“Nobody will ever say they like negative advertising. No focus group has ever responded to saying they like the negative ad, but it’s naïve to say they don’t play a role in how voters form impressions of political leaders and parties,” Summa Strategies consultant Robin MacLachlan told The Hill Times last week.
“First of all, it only works if it’s based on at least either existing truth or a perception of some truth, so if there is an existing impression people have about an individual political leader or a party and the ad furthers that, then it can be successful. I don’t think there is any way we’re seeing the end of negative or contrasting ads. I think, if anything, we will see more and more of them,” Mr. MacLachlan said.
Playbook Communications’ Erik Waddell agreed.
“I think negative ads have been a staple of campaigning for a long time in Canada, and I don’t think they’re going anywhere. I think they’ve proven to be effective and we certainly haven’t seen the end of them,” Mr. Waddell said. “If the question is, ‘Do I think there will be a decline in the use of negative ads?’ No, I don’t think that at all. Just look at the B.C. election that just happened. [Premier Christy] Clark went fairly negative on the NDP, while [NDP leader Adrian] Dix told voters he wanted to try and stay above the fray by not going negative. We saw how that election turned out. The thing is, Canadians don’t really want above the fray from their politicians. All you have to do is tune into an NHL playoff game going on right now, and you’ll see Canadians love a good fight.”
Mr. MacLachlan agreed, saying that Mr. Dix suffered from his choice to run a positive campaign and that by the time he started highlighting Ms. Clark’s and the Liberals’ failures near the end of the campaign, it was too late.
“Christy Clark ran an incredibly nasty, negative, personal campaign of attacks against the NDP, misinformation, mischaracterization, and she was successfully able to change the ballot question from ‘change to economy,’ and ‘questioning leadership,’ and I think that was largely a result of their aggressive negative campaign and a lack of the necessary response from the Adrian Dix team,” Mr. MacLachlan said.
A little more than a month after Conservatives released an attack ad against Mr. Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) as being inexperienced and having no judgment to be Prime Minister, he has refused to return attack negatively. Instead, Mr. Trudeau’s response was to focus on himself.
“Canadians deserve better,” Mr. Trudeau said in an ad showing him half sitting on a desk in a classroom after turning off the television with the Conservatives’ “in over his head ad.”
“We can keep mistrusting and finding flaws in each other, or we can pull together and get to work. I worked hard to earn the confidence of folks in Papineau, I worked hard to be the choice of Liberals, and now I’m going to work hard to earn your trust. I’m proud to be a teacher. I’m a son but I’m also a father. Although I’m a leader, I’m here to serve. I’m Justin Trudeau and together we will build a better country.”
Insiders said last week that the Liberal brain trust surrounding Mr. Trudeau thought long and hard about how to respond to the Conservatives’ attempt to define him before he could do it himself, as they did to the previous two leaders—Liberal MP Stéphane Dion (Saint Laurent-Cartierville, Que.) and Michael Ignatieff—to great success. For example, when Mr. Ignatieff’s team put together the response ad to the Conservatives’ “He Didn’t Come Back For You,” playing on his three decades working outside of Canada before deciding to run for the Liberal leadership, it was nicknamed “Narnia” because Mr. Ignatieff was standing in a Narnia-looking forest speaking directly to the viewer as soft music played. At the time, critics said it tried too hard to be inspiring, but did not look authentic.
Today, for the Trudeau team, they wanted to emphasize the fact that he was a teacher and a father, in order to introduce him to voters who didn’t necessarily know what he did before getting into politics.
Environics’ Greg MacEachern, a Liberal pundit, said the most interesting thing about the ad was that the Liberals had the resources to put it together within a week to respond. Mr. MacEachern said that it’s still too early to tell if going the positive route was effective, but also said he believes there seems to be a mood within the Canadian population to go that way.
“I do have a trepidation just because of previous situations where attack ads were used against Dion and Ignatieff and the response in both cases was either no response, or a pretty tepid response. So in those cases it didn’t work,” he said. “While it may be different in the current climate is there does seem to be a fatigue around attack ads among Canadians and that so far, by staying positive, … if you look at the tracking in poll numbers, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals seem to be doing fairly well.”
The latest Ipsos-Reid poll shows the Liberals in first place with 35 per cent support and the Conservatives in second with 32 per cent support while the NDP have 25 per cent support. The poll was taken April 26-30 with 1,059 people.
“The Conservative attack ads against Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party appear to be having little impact—except perhaps to move some soft NDP votes into the arms of the Grits,” Ipsos-Reid said in a press release.
Mr. Waddell said, however, that current polling is a bad prediction of what could happen two years from now in a 2015 general election campaign, and that, in the long run, the Liberals will likely have a difficult time not going negative.
“I don’t know if it’s [the Liberal ad] been terribly effective. Again, there’s a lot of prognosticating about what current polling means and how those ads, from the Conservatives and the Liberals have affected polling, but the truth is the polling going on right now isn’t very meaningful by the time the next election comes around. At the end of the day, I think both Trudeau and [NDP Leader Thomas] Mulcair are untested as leaders during an election campaign and they’ve got a lot to prove when the next election comes around,” he said.
“I can’t predict the future, but I think that efforts to completely avoid negative ads are probably not going to work in the long run. I think we’ve seen enough examples in the Canadian context, both federally and provincially that negative advertising works, that it’s effective, and that it’s something that Canadians don’t reject even though they might say they do,” Mr. Waddell said.
Meanwhile, nine Conservative backbench MPs have refused to send out the party’s Ten Percenters—one sheet black and white flyers that MPs can send to 10 per cent of their constituents paid for by the House of Commons—featuring Mr. Trudeau as having no experience or judgment to be prime minister.
“I haven’t sent out an attack Ten Percenter for over four years,” Edmonton Centre, Alta., Conservative MP Laurie Hawn told The Canadian Press recently. “It’s just not my style.”
Additionally, Conservative MP Larry Miller (Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, Ont.) said that voters told him they didn’t like when the Liberals attacked Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) and didn’t like when the Conservatives did it back.
“I don’t participate in criticizing anybody else. I like to talk about me,” Mr. Miller told CP. “I don’t like negative advertising, I don’t use it, and that old saying—I control what I can control. I’ve voiced my opinion on it, I don’t like it.”
Other Conservative MPs who said they wouldn’t send the Ten Percenters include Kevin Sorenson (Crowfoot, Alta.), Mike Lake (Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont, Alta.), Joe Daniel (Don Valley East, Ont.), Brent Rathgeber (Edmonton-St. Albert, Alta.), Dan Albas (Okanagan-Coquihalla, B.C.), Mike Allen (Tobique-Mactaquac, N.B.) and Stephen Woodworth (Kitchener Centre, Ont.).
Mr. MacEachern said the fact that Conservative MPs are speaking out against negative ads shows there’s a mood among parties as well to move away from them.
Mr. MacLachlan noted, however, that it was a strategy for the Conservatives to get media attention and allow their MPs to stay out of the negativity.
“I believe there are backbench MPs that reject the nastiness of the Conservative campaign machine, but I don’t think headquarters are upset that their MPs are out there rejecting it,” he said. “We’ll have to see if it works.”
Mr. Waddell said time will tell on how both the Conservatives’ and the Liberals’ ads worked.
“We’re sort of mid-way through the majority Conservative mandate right now, and it’s hard to tell what is effective and what isn’t until we get closer to a time when people are actually going to have to vote,” he said.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: BEA VONGDOUANGCHANH
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