She’s “mentally impaired.” He’s “unhinged.” She “has bigger cognitive problems” than President Joe Biden. He’s “increasingly unstable.”
Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris are ramping up their attacks on each other as the American presidential campaign enters its final weeks.
The personal barbs are sharper and the television ads are more combative, the tone of American politics transformed into pro wrestling.
Except in this case the tussling is not phony, though some of the attack lines are.
Despite the disrepute that has greeted modern negative campaigning, trash talk has not been relegated to the ash bin of history.
“The negative ads are seemingly endless,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., in the heart of the Lehigh Valley political battleground that is critical to winning the state’s highly contested 19 electoral votes. “You can’t escape them even on sporting events, on streaming services and around songs on YouTube. The daily exposure of an enormous amount of negative content does not elevate the mood, the spirit or the campaign.”
Attack rhetoric has been a part of the Trump personal portfolio since long before he entered politics, though he has refined his invective since joining the 2016 presidential race. His nicknames for Republican rivals (“Lyin’ Ted” Cruz for the Texas senator, “Little Marco” Rubio for the Florida senator) were supplanted in the general election by his jabs at “Crooked Hillary” Clinton. Earlier in the current election cycle, he said that Mr. Biden “should have to take a cognitive test,” though as part of this campaign riff Mr. Trump then bungled the name of the physician who, he said, had administered one to him.
Now, just as the former president is intensifying his attacks on Ms. Harris, the Vice-President is heeding the advice of campaign strategists who believe that she has been too timid in her criticism of her rival.
She’s turning up the heat on Mr. Trump and has asked her staff to sharpen the tone of her rallies by showing clips of him fulminating against “radical left lunatics” and saying of his critics that ”those people are more dangerous, the enemy from within, than Russia and China.”
Wednesday night she waded into the hostile territory of right-leaning Fox News to bring the fight directly to her opponent, arguing, “I think the American people have a concern about Donald Trump – which is why the people that know him best, including leaders of our national-security community, have all spoken out, even people who worked for him in the Oval Office, worked with him in the Situation Room, and have said he is unfit and dangerous.”
The two candidates are battling over controversial public issues such as abortion rights and immigration, but the use of negative campaigning is itself controversial.
As long ago as 1995, the political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere, now at Harvard, and Shanto Iyengar, now at Stanford, argued in their book Going Negative that negative campaigning is effective, but harmful to civic society. A separate study conducted 11 years later by David Niven, now a politics professor at the University of Cincinnati, found that negative advertisements spur voter turnout. But a survey released this week by the non-partisan academic group Bright Line Watch found that experts consider efforts to promote voter turnout to be more effective than accusing the other candidate of being a threat to democracy.
“Negative campaigning debases politics and politicians,” Donald Savoie, who holds the Canada Research Chair in public administration at New Brunswick’s Université de Moncton, said in an interview. “You don’t see medical doctors debasing their peers in the medical profession the way political figures denigrate their peers. ‘War rooms’ that produce negative advertisements and promote negative campaigning are not a good invention.”
And yet, while the candidates are tossing out positive elements in their search for voters – forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, expansion of the child tax credit, US$25,000 in down-payment support for first-time homeowners, tax-free overtime pay, tax-free Social Security benefits and tax-free tips – the emphasis in the closing days of the campaign is increasingly on the evils of their competitors.
The assault is especially heavy in Pennsylvania, known since colonial days as the Keystone State and regarded widely this year as the key to the presidential election. There, according to the respected AdImpact survey, US$137-million in presidential advertisement reservations have been entered. Much of it so far has been negative.
There is little evidence of the effectiveness of attacks against Ms. Harris. But it’s clear that repeated negative attacks against Mr. Trump, beginning with 2016 Republican competitors who sought to portray him as rash and unfit for the presidency, have fallen flat.
Likewise, efforts to cast his remarks as inappropriate, in bad taste or simply wrong have never gained traction. Those initiatives and his various legal challenges have actually boosted him in the estimation of his supporters and, in some cases, among the broader American voting public.
But despite the fact that negative attacks can backfire, people continue to want to mount such campaigns, said Éric Blais, president of Toronto-based Headspace Marketing and a commentator on political marketing. And that doesn’t just apply to American elections. “If what we are seeing so far in the U.S. is deemed effective, why would we expect anything more civilized in Canada?”