by John Cane

Created on: October 23, 2008

Negative ads in a campaign are vastly more effective than positive ones. This may seem counterintuitive, but only because we tend to thing of advertisements as a way to persuade people to vote for a candidate. But I contend that the purpose of an ad is not to change anyone's mind, but rather to change people's mindset. Looking at if from this perspective, we start to understand why negative ads are more effective.

First we must understand that there is only a limited amount of information that can be imparted in a 30 second ad. This is about enough time to give a skeleton idea of an issue without much detail. The idea that you are really going to be informing anyone on an issue in this time is just off the wall. What you hope to do is give a rough idea of either why your plan is great, or your opponents plan is dangerous.

But there is a catch. We can divide the viewing/listening audience into three groups: 1. Informed Potential Voters, 2. Uninformed Potential Voters 3. People who can't vote (underaged, non-citizen, unregistered etc.) We can throw the third group out and focus on the first two. Informed voters have generally made up their mind as to who is the better candidate, and if they make it to the ballot box, they will cast a vote for that candidate. It is highly unlikely that you are going to change that persons mind with an ad unless you have something earth shattering. On the other hand, if there is something earth shattering out there, it has probably already been in the news and the informed voter has already taken it into account.

An uninformed voter has probably also made up his or her mind. This decision is usually just along a party line or based on something inane like the color or sex of the candidate. A substantive 30 second add is not going to be enough to really inform this voter, nor is it likely to change his mind considering that the basis of his decision had not changed.

So what about all the undecided voters out there? Undecided voters are a much smaller number that you might think. A large number of the people who tell you they are undecided, just don't feel like talking politics. They tell you that they haven't decided so they don't have to defend their position. Then there is the group who is so fed up with their parties candidate that they are considering throwing their vote away to the libertarian, Green, or other unlikely candidate as a "protest vote" As we will see in a moment, these can be treated like people who have made up

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