Transcription – John Geer Interview

Q: John, your book is historical, and it’s grounded. I mean, you talk about the founding period, you talk about Lincoln, you talk about — in other words, [inaudible] of what appear to us to be very negative political campaigning with positive effects. But you really focus on the period from 1960 forward. And I wonder within that period, do you note any trends in terms of prevalence of negative advertising, kinds of negative advertising from 1960 on forward?

GEER: Well, on average, there’s been a trend towards more and more negativity. And that certainly picked up after ’88, but the ’60 campaign wasn’t very negative; ’64 got very negative, and then it kind of was flat for a while, and then started increasing. That’s certainly one, in general. There’s been more attacks in American politics. And we see it today [00:21:00] in all the polarization that’s unfolded between the parties and between various politicians, that attacks are part and parcel of American politics these days. Some of the other trends you see is that — and this is tied to a variety of factors — ads used to be longer. So there used to be minute-long ads, and now they went to 30, and now they’re off in 15 seconds. The rise of the contrast ad. Really, Bill Clinton put together and started the contrast ad. There have been contrast ads in the past, but in 1996, he used a heck of a lot of contrast ads.

Q: What is a — what is a contrast ad, as compared with a negative and positive?

GEER: Well, a negative ad is simply going to be attacking [inaudible] positive as touting somebody, and then contrast is you might start out by saying, you know, “George Bush is a wonderful person,” and then all of the sudden go to John Kerry and start attacking John Kerry. So you have a little bit of both. And it turns out in most contrast ads, it’s about 60% negative, 40% positive. [00:22:00] So you tend to be a little bit more negative, but some people think that it lessens the blow. But it also is that a campaign is fundamentally about a contrast. You know, are you going to vote for one or the other? You may not — you may not like George W. Bush, but you may still vote for him because you really dislike John Kerry. And so that’s become more and more common. Though again, it varies. Certain campaigns don’t have them as much, but it really started as a trend. And fortunately, my coding scheme — a lot of early coding schemes either coded ads as positive or negative. And then the contrast ad caused them problems, because they had to put them in one of those two buckets. But because I focused on the appeal within each of the ads, I made a seamless transition to contrast ads. Again, not because I knew what I was doing. (laughter) It was more because my coding scheme was just set up — I was thinking about the ads as offering, you know, a set of reasons to the American public about why you should vote for somebody, or vote against somebody. And so it was just a — it was easy to pick up, and I was able to say something much more [00:23:00] concrete about contrast ads as a result of that.

Q: Why do you think — now your focus in the book is on the ads that presidential campaigns themselves run.

GEER: That’s right.

Q: We’ll talk later about the third-party groups that have come along. But why do you think presidential candidates started turning more toward negative ads and contrast ads at some point? When was that point, and why?

GEER: Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, the negative stuff has always been around in campaigns, whether we’re talking about Thomas Jefferson, or we’re talking about Dwight Eisenhower or George W. Bush. It’s always been around. I think it’s turned around more in the ’80s and then through the ’90s for a variety of reasons. And one of them I have — one hypothesis I have is that the journalists started to pay a lot of attention to ads following the ’88 campaign. There was a belief by David Broder, famous Wall Street — not Wall Street — famous Washington Post reporter, who [00:24:00] felt that Bush won that campaign in 1988 through negative ads, which I think is absolutely false, and I actually take that argument on in the book. But there was a belief that these ads had this power. And so we’re now going to journalist — journalistic community is going to vet these ads. Which makes — you know, it’s plausible. It’s First Amendment, it’s a reasonable thing to do. The difficulty is that first of all, there’s this assumption that negative ads are going to have all this false information. They equate exaggeration with false information. It’s not always true. I mean, getting back to the earlier point, campaigns are always about exaggeration. But what happened, and consultants began to pick this up especially as we turned into the next century, is that journalists gave coverage to these ads, but they tend to like negative ads. They tend to be drawn to the negative ad. They tend not to talk about the positive ad, partly because most positive ads are pretty boring. You know, finding out that somebody is a good parent and favors educated children and clean water just is pretty dull. And the negative ads had some spice to them. [00:25:00]And so then journalists began to cover these ads, and cover negative ads more, and give them the attention. But that, of course, then meant that the consultants understood that that’s how you get your story out. And so they started running more negative than they might have otherwise, because that’s what the journalists gave coverage to, and they were trying to shape the narrative of the campaign. And so a lot of people say, “Oh, well, negative ads work because of the evil aspects of consultants, and that the public buys them, and the public can be easily manipulated. Yeah, maybe that’s part of it. But the other part of it is that journalists, by covering them, inverted the incentives of consultants to air more negative ads, because they knew that’s what they’d get coverage of, because they don’t — you know, if it’s an interesting positive ad, they’d give it coverage. But if it’s — the typical, kind of positive ad’s pretty dull. But negative ad has some spark to it. And so that’s a big change in American politics.

Q: You also write about maybe an even bigger change, and that is the growing polarization [00:26:00] between the two parties, and the extent to which that makes the Republicans and Democrats much more adversarial to each other. Can you elaborate on that?

GEER: Yeah. I mean, we have two trends that are going on here. One is the rise of negativity, and we have the growth of polarization. And there has been speculation that, by going back again to Shanto and Steve and their work and Going Negative, they were positing that the negative ads were driving the polarization. On the surface of it, that struck me as odd. And the reason it struck me as odd is that political ads don’t have that kind of effect. And how is a political — set of political ads going to restructure government? Restructure how the political system is working? It struck me as far too powerful an influence. Instead, it strikes me it’s the other causal — causal arrow was just reversed. That is, that the polarization of the political system gave rise to more negative ads. So Democrats and Republicans in 1976 didn’t disagree on as many issues as they did in 2006. And that disagreement, [00:27:00] getting back to my earlier point, is that negative ads have to have some basis in fact. But with those disagreements, you can have more attack politics.