A group of Northwestern University students watched a selection of television commercials from this fall's Illinois political campaigns. Showing them the ads were Gordon Walek and Cynthia Canary of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, which conducted an Ad Watch during the last six weeks of the campaign. Asked which ads stood out most, the students identified two from the gubernatorial campaign.

One depicted Democrat Glenn Poshard as an extremist on guns. It was one of Republican George Ryan's earliest TV spots, showing a closeup of a pistol turning slowly on the screen until it pointed directly at the viewer. It also included images of ghostly gang members running as if ready to do harm. Ryan's message was clear: Poshard would allow dangerous people to carry guns freely all over Illinois; and, since the ad elicited fear, Poshard must be a frightening candidate.

The other ad, sponsored by the state's Democratic Party, showed a burned-out minivan in which six children had died after a truck accident. The ad linked that accident to a scandal involving the issuance of commercial driver's licenses by the secretary of state's office, thereby suggesting that Ryan was responsible for the death of those children.

The spinning gun and burned minivan are the two most lasting images from this year's campaign. Asked for whom they would vote based on those ads, the Northwestern students said they would not vote at all, Canary related. Instead, the students asked rhetorically why they should vote for someone who wants everyone to have a gun, or for his opponent, who kills kids.

The sad truth is that these ads probably served their purpose, because campaigns design negative ads to stop citizens from voting for someone they might have considered, or to stop them from voting at all. Nasty campaign messages are targeted mostly toward that 20 percent to 30 percent of voters who are independent, undecided or "persuadable." Studies by Stephen Ansolabehere and colleagues at UCLA in the mid-1990s confirm the conclusion that negative ads reduce voter turnout. They extensively analyzed several California races and then 34 other campaigns around the country, and found strong correlations between negative ads and lower turnout. "In short," they said, "exposure to campaign attacks makes voters disenchanted with the business of politics as usual," and the result is that the class of nonvoters is on the increase.

A strategy for winning has come to this: making one's opponent the focus of the campaign and defining that opponent negatively. That is what Ryan did to Poshard, first with the spinning gun ad in the summer and then with additional messages both on television and in print. These messages painted Poshard as

Illinois Issues December 1998 / 3

extreme — extremely dangerous — on issues that people care about, such as guns and the environment. Ryan also ran ads in Spanish-language newspapers in Chicago, using the tag line, "Poshard is not the Democrat you think he is," Northwestern's Medill News Service reported. Ryan used quotes from prominent Latino Democrats who criticized Poshard, but these ads did not reveal that the quotes were from the primary election season, when the Latinos supported John Schmidt over Poshard.

Poshard never recovered from the initial image that he, like the gangsters on television, is a scary man. Paul Kleppner, a longtime political observer at Northern Illinois University, said he had gathered anecdotal information before the election that some Democratic voters in the liberal Lake Shore wards planned not to vote in the governor's race because they formed impressions from ads in the primary and general elections that Poshard was too conservative on issues such as guns, gay rights and abortion. An early analysis of numbers shows that Kleppner was right. In the lakefront wards where Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun whipped Republican Peter Fitzgerald by 32, 000 votes in the U.S. Senate race, Poshard trailed Ryan by 6, 600 votes, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Much ado was made just after the election that voter turnout was "higher than expected.'? But a closer analysis shows that the Election Day glee can be attributed simply to pundit predictions about low turnout. In fact, the statewide turnout was less than 55 percent, according to Ron Michaelson, executive director of the State Board of Elections. The 1998 turnout is about the same as the last two gubernatorial elections: 53 percent in 1994 and 57 percent in 1990, both sharply lower than the 65 percent turnout in 1986. So this could hardly be considered a high turnout.

A major problem with nasty, unfair, untruthful political messages is that they can leave voters confused and uninformed about where the candidates actually stand. Kleppner explains studies show that voters who feel cognitively "cross-pressured" often do not resolve the conflict caused by the messages, and they drop out of the process, shrinking the size of the electorate. Candidates run distorted ads to create cognitive conflict, especially among voters who are undecided but might be leaning toward one candidate or another. Voters with a strong disposition in favor of one candidate are likely to dismiss the negative messages, Kleppner says. The ICPR's Canary agrees with Kleppner's assessment that the purpose of attacks is to get people "to become so disenchanted that they stay home."

The Democratic Party of Illinois paid for a controversial four-page flier with this eye-catching cover and sent it to many homes in Republican state Rep. Gwenn Klingler's Springfield district on behalf of her Democratic challenger. Klinglev was upset because the flier did not explain her concerns about the unconstitutional provisions of one of the hills, and because she opposes "partial-birth" abortions unless there is a serious threat to the mother's health. Some Democrats were angry that their party paid for this mailer because Klingler is pro-choice, their party's plat form is pro-choice, but the flier had a anti-abortion tone to it.

But not everyone believes the cause- and-effect is that clear. Fred Yang, who works for the Garin-Hart-Yang research group in Washington, D.C., and did polling for U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin two years ago, is not as certain that candidates and consultants deliberately attempt to reduce voter turnout by running negative ads. Nonetheless, Yang concedes, two facts are clear:

Voter turnout is low, and there are a lot of negative television commercials. He says consultants advise candidates to go negative because it is easier to get the attention of undecided voters, the "persuadables," with negative messages than with positive ones. The electorate is increasingly turned off to politics, and political campaigns are less important to people than hamburgers or deodorant, Yang says. So the purpose of negative ads is to get potential voters' attention and persuade them, if they vote at all, to vote against somebody. But "it's hard to get their attention," he says.

