Republicans have a lot to worry about right now: gas prices, the war with Iran and especially the unpopularity of their party’s president. But Donald Trump has been causing even more fear in the GOP for a different reason: whether he’ll spend his massive campaign fund to help Republican candidates in the upcoming elections. Trump’s super PAC, which had accumulated $450 million, is only now beginning to use that money, with $57 million heading to key House and Senate races.
But is this too little, too late? Should Trump and his allies have been spending much earlier? The answer, actually, is probably not.
Any effects of ads on voters tend to wear off, and sometimes quite quickly.
The idea that campaigns should spend early is a common one. The theory is that early spending lets candidates “introduce themselves” and build support or “define” their opponent and establish a negative image that the rival will never be able to shake.
That conventional wisdom surfaced in the 2012 presidential election, for example. In the spring and summer of that year, after Mitt Romney clinched the Republican nomination, Barack Obama’s campaign and its affiliated super PAC ran a spate of ads criticizing Romney’s work for Bain Capital. The spots claimed that Bain had bought and then shuttered businesses, outsourcing jobs to other countries and hurting American workers.
But did those ads actually work? In our book on the 2012 election, political scientist Lynn Vavreck and I found little evidence that they did. Romney actually gained support in national polls during the weeks when the ads were running. And in YouGov polling, we found no change in exactly the perceptions that you might have expected the ads to affect, like whether voters thought Romney cared about the poor, the middle class or “people like me.” After Obama won, his leading strategist, David Axelrod, acknowledged this, saying that their polling had actually been “remarkably consistent really from last spring forward.”
The 2012 election was not an outlier. Studies of other campaigns have similar findings. The upshot is straightforward: later ads matter more than earlier ads. In part, this is because any effects of ads on voters tend to wear off and sometimes quite quickly.
A lot of campaigning is really like aspirin: It helps in the short run, but it’s no long-term cure.
For example, in one clever study conducted during Texas’ 2006 gubernatorial election, a team of political scientists worked with incumbent Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign to randomly assign television advertising to different media markets. They found that ads helped Perry the week they aired, but the effect disappeared the following week — a pattern they called “rapid decay.”
A 2014 study examined advertising in the 2000 presidential election and a range of 2006 gubernatorial, House and Senate campaigns and also found decay. Survey respondents were most influenced by the ads that aired the day they were surveyed. Ads that aired even a couple days before were less important. Ads that aired the week prior or earlier did not matter at all. My co-authors and I followed up by studying the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections and arrived at a similar conclusion. Our findings illustrated the very fitting title of that 2014 study: “How Quickly We Forget.”
Recently, there have been more comprehensive assessments of electoral campaigning. In a study I conducted with Vavreck and Christopher Warshaw, we examined the relationship between television advertising and election outcomes in all presidential, House, Senate and gubernatorial elections between 2000 and 2016, as well as some other downballot statewide elections.
In general, there was a positive relationship: the larger a candidate’s share of the ads aired in the race, the larger that candidate’s share of the vote. The effects were larger in House and Senate races than presidential races — a good reason for Trump’s super PAC to get off the sideline. But we could not find any evidence that ads aired before the traditional “start” of the campaign (roughly, Labor Day) mattered at all. The advertising in the fall was more consequential.
Our findings matched another assessment of a different campaign tactic: door-to-door electioneering that was attempting to persuade voters with in-person conversations. The authors of that study also found that early attempts at persuading voters were effective, but, once again, the effects decayed quickly. Unlike with television advertising, however, later attempts at face-to-face persuasion were not effective — perhaps because so few voters were even persuadable by that point.
This latter finding illustrates a conundrum that all candidates face. Campaign too early, and the effects disappear before Election Day. Campaign too late, and it might be ineffective. Political science studies cannot conclusively resolve this conundrum or establish the “right” time to campaign. The answer may depend on the campaigning tactic — television advertising, canvassing, etc. — and on each race’s unique features.
The weight of the evidence, though, suggests that Trump’s super PAC did not make a mistake by waiting until now to begin using its money. The mistake we sometimes make is to assume that campaign tactics are like nuclear radiation: They get in our bodies and stay there, with long-lasting effects. But a lot of campaigning is really like aspirin: It helps in the short run, but it’s no long-term cure.
For this reason, what happens between now and Election Day is the campaigning that’s most likely to matter.
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