The Anatomy Of A Negative Campaign

The famous Nixon - Kennedy debate of 1960 marked a turning point in American politics, the onset of the new media age, something deplored by commentators as making the nature of the campaign much more shallow.

Far gone are now the memories of campaigns like the famous Thomas Dewey challenge of President Harry S. Truman where it was hard, if not impossible to find a single reference to their opponent by either the New York Governor or the incumbent President, or the worthy adversary elections of Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson and General Dwight David Eisenhower.

By Citizen Correspondent Wyatt McIntyre

Date Posted: 07/02/08

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Our election fights were never easy ones…We hadn’t held our seat in 20 years, and for just over a decade it was occupied by what could only be considered a safe incumbent with considerable strength throughout. Only once was she even close to being unseated during the course of her tenure, and even then the veritable strength of the challenger subsided to weak campaigns that only built on her strength.

The previous election we had mounted perhaps the best campaign we could, but with a young challenger, a relative unknown, the breakthrough we were hoping for was incredibly hard, if not impossible. With the electoral history, the demographical profiles and the polling numbers offering a hard, cold reality, the odds were stacked against us.

By the end there was little left to do but prepare the post mortem, and focus ourselves on the next fight.

About a year after the election, sitting around a board table we were preparing our strategy for the next time out when someone put the idea on the table. We need to go after our incumbent’s record, we need to find the controversial points and essentially put it in the worst possible light we could, we needed to paint her as being far distant from the mainstream of voters if we ever hoped to have any chance of beating her. Another person piped in, they would have no part in negative campaigning nor could the condone attack ads, it just didn’t seem right. It’s not an attack ad, it’s a truth ad, would be the defense, and anyways, for the past however man elections we have watched as they condemned us for using smear tactics that never came and proceeded to attack us using whatever they could to do it, if we are going to take the hit perhaps it should be for something we actually did do, not necessarily what it is perceived that we might do.

Ultimately it was decided against taking that road but amidst that it’s easy to see where people find it a simple thing to justify specific tactics and specific methods in order to win.

Without a doubt, politics in the last 50 years have changed.