads we’ve seen in certain races throughout the state — while noteworthy for how nonprofits have leveraged legal loopholes — is nothing compared to what’s awaiting us on the other side of the primary.
Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on X at @schausmichael.
