FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 29, 2004

CONTACT:
Arthur Sanders, (515) 271-3172, arthur.sanders@drake.edu
Lisa Lacher, (515) 271-3119, lisa.lacher@drake.edu

DRAKE PROFESSOR EXAMINES PROS, CONS OF NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS

Here's a warning to both presidential candidates trying to woo voters in the battleground state of Iowa: If you're going to run negative ads, they had better fit effectively into the broader context of the campaign or they may do more harm than good, a Drake University professor suggests.

Arthur Sanders, chair of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Drake, is one of several experts who have contributed to "Lights, Camera, Campaign!" Edited by David Schultz, a professor in the Graduate School of Public Administration at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., the book explores the convergence of political negative advertising.

In the book, Sanders points out how two negative ads with seemingly ideal messages failed to be effective in recent unsuccessful campaigns against Gov. Tom Vilsack and Sen. Tom Harkin, and how a Vilsack negative ad worked perfectly.

Vilsack's opponent, Republican Doug Gross, ran a commercial portraying the governor hauling away bags of money, symbolizing Iowa's budget surplus. But the incumbent responded quickly and effectively with an ad in which he spoke directly into the camera about his efforts to deal with the state's problems.

"The contrast, of a hard-working governor willing to deal with problems in a serious way, and a challenger who simply made fun of the governor, caused the ad to backfire on Doug Gross," writes Sanders, who has written three books and served as an election analyst for news organizations across the country. "It reinforced an image that he was developing as someone who was not the right person to lead the state."

That image was fostered by a Vilsack ad reminding voters that Gross' law firm defended one of the state's largest hog-lot operators, Iowa Select, in a lawsuit against local residents. On camera, one of the locals, Rebecca Cole, accused Gross of being a mean-spirited man out for big business only. Writes Sanders, "It was, clearly, a battle of
good [the local community] versus bad [the big corporate hog producers], and Doug Gross was the representative of evil -- and the implication is that he liked doing it."

That contrasts starkly with an ad that backfired on Greg Ganske in his unsuccessful 2002 campaign to unseat Sen. Tom Harkin. The commercial, created by a national organization working for the GOP, featured an elderly woman saying she could no longer trust Harkin because he had voted for a tax that she said reduced her Social
Security benefits. "The ad is not really concerned with Social Security, the presumed policy focus of the discussion," Sanders writes. "Rather, it is about the senator and his trustworthiness or lack thereof. . . . This would seem to be an effective strategy."

There was only one problem: The woman was found to be an actress, not an "ordinary" Iowan like Rebecca Cole. "Instead of 'can we trust Harkin,' the message of the response to this ad became 'can we trust Ganske,' " Sanders writes.

"Iowans want to trust their candidates," Sanders says, "as do all Americans. That's why I contributed to this book: to help the public understand how and why ads are constructed as they are so they can get beyond the slick superficial messages to better evaluate the
actual claims being made in the ads."

For a copy of Sanders' chapter or to obtain information on how to get a review copy of the book, please contact Lisa Lacher at (515) 271-3119 or lisa.lacher@drake.edu.

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