Although largely forgotten now, 2012 was a defining moment in testing the theory of whether spending large sums of money for a barrage of negative ads in swing states would make a difference come Election Day. Karl Rove, once considered a political genius, raked in over $100 million for his super PAC, Crossroads GPS. Along with tens of millions of dollars from the Republican National Committee and the Mitt Romney campaign, Rove was certain of President Barack Obama’s defeat. 

A right-wing “carpet bomb” of negative ads came and went, yet Romney lost in a near landslide. Rove had a meltdown about it on live television. Afterward, Rove essentially disappeared, and the dominant theory that political ads could turn things around was dead. This was all but confirmed in a 2017 scientific review of 49 field experiments that showed political ads in a general election had a net effect of “zero”

However, a new study out of Yale, Columbia, and George Washington Universities and released in May shows that there is a way for political ads to be extremely effective … as long as they focus on the right thing.

To be blunt, we—meaning Democrats—are doing it all wrong.

Watch any political ad from a campaign, party, or political action committee and you will notice the same thing: The ad is focused on winning the immediate upcoming election. The ad will either tout the positive aspects of a preferred candidate, or more likely, will smear the opponent of the preferred candidate. Yet this new study shows these fleeting attack ads are exactly the sort that are ineffective in the long run. A paradigm shift needs to happen so that campaigns will focus on a strategy that the study found to work: converting mildly interested voters into engaged partisans.

In other words, for political advertisements to truly be effective, the focal point must pivot away from cycle-driven selling of any given candidate and toward selling party ideals throughout the year. This approach is proven to spark concern—actionable concern—from the moderately partial voter. Moving someone from the mildly ‘leaning’ partisan category into the ‘full’ partisan category means not only having less of a heavy lift come election time, but possibly opened doors for engaged activism.

There is limited time for a political ad to make its pitch, so it makes sense to focus on targeting those who have a proclivity toward your side already; it’s proven that political ads are ineffective in trying to convince partisans to vote for the other side.

The Yale, et. al. study notes how deeply partisan we have become.

And this kind of behavior isn’t on the wane: The last election featured the lowest levels of ticket-splitting in decades. In our polarized age, partisanship—and party loyalists—rule.

Rather than focus on the players of an upcoming election, the study indicates that nonpartisans would be more inclined to pick a side if ads take the long-range view of what their side will do for them. The effect is rather small, but it exists, and it can make a significant difference. Roughly 18% of voters are unaffiliated, which is not an insignificant number to either major party. Also consider that there are almost 10 million voters under 30 who identify as independent of any party. Running ads to push party ideals, rather than any given current candidate, will pay dividends long after the election is over.

Let’s look at the last election. Millions of dollars were spent by Donald Trump’s campaign on ads such as this one. Watch this attack ad and ask yourself: Does this ad target undecided voters?

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I feel comfortable stating that this ad didn’t change one mind. However, I’m certain the people who put it together convinced themselves it would be effective, because it probably felt good for them to watch it. That is why the ad, and others like it, was greenlit.

Yet consider an independent voter with a right-leaning proclivity who wonders why they should vote for Trump: What in the world does this ad do for them? It’s stupid, crass, and hardly serves its allegation that Joe Biden is a creepy old man since anyone paying attention could make the same argument about Trump.

To be fair, if Biden ran an ad attacking Trump’s cognitive abilities, it wouldn’t have been effective either. People leaning toward Trump discounted this line of attack just as people leaning toward Biden did. So while this ad making fun of Trump and his cognitive test was hilarious, I’m sure it didn’t score many points among undecided voters.

Political media needs to take a page from corporate brands, who play the game for the long haul. They may promote individual products from time to time, but they spend most of their advertising budget on getting you to identify with their brand. Sometimes they don’t even mention the service or product, but just want you to associate the brand with a feeling, like childhood nostalgia or happiness.

In 2020, over $8 billion was spent on political advertisements either hyping or trashing candidates. The Yale study concluded that there is a better way.

The researchers identified four theories to explain partisan identification: economics, specific issue (abortion, immigration, etc.), charismatic leadership, and social identity. Two firms were hired to make videos for each of the theories identified. Researchers contacted 18,000 people to measure their initial party allegiance, and again two weeks later, after they’d been exposed to different ads based on the four theories. Participants were asked about their party allegiance one last time, a year later. There was also a control group that wasn’t exposed to any of the ads.

Here is one of the ads for the economics theory.

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And one for the issues theory.

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Here is a charismatic leader ad.

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And here is one of the ads for the social identity theory.

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The important thing to notice here is that there is no mention of any candidates, or even elections. The commercials are all about selling the values of the Democratic Party. The researchers discovered that one ad had little to no effect, but multiple ads did. Some of the subjects. exposed to three or more ads, even indicated that they planned on switching their votes for an upcoming election.

