Radio Free America: Every political ad sucks
Sorry that political ads are so terrible. If you want them to be better get your message out year round.
Welcome to Radio Free America, Aaron Kleinman’s newsletter on stories that matter in state politics but aren’t getting enough attention. Want this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? Sign up!
It’s football season, you know what that means. Time to kick your feet up, crack open a cold one and watch some political ads during an injury timeout.
And much as you know better than Nick Sirianni how to coach with a 10-point lead, you could make a better ad than that one above, right? That’s what Democratic communications consultant Dan Ancona implied when he complained that political ads were the worst in his five cycles of studying them. While polling has the party headed for a sizeable victory, could their purportedly terrible advertising strategy hold them back?
No. When political ads get tested, the results tend to show the ones that political obsessives think are boring move public opinion the most. That’s because swing voters don’t really pay attention to the news and didn’t know that, say, Rebecca Cooke is willing to work with Republicans if they have good ideas.
But Ancona said that testing from his group, Way to Win, shows that these ads don’t help. And as proof of why he’s right and his competitors are wrong, he sent me the report the group put out last year. And it’s worth grappling with because the report was popular among liberal activists and got a fawning writeup in The New Republic.
The report said that Democrats are too critical of their own party and movement and should embrace progressive communications strategies instead of tacking to the center. Its support for this assertion included, among other things, this poll question:
I would love it if that were the choice Americans were making every November. Also, I’m more likely to be the next pope than Democrats are to achieve this through 30-second advertisements.
Ancona wants to press ahead, though. He told me that “making a point about national issues and driving an underlying worldview, in alignment with making your campaign/principal more popular, is something Republicans are excellent at and Dems are still generally terrible at.” But I think this misunderstands what candidate ads are actually for.
Television ads are the most cost effective way to communicate with a large audience of voters. The point of the ad is to get voters to take a discrete action (voting for you, the candidate paying for them) in November. If the national issues and underlying worldview of your party are unpopular in your district, why should you have to force yourself into a corner trying to defend them? Why does Josh Turek or Mary Peltola have to spend the two months before the election talking about how loyal they are to the Democratic Party?
It also seems like Way to Win cares more about the words that ads use, not the substance of their arguments. The ad that it singled out in its report as being too conservative was making the case against tariffs! Considering swing states shifted toward Trump less than non-swing states, I don’t think this ad cost Democrats the election. If anything, Kamala Harris should’ve made an anti-tariff message more central to her campaign.
And while comms consultants love to argue over the words that people use to describe policies, the actual content of those policies matters to voters. Arguing that politicians should just be slicker at talking to voters instead of trying to address their concerns seems deeply cynical to me.
Instead, it should fall on groups like Way to Win to make it so those candidates have an easier time advocating for their preferred policies. Some, like late Democratic strategist Hal Malchow, thought year-round advertising was a good idea. But Way to Win’s own report indicates that there’s a better option.
They put in its executive summary that “conservatives have invested heavily in media and persuasion for decades, and recently have adapted much more aggressively to a fragmented media environment than Democrats and the left, resulting in durable and outsized advantages on all kinds of campaigns.” The solution to this isn’t to force Democrats running tough elections to bear hug the party; it’s having liberals invest in their own countervailing media institutions.
Instead of wishing politicians would buy ads that say what you want two months every two years, just say what you want for the other 22 months! If your case is as compelling as you say it is, then they won’t be able to ignore you. If you want swing state Democrats to be more loyal to the party, make the party more popular in swing states.
Because campaign ads are not where you start communicating with the public: They’re the end of it. Fixating on them is like going out to get the best kicker without worrying about whether your offense can move the ball downfield. Ads aren’t where you lay out your vision for the country; they’re where you make up for everything you didn’t do over the last 22 months. So yeah, they’re gonna suck.
AROUND AMERICA
- OK so not all ads suck. Seriously, a recent study showed that visuals get attention while audio is what actually persuades voters. So if you want ads to suck less, recruit more candidates with cute pets.
- The firm that performed that study, Tavern Research, also found that jingles are a persuasive form of audio. So they released a pro-James Talarico earworm.
- On behalf of all Giants fans, thank you for this ad, House Majority PAC. Even if it does still make me wince to relive it
- At my old job, I first came across Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Aaron Bernstine when he was making his five-year-old son smoke cigars while he made fun of people living with mental disabilities. As Republicans in Trumpy areas so often do, his political career survived that scandal. So now he’s free to hurl gay slurs at a colleague.
- Speaking of slurs being hurled, Greg Abbott was forced to withdraw his support of Texas state House candidate David Flores after he was caught using racial slurs while being arrested for a DUI.
- While reproductive rights aren’t as central to this midterm election as the last one, it sure seems like they could be decisive in the Georgia’s gubernatorial election, where the badly outspent Keisha Lance Bottoms is trying to point out that her opponent Rick Jackson is a real extremist on the issue.
- I’ve pointed out that New Hampshire Republicans have an antisemitism problem before, and their bigotry is popping up again. They’re using AI to manipulate photos of a Black state Senate candidate to reflect racist tropes.
INTERNET STUFF I LIKED THIS WEEK
Listen man, I’ve been there. I’ve had six domestic macrobrews at a professional football game before. And if someone came to me afterward asking about the coach, I too would be forced to invent a word like “unstmost.” And now, this man joins the pantheon of legendary Philly sports fans, though I don’t know if anyone will ever top Unlike Agholor Guy.
BOOK CLUB
Image courtesy of Vintage Publishing
Yesterday I asked Nobel expert Alex Shephard who he thought win the Literature prize this morning. He said that after going big the last few years with the ambitious Jon Fosse, Han Kang and Laszlo Krasznahorkai they’d go small this year. And it doesn’t get much smaller than giving the Nobel Prize to Canadian poet Anne Carson. I read “Autobiography of Red” and it’s charitably categorized as “grad student bullshit.” If it was going to go to a Canadian it should have been Margaret Atwood, it’s not her fault that her work became too popular or that she, like fellow Nobel snub Don DeLillo, was cursed by Apollo with the gift of prophecy. Read “The Handmaid’s Tale” (again if you must) out of spite toward the Swedish Academy.
HELP US OUT
For last week’s request, MLB TV’s own Mike Petriello told me that the Mups was the most memorable MLB postseason song. And welp, that’s the last I’ll be talking about this MLB postseason. Or Fall Out Boy, for that matter.
As for this week’s, are any of you an aesthetician? Or know the menswear guy? While the newsletter is great for reaching people who already care about politics, you need to do vertical videos for those who don’t. So there’s going to be a lot more of me talking to the camera. Anything about my presentation that I should be doing differently? Email me and let me know!
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