The other day, a Siena Poll revealed that a lot of New Yorkers don’t much like Governor Kathy Hochul – though they just elected her last month. Now 43 percent of those polled have an unfavorable view of her; that’s the highest unfavorability rating she has ever encountered. I’d say it suggests that the negative campaign against her this fall worked: In the parlance of politics, it raised her negatives.
Really, the attack ads that so successfully tore down Hochul’s once-shiny reputation are just par for the course in politics these days. And it’s bipartisan. Running for office has become less about explaining a candidate’s stances than trashing an opponent’s character. And that’s one of the reasons why Americans have so little faith in government these days: We’ve been told in campaigns, year after year, that you can’t trust anybody in politics.
Actually, America has quite a history of political invective. Consider 1800, when two of the august founders of our republic, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, squared off for the presidency. Jefferson’s partisans claimed that Adams, the incumbent, was (in one supporter’s account) a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Talk about raising your opponent’s negatives! But Adams’ advocates, not to be outdone, claimed that if Jefferson was elected – this is literally what was written – “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest, will openly be taught and practiced.”
Jefferson won, but 19th century history does not record any upswing in the advocacy of adultery and incest in America. Maybe that experience set the stage for today’s harsh political climate – which does seem, well, meaner than it was a generation back.
It’s an unfortunate fact that the “attack ads” that permeate campaigns these days usually do their job. Research at the intersection of psychology and political science points to the so-called “negativity bias” of the human brain. As the psychologist Rick Hanson has noted, “The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.” That is, negative information tends to be “stickier” for most folks.
Media coverage also encourages negativity, since attacks draw more attention. And attack ads energize a candidate’s base – you know, you feel good if your candidate is whacking the other side, so it ties supporters more closely to the side of their candidate.
There was a time, though, when politicians checked their attacks, because they believed that voters were turned off by negativity — that people wanted leaders of character, the sort of folks who would rise above nastiness. That has fallen out of favor – maybe in part owing to the observable success of Donald Trump, the most boundary-breaking candidate in American history.
Campaigns haven’t always been so nasty, but they’ve long been tough. As a young man, I worked in politics before turning to a career in journalism, and I’ve never forgotten what a veteran political consultant told me was an axiom of politics. “You don’t powder puff an incumbent out of office,” he said – implying that it was one of those lessons that was engraved on the stone tablets of politics.
Here's what’s so troubling: The success of negativity in politics, and the way our brains absorb and keep that negativity, seems sure to further cement the polarization that makes progress in government so difficult. It builds a sense on both sides of the political divide that those other people aren’t trustworthy or deserving of compromise. It is bad for our democracy.
If there’s any comfort to draw from this reality, it may be in remembering 1800. That history shows that our political dialogue has sometimes before been dark and venomous, and our system survived those days. You know, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson famously reconciled after their bitter divide, and they remained the best of friends, and died within hours of each other on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Of course, they were both dedicated to preserving American democracy — which isn’t the priority of some politicians nowadays, sadly.
If that seems too negative a view as we’re talking about how negativity harms our political discourse, well, I can only suggest that it is frankly true. And it is only by depending upon truth that we will be able to find a path forward through the attacks that seem to put our political system at risk.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack."
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.