Warning: This is not a blog for those of you who are already sick to death of election talk ...
The other night I went to the 30th anniversary
party of Urban Stonehenge. It’s a
peeling pink house atop Potrero Hill, right at the intersection of 26th
and Wisconsin. In 1982, a group of
anarchists, many of them veterans of the campaign to shut down the nuclear
weapons production facility in Rocky Flats, Colorado, moved in there, and it’s
remained a collective house ever since.
There are more or less four bedrooms upstairs and a basement which was
once a church (the baptismal font is still recognizable), is now a den, and in
between housed hordes of traveling activists, punks, squatters, slackers and
such like. I lived there for a year
around 1985-86, in a room that had no windows.
If it hadn’t been across from the kitchen, I would never have known when
it was time to get up. A few years
later, my friend Sheila moved into that room and put in a window, a skylight
and a loft, rendering it quite charming.
The people who live there now have much better cooking and
cleaning habits than the household I was part of, which might be why someone
who moved out last year had lived there for seventeen years.
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Maximum Rock n Roll reporting on
the DemCon protests in 1984 (I was there) |
One of those Rocky Flats veterans and founding collective
members, now a lawyer, was at the reunion wearing a t-shirt that said, “I’m
Organizing for America.”
I knew I
recognized the slogan but couldn’t quite place it.
When I asked him, he said, “Well, it has to
do with the Obama campaign.”
I was
pretty surprised, because let’s just say that when I last saw him, the Democratic
Party wasn’t on his Christmas card list.
We didn’t get too deep into why he was doing it (though I did ask kind
of incredulously, “Do you
believe in Obama?”), but we did talk about
what he is doing – organizing phone banks in Berkeley and Albany to call up
voters in Nevada and New Mexico.
He said
one thing I found very interesting.
“There are no undecided voters,” he said. “It’s all about getting out the vote.”
He overstated it a bit, but the
general point is correct:
there are many fewer undecideds than in
previous elections and
despite what they claim,
the campaigns are not really trying to appeal to them. Instead they are trying
to motivate their bases to come out and volunteer.
My acquaintance went on to say that the most effective way
to get an iffy voter to the polls is a face-to-face meeting with a
volunteer. The second most effective way
is a phone call from a volunteer.
“Television ads have virtually no impact,” he said.
I wondered if that was true. It certainly flies in the face of the
now-commonplace assessment that whoever raises the most money is most likely to
win an election. Big bucks are important
for big ad buys, not for recruiting droves of volunteers to go door-to-door. I decided to look into it.
Question 1:
Is major media advertising ineffective in getting out the vote?
The effectiveness of in-person get-out-the-vote efforts
(GOTV) is
undisputed,
but the question of the how and whether mass media advertising, positive,
negative, partisan or non-partisan, effects turnout is hotly contested.
Looking at evidence from the 2008 elections, Matthew
Holleque and Sarah Niebler of the University of Wisconsin political science
department
conclude:
Laboratory experiments, like the ones conducted by
Ansolebehere, Iyengar, and their colleagues (1994; 1997), find that exposure to
negative advertising decreases the probability that people will turnout to
vote. Negative campaigning, they argue,
turns people off from politics and angers citizens about the tone of politics.
This demobilizing effect translates into as much as five percentage point drop
in voter turnout, disenfranchising approximately six million potential voters.
Ansolebehere and Iyengar (1997) conclude, “In election after election, citizens
have registered their disgust with the negativity of contemporary political
campaigns by tuning out and staying home.”
Contrary to these findings, subsequent observational studies
show no evidence that political advertising—even negative advertising—depresses
voter turnout. Numerous studies posit that campaign advertising actually
stimulates voter turnout, although these effects are sometimes conditional. For
example, Freedman, Franz, and Goldstein (2004) find that exposure to
advertising can raise the probability of turning out by as much as 10
percentage points.
Hillygus (2005) finds that all campaign effects (including
television advertising) raises an individual’s probability of voting by at
least 10 percent. However, despite these findings, the jury is still out
on the question of whether campaign advertising affects voter turnout at all.
Many studies find that campaigning advertising has no effect
on voter turnout…. While it is safe to say that campaign advertising is
probably not causing millions of people to stay home on Election Day, it
remains debatable whether or not campaign ads actually mobilizes citizens to
head to the polls.
Question 2:
With such questionable return, why are all these super-PACs so hot to
spend millions of undisclosed dollars on TV ads?
Here are a few theories scantily clad in facts to back
them up, but not for lack of looking:
- They may not accept or even know of the hypothesis that
there are not many voters to convince.
When the electorate is less polarized, advertising is potentially more
effective. At least one study of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections claims to find that eliminating advertising would have cost Bush 22 electoral
votes in 2000, giving Gore the election.
(I say “claims to find” because not being a geek, I can’t begin to
understand whether their methodology is sound.
I just skip from theAbstract to the Conclusion.)
- Consultants tell them they advertising is
effective. “Television and Politics –
Nothing Makes a Bigger Impact,” is the headline of a 2009 article in the online
magazine ElectWomen . The article is largely a rehashing of the
political advice of a guy named Doug Heyl, who is, not surprisingly, “a
political media adviser who develops campaign media strategies, develops and
creates commercials and directs the purchase of television and radio airtime.
R. Michael Alvarez wrote in a 2011
article in Psychology Today:
… do voters pay attention? Does this barrage of political ads
influence the outcome of an election?