The study also showed that over time, the effect of the ads faded. Just like with any product, you must promote your brand consistently. This approach would be a fundamental change from the way most political media firms operate. Usually, they make candidate-centric ads during election years, and flood the market a few months or weeks before an election before vanishing until the next election. However, if we can promote our party consistently, we could convert independents or mild partisans to identify as Democrats. This means candidates wouldn’t need to waste millions of dollars on a slurry of useless ads come election time.

After looking at the study, I took a hard look at what both parties did over the past year. I noticed what was effective was in line with the study’s findings about promoting ideology over candidates. On the Republican side, almost all of their advertising was negative and I couldn’t find any ads that focused on what the Republican Party believed in. Considering the GOP didn’t even have a platform in 2020, that’s not surprising.

However, I did see an approach that I know firsthand was extremely effective, especially in South Florida. It actually wasn’t an ad, but a speech at the GOP convention, although clips of the speech were put in mini-ads that targeted immigrant communities here in Florida. Among the ridiculously loud and racist rants that defined the 2020 Republican National Convention, there was one that conservatives kept sending to me, “demanding” I listen to it in order to better understand why they identified as a Republican. The speech was from Florida gas company magnate Maximo Alvarez.

Trump supporters in Miami, Florida

Although he definitely supported Trump, Alvarez spoke almost exclusively about his family’s personal escape from the authoritarian regimes of Spain, and later, Cuba. He ginned up fear in the Nicaraguan, Venezuelan, and Cuban communities by asserting that the Democratic Party goals of free education and health care were really a ploy to introduce communism to the U.S., and turn it into an authoritarian regime similar to the very ones they had escaped.

To be clear, I’m not praising the speech: I can’t find the words to describe how hypocritical and disingenuous Alvarez was. Alvarez has very close ties to Nicolas Maduro and his communist apparatus in Venezuela. His 80-odd CITGO stations directly fund Maduro’s murderous regime; Alvarez never supports boycotts against the Venezuelan government.

Unsurprisingly, the only reason Alvarez is even in the U.S. at all is due to the efforts of the Democratic Congress and JFK’s Cuban Refugee Act of 1961, which was opposed by most Republicans at the time.

Yet Alvarez’s pitch was very effective because it focused on the Republican mantra against socialism. It also disingenuously tied Fidel Castro’s communist government to Democratic candidates by using a false comparison to progressivism.

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The irony of Alvarez praising Trump on immigration even as he was still separating families from their children (and running racist ads in white communities insinuating brown immigrants are criminals and cop killers) didn’t matter: The speech was a hit.

Although I only have anecdotal evidence of Alvarez’ speech having an impact in South Florida, and the Democrats did themselves no favors by banning door-to-door campaigning under COVID-19, Republican Latino turnout in Miami-Dade crushed Democratic Latino turnout, 57% to 48%. That gap didn’t exist in 2016, nor did it exist in Broward or Orange counties—only in Miami, where the largest Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Cuban communities are located.

On Team Blue/Never Trump, we had many organizations making good ads. The Lincoln Project, MeidasTouch, and ElevenFilms were infamous for promoting hard-hitting, slick, and creative ads. One of my favorites was this one from MeidasTouch.

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It’s clever, but again, the impact is short-lived. Donald Trump will not be on the ballot in 2022—and perhaps not even in 2024. Yet an ad that targets an idea, like infrastructure, as opposed to a candidate can be more effective in the long run.  

I couldn’t find any ads that promote Democratic ideals, outside of the ones created for this study. However, I did find an effective issues-based campaign that targets people in red states. Here, Biden’s White House appeals directly to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s constituents in Kentucky on infrastructure.

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BarbiAnn Maynard is a local activist who speaks with a thick Bluegrass State drawl as she takes the viewer around her beloved Martin County.

The first 30 seconds would make a great ad; Maynard calmly points out the infrastructure needs of her county while lambasting the politicians in her state who refuse to invest in their communities. She demonstrates how she and her neighbors have to use bottled water for everything, thanks to criminal neglect by Massey Energy and its CEO, Don Blankenship, who released millions of gallons of sludge—full of arsenic and heavy metals—into their water supply. She points out that the county’s water treatment plant hasn’t been updated since the 1950s, and that it’s been over two decades since Martin County residents could use their running water. Furthermore, Martin County’s roads and bridges are collapsing because there has been no enforcement of the road weight limit on roads running over ground that’s been hollowed out by mining. It’s horrifying.

Maynard never once mentions McConnell by name, but she doesn’t have to. She also doesn’t mention Biden or the Democrats trying to fix these problems, but again, she doesn’t have to. The underlying message is that one party is interested in using government resources to help people like her, while the party in power in Kentucky isn’t.

I’m not trying to say that our current approach for political ads doesn’t work at all. The ads do have an effect, to an extent, and we shouldn’t get rid of them. Yet if I was in control of an advertising budget, I wouldn’t spend it solely on negative ads dropped right before an election. I would divert at least part of that money to invest in promoting our party and our ideals to specific communities on television, radio and digital, all year long.

It’s time to think differently. The payoff could be huge, and we can’t afford to lose.