It's election season again, and mailboxes, inboxes and social media feeds across Florida are filling with political attack ads.
Many voters say they hate them. But experts say campaigns keep using them for one simple reason.
They work.
While many voters say they’re annoyed by what sometimes feels like a deluge of negative campaign texts, calls and emails, experts say those communications play to how human brains work.
Jay Revell is the owner of Revell Media and an adjunct instructor in Florida State University’s Masters in Applied American Politics and Policy program. He teaches a course about political campaigns.
He says negative political ads prey on humans’ preference to avoid bad outcomes.
“We tend to have a bias towards negativity we just remember it better it elicits an emotional reaction and you know those emotions stick with us more than, like I said, the facts and figures and policy points,” he said. “It's just a lot easier to remember the two or three reasons you don't like a candidate versus the long list of reasons you should like a candidate.”
It’s the same principle that drives why a lot of media of all stripes focus on negative news: while people don’t enjoy hearing it, that type of information is more likely to stick in their memories and pull their attention.
Aubrey Jewitt is a political science professor at the University of Central Florida.
“If you ask people if they like negative ads, almost universally the answer is no. People say they do not like them, but psychology finds that people tend to prioritize negative information over positive news, and that that's just sort of a natural thing that people do,” he said.
But attack ads are only effective to a certain extent. Jewitt says they are unlikely to impact races with wider margins, but are heavily influential in close races, or races with many candidates running in them. In those contests, he says negative ads are commonly used to reduce turnout in groups likely to support a certain candidate.
“They are trying to confuse voters and get them to either vote differently than they otherwise would, or they are trying to suppress the vote and get it and make it so that people just don't turn out at all or don't send their ballot in,” he said.
And putting out attack ads comes with risks for campaigns. Revell says there can be blowback from attack ads if they are not convincing to voters.
“If someone feels like they're, you know, being deceived, if they feel like there's hypocrisy in play with some of these negative attacks, that can really have that opposite effect of what whoever the person doing the communicating is trying to do,” he said.
He says that blowback is more likely in local and smaller state legislative races, where elected officials represent a smaller area and more closely connected to the regions they serve.
“A lot of times people know these candidates, right. Either know them personally or you see them at the grocery store or at church or when you're dropping or picking up your kids, and there's some things that just you know aren't true. And again, that can resonate in an interesting way. If someone tries to sell a bill of goods on someone that's just not accurate, you can have a real negative blowback to that,” he said.
To avoid potential blowback, attack ads often don’t come from a candidate’s campaign directly. Many come from political committees not explicitly tied to one candidate or another. Jewitt says those committees make it challenging to tie a particular attack to one group supporting a specific candidate.
“They will collect money, then transfer money to another group, and might transfer money to another group, and then if you're trying to figure out who's actually behind it, it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to follow that trail of money,” he said.
During a time when those communications are frequent and their origins are often unclear, Revell recommends that people be skeptical and decerning about the political communication they receive.
“Do your own homework, and you know, go and see if that claim is accurate. Go and see if that thing that they're saying about that candidate is truthful. And you know, if it's not, you need to take that into account too,” he said.
