Do political ads on TV actually work?

Key Takeaways

these politicians Washington special I Dr trucks I've been a paper boy I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm an estimated $2 billion or more will be spent on political ads for the 2014 midterms and with the surge of outside money Unleashed by the Supreme Court in 2010 we can only expect to see more of these ads going forward so you might wonder do these ads even work TV spot ads for political campaigns date back to 1952 Washington it didn't take long for TV ads to go negative a trend that's worsening still an Infamous 1964 ad from Lynden Johnson's campaign suggested his opponent would start a nuclear war these are the stakes Johnson soon won in a landslide but it wasn't because of the ad he was even further ahead before it aired these ads can be so vivid and memorable that it's easy to overstate their influence but studies on whether or not they matter are surprisingly murky think about how small the target is and ads work if they persuade those few Americans who vote but lack political allegiances and also live in a state or a district where the election might be a close call so it's a hard topic to research the available studies find limited effects of ads in a few cases but by one estimate having a massive ad Advantage delivered only a half of a percentage Point advantage in vote share in the 2008 presidential election as had an even smaller effect in 2004 in one real world experiment during the early months of Rick Perry's 2006 governor of reelection campaign researchers randomly assigned this ad to certain media markets in Texas I'm proud of Texas how about you they conducted a poll afterwards and found stronger support for Perry in the areas that saw the ad but only during the week it aired by the following week the effects had disappeared they only examined positive ads though might negative ads work better found in a strip club toasted the Chinese vice president Obamacare the most comprehensive reviews so far concluded that negative ads are more memorable but hurt the attacker as often as they help it's not necessarily so irrational though that candidates spend so much money on ads even if there's no guarantee that ads can swing a race there's only a few ways a campaign can get its message in front of Voters if the race is close even half a percentage Point might make a difference