Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren signed a pledge last year to keep outside money out of their race. | AP Photos The need to dial back ads

As the dust of the 2012 election cycle settles, voters are enjoying their increasingly brief respite from the avalanche of negative political ads that have come to define modern campaigns. Everyone knows that campaigns are too negative; candidates and consultants know it, voters know it and the data show it. Nearly everyone agrees that something must change, but the question is, what?

One key development from 2012 that has been significantly overlooked is the People’s Pledge adopted in the Massachusetts Senate race. Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren signed the pledge in January 2012, and in doing so put in place a system of financial penalties designed to discourage media spending by outside groups. The agreement effectively banned the presence of outside television ads in the race — a development nearly unheard of in the post- Citizens United era.


Given this unique exclusion of outside ads, Massachusetts provides a good case study on the impact of outside media spending on overall tone. Fewer outside ads meant fewer negative ads, and the tone of the race remained positive until much later in the cycle. Though a handful of outside groups aired broadcast ads in the race before the signing of the pledge, the next negative ad didn’t hit the airwaves until September 2012, months later than in other races. When the race did go negative, the candidates only had to respond to each other, not to the anonymous negative attacks of third-party groups and PACs. It placed a degree of accountability and respectability in the campaign that was unparalleled throughout the cycle. This is a significant accomplishment, and one that merits further consideration as we move toward 2014.

The breakdown of positive and negative broadcast spots run by candidates and outside groups can be found by using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group. In looking at this data, it becomes clear that messaging in 2012 was overwhelmingly negative, and third-party ads factored heavily into that equation — but with what value added?

For the sake of comparison, the 2012 Senate races in Nevada, North Dakota, Montana, Ohio and Virginia provide good contrasts to Massachusetts. Across these five additional races, the uniform negativity and volume of outside ads diluted the quantity of positive ads run by candidates. A series of charts developed by the Atlas Project visualizing this disparity can be seen here. Between Jan. 1 and Oct. 27, 2012, independent expenditure groups ran between 17,900 and 56,500 broadcast spots in each of these races, and 95 percent to 99 percent of those ads were negative in tone. Looking at Nevada in isolation, independent expenditures ran an estimated 21,500 spots, and of those, not a single positive spot was run by any progressive or conservative group. They were, quite literally, 100 percent negative. In sharp contrast stands Massachusetts, where overall, spots remained 64 percent positive and 36 percent negative.

Two notable exceptions found here are in Virginia and North Dakota. In Virginia, candidate ads were 64 percent positive and 36 percent negative, while in North Dakota that ratio stood at 55 percent to 45 percent. This positivity was still drowned out by a flood of negative outside ads, but these unusually high ratios were no accident. It takes political courage to go against the grain, and in Virginia, Tim Kaine displayed exactly that when he correctly calculated that positive ads could break through the clutter and be used as a tool to survive a spending onslaught. Kaine himself spoke firsthand about how he “banked that Virginians would reject negative ads” in a post-election interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

At times, maintaining a positive profile proved to be as much of a boon to candidates as going negative hurt their opponents. Scott Brown’s polling numbers dropped only after he began to go negative against Warren in September, and Kaine pulled away from George Allen in the polls only after he began airing positive ads in late August.

Candidates who ran positive ad campaigns also appear to have exited their races with higher favorability ratings than their negative counterparts. Looking at final polls conducted by Public Policy Polling and Rasmussen on these same Senate races, only Brown, Warren, Kaine, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester and Rick Berg could boast favorability ratings over 50 percent in the final days of the campaign. Brown was even shown with a favorability rating of 58 percent in a post-election WBUR poll. Brown, Warren, Heitkamp and Kaine were notably four of few candidates examined here who kept their message largely positive. It seems possible, but unlikely, that this is purely a coincidence.

The task of fixing our broken political system is a daunting one, and after each election, we are left weighing our next steps. A lot of attention has been paid over the years to the impact of negative advertising and the conventional wisdom that supports it. But if the People’s Pledge is any indication, campaign strategists in both parties would be wise to study this data and pay more attention to the benefits of running positive campaigns. We will be stuck with Citizens United for the foreseeable future, and as long as that is the case, we’re not advocating Democrats fight with one hand tied behind their back. On the contrary, exploration of a better path forward is something that should be done across the board, and both parties should seriously consider extending the People’s Pledge to races across the country.

In the end, positivity is a choice — a choice that for far too long, candidates and campaigns have simply been too afraid to make. Campaigns define who we are and what we hope to be, and if we pursue an even steeper descent into negativity — victories may be won in the short run, but in the long run, we all lose. Given this choice that we face, the words of Martin Luther King Jr. may be worth remembering: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”

Steve Rosenthal is a former AFL-CIO political director, founder and CEO of America Coming Together and currently president of the Atlas Project and the Organizing Group. Karyn Bruggeman is a political analyst at the Atlas Project.

This article tagged under: Opinion

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