Candidates and political consultants think the answer to both
questions is yes. For example, candidates running for office in big states like
California pump amazing amounts of money into their television advertising
budgets. … Recently we had a contested city council election in my home city of
Pasadena, and in that race our incumbent city councilmember produced and aired
a television ad in his re-election bid, and this was an election in which about
4,000 votes were cast.
But many political scientists have questioned the extent to
which television advertising --- indeed, pretty much any type of campaigning
--- changes voter perceptions and election outcomes.
- Ads are more important in races where the candidates
are less well known. Says Ezra Klein,
If in the final days of the presidential campaign some hedge
fund billionaire begins a multimillion-dollar assault on Obama, some Hollywood
billionaire will probably help the president out. Either way, the ads would
have a limited effect. By the end of the presidential campaign, most voters
will have made up their minds. They’re not waiting for one more black-and-white
clip narrated by another grim voice to push them over the edge.
In contrast, even at the end of the campaign, many potential
voters will know very little about their congressional candidates. They will be
susceptible to ads telling them terrible things. Some of those candidates won’t
have the resources to fight back.
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| Didn't see this on MSNBC |
There’s even some speculation of a “
reverse coattail effect,” that if people get revved up to vote against down-ticket candidates of
a particular party, it will subtly affect the presidential race.
Everyone who has tried to find such an effect
has failed, but as we know “fact-based politics” is not that fashionable in some circles.
- They hope to discourage voting by demoralizing the
people who favor the other guy. Though
polls keep finding that negative campaign ads don’t depress voter turnout,
people who want to thwart democracy are nothing if not persistent.
- They keep the base energized and worried about the
people who might be planning to vote for the other guy.
- They make the candidates believe they are beholden to
the people who paid for the advertising.
Question 3:
If it’s all about getting out the vote, why are the Democrats (and the
Obama campaign in particular) so unworried about the people who came out for
them in droves in 2008 and are clearly not enthused about them now?
People keep saying that African Americans,
labor, Latinos and progressives have “nowhere to go,” but the fact is that
nowhere is a place, and those folks are very likely to go there. Especially since for many of them – the
Latinos and African Americans in particular – it’s getting harder and harder to
vote, something the Democrats seem fairly laconic about challenging. My acquaintance at the party claimed that
wasn’t true, that the Demos have filed suits in every state where there are
photo ID laws and discriminatory restrictions on absentee and early
voting. If that’s so, they sure are
being quiet about it. I keep hearing
that the reason 11% of eligible voters don’t have photo ID (!) is partly that
they can’t get to wherever they need to go to get it. So you would think that MoveOn and David
Axelrod and all those other annoying people I get emails from would be sending
out pleas for volunteers to go drive people to the DMV. Maybe there are sending them to someone, but
none have seeped through my spam filter.
Question 4:
Why is racism so pernicious?
As NYT columnist Bob Herbert
said the other day,
the semi-secret Republican subtext in this campaign is race race race.
Whether it’s “jokes” about “I was born here,”
or comments about the “food stamp president” or calling Obama a Marxist who
wants radical redistribution of wealth (would that it were true), it all adds
up to the same thing, and it’s all they need to say to trigger the deep fear of
middle-class white older (and not so much older) voters.
Now the people who study these things claim that “race” as
a concept has only existed in human history for a scant six hundred years or
so, that “whiteness” never existed before the importation of slaves from Africa
to this continent.
In the middle of the 20th century, a new generation of
historians began to take another look at the beginnings of the American
experience. … Their research revealed that our 19th and 20th century ideas and
beliefs about races did not in fact exist in the 17th century. Race originated
as a folk idea and ideology about human differences; it was a social invention,
not a product of science. Historians have documented when, and to a great
extent, how race as an ideology came into our culture and our consciousness.
Dr. Audrey Smedley, Virginia Commonwealth University
Professor Emerita,
Understanding Race
The role played by America is particularly important in
generating and perpetuating the concept of "race." The human
inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere largely derive from three very separate
regions of the world—Northeast Asia, Northwest Europe, and Western Africa—and
none of them has been in the New World long enough to have been shaped by their
experiences in the manner of those long-term residents in the various separate
regions of the Old World.
It was the American experience of those three separate
population components facing one another on a daily basis under conditions of
manifest and enforced inequality that created the concept in the first place
and endowed it with the assumption that those perceived "races" had
very different sets of capabilities. Those thoughts are very influential and
have become enshrined in laws and regulations. This is why I can conclude that,
while the word "race" has no coherent biological meaning, its
continued grip on the public mind is in fact a manifestation of the power of
the historical continuity of the American social structure, which is assumed by
all to be essentially "correct."
According to Theodore Allen, the knowledge, ideologies,
norms, and practices of whiteness and the accompanying "white race"
were invented in the U.S. as part of a system of racial oppression designed to
solve a particular problem in colonial Virginia. Prior to that time, although
Europeans recognized differences in the color of human skin, they did not
categorize themselves as white. I will provide more detail later. For now, the
important element of his theory is that whiteness serves to preserve the
position of a ruling white elite who benefit economically from the labor of
other white people and people of color.
So why does such a relatively recent, artificial concept have such enormous staying power, not only in this country, where it was (ostensibly) born, but in many places around the world?
More on that some other time, unless one of you can supply me with the answer.
