The Persistence of Negativity
By Jamelle Bouie - Oct 28th, 2008 at 10:05 amVia ThinkProgress comes the revelation that more than half of Kentucky Republicans–and almost a quarter of Kentucky Democrats–are unaware that Barack Obama is a Christian:
A poll of likely Kentucky voters finds that, “despite heavy national media attention about Obama’s faith, more than half of likely Republican voters — 54 percent — and one of every four Democrats in the state do not know that the Democratic presidential nominee is a Christian.” The poll indicated that “14 percent of likely Kentucky voters — 28 percent of Republicans, 4 percent of Democrats and 11 percent of independents — think Obama adheres to the Muslim faith.”
My hunch is that a fair number of Kentucky voters were “introduced” to Obama by way of Internet smears, chain emails, and negative campaigning on part of first the Hillary Clinton campaign, and then the John McCain campaign. If that’s the case, then according to a good deal of political psychology literature, it makes sense that many Kentucky voters are still unsure or ignorant of Obama’s religious affiliation.
That is, the literature suggests that one of the more insidious impacts of negative campaigning is that if a voter is introduced to candidate via negative campaigning, then not only will the negative lens color the voter’s perception of the candidate, but any new information regarding the candidate will be filtered through the original negative lens, even if the original information is debunked. Of course, it’s still the case that explicitly personal attacks tend to backfire on the attacker.
But still, this is a fairly a depressing finding, since it suggests that there is real benefit in going negative early and often.
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