Midterm Political Ads Draw Scrutiny for Being Too Dark
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Right 50%
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What happened
Political television advertisements airing during the current U.S. midterm election cycle have been the subject of media scrutiny over their dark tone. Slate devoted a podcast episode to whether midterm ads had always been as harsh as those now on air, noting that more money is being spent on ad buys than ever before. The Daily Wire published a historical account of a 4½-minute 1976 Gerald Ford campaign commercial, produced by Bailey Deardourff & Associates, that never aired after it unsettled the Secret Service, campaign manager James Baker, and a focus group; the spot showed Ford flinching at a firecracker during a University of Michigan rally and then waving from an open limousine in Dallas, with a narrator invoking “memories of recent years.” The Daily Wire also described an advertisement by Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that uses his opponent’s estranged mother.
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Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
Left-leaning coverage asks if midterm ads were always this bad and never answers that question, while right-leaning coverage answers with a Ford commercial that never ran and never returns to this cycle. Slate calls the current spots "unhinged" without naming a candidate, a race, or a commercial. The Daily Wire's only present-day ad is Vivek Ramaswamy using an opponent's estranged mother against her, after which the piece stays in 1976.
Left-leaning coverage leads with whether the ads make any difference. Right-leaning coverage leads with a campaign that killed its own commercial after a focus group found it "just frightening."
Did any campaign this cycle kill an ad the way Ford's did, or is the darkness all still on the air?
Bottom line
The midterm ads under scrutiny never appear in Slate, and appear in the Daily Wire only as a one-line Ramaswamy example.
The receipts — 3 facts one side's coverage lacks
- The Ford campaign killed a commercial that invoked Dallas and a firecracker scare.
- More money is being spent on ad buys than ever before.
- The Ford ad was designed to take viewers through the assassinations, wars, and Watergate of the prior 12 years.
The Left View
Slate framed the current spots as exceptionally extreme, titling the episode “Were Midterm Ads Always This Bad?” and describing them as ranging “from the unhinged to the undeniably ugly.” It told listeners that turning on a television “just about anywhere in America” would mean seeing “some of the most unhinged political ads of your life.” Given the record spending on ad buys, the episode, featuring Fast Politics host Molly Jong-Fast, asked whether such ads “make any difference.”
The Right View
The Daily Wire framed dark campaign ads as a longstanding feature of American politics, writing that voters today are “accustomed to political ads that seemingly have no boundaries.” It used the killed 1976 Ford commercial to show that a presidential campaign once produced a spot meant, in consultant Doug Bailey’s words, “to create a five-minute spot that emotionally rang all of those bells of the last 12 years” of assassinations, wars, and Watergate and to “shake them in a way that caused them to rethink how they were going to vote.” The article reported that Baker thought the approach “nutty, absolutely screwy” and that pollster Bob Teeter said a focus group found it “just too emotional … just frightening,” and it called Ramaswamy’s mother-focused spot an “incendiary commercial.”
Our Take (balanced)
Slate’s strongest argument is that this cycle’s advertising is exceptional in tone—the episode’s own labels are “unhinged” and “undeniably ugly”—and that record ad spending makes it fair to ask whether the spots work at all. The Daily Wire’s strongest argument is documentary: a presidential campaign once buried its own dark ad after insiders and a focus group found it too frightening, evidence that such tactics are old and are now more openly aired. The central unresolved tension is whether current midterm ads are a qualitative break from past practice or the same dark playbook, no longer killed internally.
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