Goldstein expects to watch more than 7,000 political ads this election cycle. A self-described political junkie, he is also director of UW-Madison 's Wisconsin Advertising Project, which is tracking political advertising in the country 's top 100 television markets for the 2008 presidential campaign...
"We've looked at scores of campaigns using six different data sets," Goldstein said. "We surveyed the election data, sliced it, diced it, did every possible geeky thing you could imagine and simply could not find any negative effects of negative advertising..."
Negative ads are more likely to be about policy issues, he said. They 're also more likely to be factually correct, perhaps because they can expect to face greater public and media scrutiny.
"People certainly like to complain about them, but the evidence also shows they learn from them," Goldstein said. "Everyone thinks negative ads are these mudslinging personal things. They are sometimes, but most of the time negative ads are about policy issues and so they're verifiable claims..."
"The notion that all of us out here are so stupid, and the really clever, negative advertisers are tricking us into doing something we didn 't want to do is elitist phooey, " Goldstein said.
Consider our last four presidential elections. If voters had simply looked at the biographies of the major-party candidates, they would have chosen George H. W. Bush in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Instead, they rejected four veterans who served in wartime (and who also had considerable experience in public life) for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who had lesser résumés, both civilian and military.
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