Q: The title of your book, In Defense of Negativity, might sound like the title of an op-ed piece. But [00:07:00] far from being a, you know, mere polemic, there’s a lot of data-based and statistics-based analysis in this book. How did you go about developing what became the themes of the book? And then demonstrating that those arguments were a better description of the truth than the conventional wisdom? And I don’t want you to have to recapitulate the whole book, but can you pick maybe one or two examples?

GEER: Yeah. Well, I mean, that book came about partly because I was lucky enough to get a fellowship at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton. And so I had a whole year to think about the subject. I had been thinking about it on and off for quite a while, and I had this, you know, basic, iconoclastic kind of argument, that negative ads weren’t a bad thing, that they were potentially a good thing. And it came partly from the fact that the opposition’s party’s responsibility in a democracy is to attack those in power. And imagine if we all of the sudden — you know, there’s been conversations about banning negative ads. [00:08:00] In fact, Mexico was thinking about getting rid of their negative ads. I went down and talked to the people, I said, “That’s what you need.” A democracy rests on negativity. You know, go back to the founding period, the Anti-Federalists and their scathing attacks on the Federalists. What came about? The Bill of Rights. Not a bad thing. And so I think there was just, you know, a tendency to think, “Well, negativity’s got to be bad,” but it’s really part and parcel to democratic politics. And that certainly was the basis of the book. I happen to have just an amazing amount of data that I’d collected by luck. I’d done this detailed coding of all these ads that just fit perfectly with this particular theme, but I will tell you right now, I didn’t collect it with this book in mind. I collected with a different project in mind. It just happened to fit this one, so there’s —

Q: What does that mean, “coding”?

GEER: Yeah, good question. Right now, ads, because of the web, are all pretty easy to get. I have. you know, 120 or so ads from the 2012 campaign, for example, that I collected. And now it’s pretty easy to get a hold of. [00:09:00] But previous ads were very hard to get a hold of. And there was a gentleman named Julian Kanter, who decided in the early ’60s to collect every single political ad he could. And he did collect the early ones, and he continued to collect them. And then maybe around 1980 or so, he decided to offer his archive to a university, who would then give him an opportunity to be kind of the curator of it. And not many universities bought into it, but the University of Oklahoma did. And the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive is still in existence. Julian actually lives in Nashville here. About 90 years old, I suppose, at this point. But I went and just looked at all those ads, because we had — you know, people looked at speeches, people looked at a lot of things, but we didn’t have any detailed read in the ads, but I knew they were there. You just had to go to Oklahoma and spend, you know, a long amount of time. And I looked at every single ad that he had that was — you know, we’re not sure of all of — the full set of ads for any campaign. There’s some controversies here and there, which ads aired, which didn’t. But it’s a pretty good sample. [00:10:00] And in some sense, it may be even the population. And I looked at each ad, and did detailed coding of it. So if a campaign talked about the environment, that was coded. If it talked about attacking someone on taxes, that was coded. So I had, on average, about 15 pieces of information for every single ad, and I had about, by the time I was done, over 800 ads from the general election. And you begin to think about 800 times 15, well, that’s a huge number of cases, and that became the database, so to speak, that I was able to say something systematic about these ads, as opposed to looking at one or two ads and kind of doing a seat-of-the-pants analysis, which most pundits and journalists do. I was able to look at it systematically, and I did all the kind of social science checks on reliability and validity to make sure that what I was measuring was genuine. And that’s where I — that’s the database.

Q: [00:11:00] So when you look at an ad, what is it that you’re coding it for? What’s the information in the ad that you’re collecting, and then comparing to all the other ads that you’re (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)?

GEER: Well, this is an interesting conversation of itself. I coded the explicit material. So if I say “Mike Nelson is soft on communism,” or I say that “Mike Nelson is a tax cutter that has, you know, balanced five budgets in the state of Tennessee,” that balanced budget comment, that soft on communism, we count it as a separate, what I call, appeal. So the way I think conceptually about an ad is how many different appeals are made, and how many different reasons you’re given. But it’s only explicit reasons. And sometimes, ads are very much about implicit reasons. So you take the very famous ad from 1988, the Willie Horton ad. The Willie Horton ad was explicitly about crime. But of course, implicitly, it was about race. My coding scheme would not capture what the [00:12:00] Willie Horton ad was about. And I’m just very up front about that, because that’s true, and there’s no point in trying to cover it up. So I look at the explicit. But sometimes, ads do have implicit types of appeals. Now whether those appeals would actually play to the public isn’t at all clear to me, because it strikes me that the implicit appeals are often aimed to try to get journalists to start to cover these kinds of things. There’s a great ad by, in 1996, by Elizabeth Dole, where she’s looking in the camera, talking about her husband, Senator Bob Dole, and says, you know, “My husband’s a workhorse, not a showhorse.” Well, that’s a twofer there. I mean, that’s a comment about her husband being hardworking, but also a jab subtly — maybe not subtly, but implicitly, at least — at Bill Clinton for being a showhorse. But my coding scheme would have counted that just for Dole. And so I tried to do some implicit stuff, but I couldn’t get the reliability and validity measures, because it turns out that people interpret those through a partisan lens. So Democrats would code [00:13:00] things differently than Republicans. And I tried to do it, and it just wasn’t going to work. And then I began to realize that a lot of the interpretations of these ads are, in fact, a product of our partisanship, so it became even more important from my point of view to try to rise above that, and not be in favor of the Democrats or the Republicans, but try to tell kind of a systematic, social science story.