What really bugs me is that both sides are just attacking the other rather than talking about why they are the right choice. US elections are always about smear campaigns
From what I see most elections always are.
It’s not what I’m used to in the Netherlands. There are personal attacks sometimes, but mostly by guys who don’t have the best reputation in the first place.
This is most of my memory of Canadian elections too. I wish even mentioning other parties wasn’t allowed in campagin material, like how in some parts of government politicians can only refer to each other by title and not by name.
Ok, but then who informs the public about the other party actually doing something bad
Debates and actually adressing the problems.
You can’t say “Party X just wants your money”, try “Our party will help you keep your money”, or even “Unlike some parties today, we will put your taxes to good use”.
It’s a lot harder to make a compelling attack without a concrete focus. “Some parties are corrupt” is so trivially true that’s it embarassing, but “Party X is corrupt” is a rallying cry.
It won’t prevent lies by any means, but since specific claims can only be nade about your own party it gives an advantage to talking about your own party instead of every ad being incredibly negative claims one step off of a flame war. Hopefully that leads to building a strong case and then defending that case during debates, but at least the ads will have less direct negativity.
It would be more positive, but potentially less accurate. A party that does a lot of very specific and bad stuff but has some vaguely good policies to point towards would beat a neutral party, even if they shouldn’t.
Maybe if you only see the political ads of a single party. It would still be better because you would know of even a single stance of one party.
Last election, I can’t remember a single actual stance taken by any party based on political ads. They were all attack ads. Without discussion you couldn’t separate the resonable accusations from the trash anyway.
Basing your politocal opinions purely on ads is a terrible stance anyway, and the party best at fearmongering will win there. There aren’t any restrictions on ads that can fix people forming opinions only on ads anyway, we’d need to encourage public political debates and discourse instead.
There was a time, a few decades ago, when there was a real demand to get away from the negativity of most campaigns. Everyone says they wanted it, polls clearly showed it, etc.
But then there was another study which analyzed the effectiveness of campaigns (i.e. if they won) vs how negative they went.
Negativity was clearly proven to be the winning tactic.
I remember the first election I was old enough to vote in (the 2004 election) paying close attention to all the political ads I saw and, at least for that election, only the Republican ads were focused on “other guy bad, so vote me.” The opposing side’s ads were entirely focused on their own platform and never even mentioned the other side.
