A Neglected Democratic Exercise

Unlike American presidential elections, midterm elections are covered very little by the national media. When they are, it is usually to present them as being a referendum on the president, or to highlight only the tightest races in the House of Representatives, and especially the Senate. The reason for this lack of interest is very simple: Because of the very high number of races (all 435 seats in the House and one-third of the seats in the Senate are in play this year, on top of 36 governorships), there are very simply too many issues, people and particularities to cover. It is therefore difficult for the national media to find an interesting narrative framework for their readers and listeners.

Further, the re-election rate for representatives and senators is very high: 90 percent of incumbent candidates are generally re-elected. This means that midterm elections promise little suspense and few surprises, which arise especially during the primaries; the unexpected defeat of Eric Cantor in Virginia was a sizable one this year. It is equally necessary to underline that the candidates’ electoral campaigns during midterm elections are often independent of political parties and national leaders: Representatives, notably, often vote according to the desires of their constituents, since no formal party discipline exists. Thus, unless there is a candidate known at the national level or believed to have the chance to play an important role in Congress, the national media is little interested in legislative elections, except to speculate on the number of seats lost by the president’s party. It is necessary to say that the voters themselves participate little in these elections, which is one of the factors explaining the media’s lack of interest.

This does not mean that there is no media coverage of the midterm elections, but simply that it occurs at the local level rather than at the national level. Newspapers are particularly important in this regard, since they disseminate the candidates’ press releases and speak of their community activities. It is not, therefore, surprising that incumbent candidates are often re-elected: The candidates who are perceived as being active in their communities have a much bigger chance of being elected, even by people who are not of the same political party. But if many differences exist between the media coverage of presidential elections and midterm elections, they have a central element in common: the recourse to electoral advertising, especially negative.

Double-Edged Sword

If negative televised electoral advertising has existed already for around 60 years, candidates have used it more and more intensively for the last three decades in order to place the credibility of their opponent in doubt. Although it is traditionally associated with presidential elections, negative advertising is also frequently used during midterm and municipal elections.

This was incidentally the case in the autumn of 2013, when Joe Lhota, the Republican candidate for mayor in New York, decided to take recourse to negative advertising in order to discredit his Democratic adversary, Bill de Blasio. During midterm elections, electoral advertising (positive and negative) has a greater importance than during presidential elections; the media coverage of this type of election is less substantial and even absent at times. Because of this lack, electoral advertising occupies a more substantial place in American media outlets and, thus, possesses a greater influence during midterm elections. Despite the fact that it is analogous to that used during presidential elections, the negative advertising broadcasted during midterm elections has evolved in a specific electoral context, marked by these elections’ lack of visibility in the American media.

The real impact of negative advertising is nevertheless difficult to discern, because it is possible to observe as many positive as negative effects on candidates and the American political system in its entirety. Thus, as a function of the time of its diffusion and of the virulence of the attacks that it contains, negative advertising can contribute just as much to the lowering as to the raising of the rate of participation.

As a function of the context and the manner in which it is used, negative advertising can also turn out to be damaging to the candidates who employ it, a double-edged sword nicknamed “the boomerang effect”: After the 20th broadcast, a negative advertisement can go against the candidate who broadcasts it, even if it is generally more informative than positive advertising.

There is no choice but to accept that negative advertising plays a role of first importance for candidates, as much in presidential elections as in midterm elections, since everyone admits that it works. Unfortunately, the line between advertising that aims to discredit the positions of an adversary and the broadcasting of untruthful or fallacious ideas is thin, a line too often is crossed by candidates and that contributes — without a doubt — to the disaffection of citizens with regard to midterm elections.