So whether candidates and consultants deliberately set out to depress voter turnout, or use hard-hitting messages just to get voters' attention, the effect is the same: Voter turnout suffers, and voters are getting more cynical. Overall, negative campaigns

4 / December 1998 Illinois Issues

reduce voters' confidence in our democratic form of government. A democracy with citizens as nonparticipants is troubling. "Exposure to negative advertising increases voters' cynicism about the electoral process and their ability to exert meaningful political influence," Ansolabehere wrote in a 1995 book, Going Negative: How Attack Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate.

The most troubling question of all is whether candidates could ever be persuaded to stop distorting opponents' positions and engage instead in a more serious, civil and detailed debate about policy and character issues affecting voters' lives, not just their fears. As long as they're convinced that going negative is part of the formula for winning, it seems unlikely they will change.

But two responses from an outraged public might help. One would be a more comprehensive statewide Ad Watch effort. A media outlet or other organization could analyze ads not only for accuracy, but also for fairness in tone, images, sound and color. Some of this happens now, but mainly by the largest newspapers and in a spotty fashion. In an Ad Watch, the "tone" issue is vital, because the context and the tone can send a powerful, distorted message even if the facts presented are difficult to dispute. A new book from the University of Illinois Press, Video Rhetorics, points out that in commercials, the pictures and sound are more powerful than the spoken word. So viewers will remember the image of a spinning gun and burned-out van far longer than they will recall the narration in the ads. My second recommendation would be for the state to arrange the publishing of a series of official voters' guides and send a regional version to every voter's home. That guide would give statewide and legislative candidates one page to provide basic facts about themselves, their backgrounds, their qualifications and their positions. Voters might learn to rely on this guide as a place to get straightforward information and reduce the confusion they feel after being barraged by all of the other political messages.

While negative campaigns clearly cause confusion and outrage among the electorate, some additional observations about the nature of political communication are important:

• The first is that negative campaigning is not a recent phenomenon. Former Gov. James Thompson told the Civic Federation in Chicago earlier this year that American politics have always been "raw, cruel and personal." Indeed, they have. Several recent books have documented gross mudslinging in the earliest days of American history, and even into European history and the time of Cicero.

• A second observation is that direct-mail printed fliers are also a requisite part of the media mix in Illinois campaigns, especially in targeted legislative races. In southern Illinois, for example. Democrat Don Strom of Carbondale ran an aggressive campaign against first-term state Rep. Mike Bost. But a flier on Bost's behalf blared:

"BEWARE! The Chicago Political Machine is moving south to influence your vote." The flier, with a picture of the Chicago skyline on the cover, opined that Strom would be controlled in Springfield by House Speaker Michael Madigan of Chicago. Downstate, such anti-Chicago messages often play well. And negative printed pieces flood the mailboxes and porches of voters in the final weeks of every campaign in a carefully orchestrated fashion.

• The third is that in an era when media-dominated campaigns have for the most part replaced party-dominated efforts — Peter Fitzgerald's successful campaign for the Senate being the most striking example this year — personal contact remains effective in turning out voters. Studies document that the best way to get voters to the polls in spite of negative commercial messages is for candidates or their campaigns to have personal contact with potential voters. So the "higher than expected" turnout this year in some places can be attributed to grass-roots efforts among African Americans in Chicago and other get-out-the-vote efforts.

• The fourth is that any rational analysis of political messages must not condemn everything that is commonly called "negative" in campaigns. Labeling everything as "negative" — which the media and voters tend to do — ignores important distinctions between factual differences of opinion and unfair distortions or lies. William G. Mayer makes a compelling argument defending some forms of negative campaigning in the fall 1996 issue of Political Science Quarterly. He says any candidate who argues for major changes in government policies must show that current policies are not working. "Negative campaigning provides voters with a lot of valuable information that they definitely need to have when deciding how to cast their ballots," he writes. "The need for such proposals becomes clear only when a candidate puts them in the context of present problems — only, that is to say, when a candidate 'goes negative.'" He then laments that most academic and popular writing "criticizes all negative campaigning, without any attempt to draw distinctions about its truth, relevance, or civility. ... If the problem really is with campaign ads that are misleading or irrelevant or nasty, why not just say so?"

OK, I'm saying so. Too much of what we saw and heard in the past few months was misleading, nasty or irrelevant. Evidence exists that the offensive political rhetoric confuses voters and does real damage to opponents' campaigns. In short, the ads work. Honorable candidates get trashed, forcing them to respond with additional smears. The ugly spiral heads downward, leaving many voters at home, leaving the electorate more cynical, and leaving many talented citizens wondering why they would ever want to get involved in such a disgusting process.

A word of thanks for helping gather campaign material for this column goes to our readers who sent information to me; to Jennifer Riddle, a graduate student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale: to students of Illinois Issues columnist Jim Ylisela at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University; to Protestants for the Common Good; and to the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.

Illinois Issues December 1998