Negative Political Ads: Voters Despise Them, but Campaigns Keep Using Them

Campaign season has arrived with its usual barrage of attack ads, and this cycle is no exception.

Polls consistently show voters say they dislike negative advertising, yet campaigns across the country keep pouring money into it.

Political scientists, strategists and marketing experts say the answer lies in a mix of high stakes, economic anxiety, simple human psychology, and now, artificial intelligence.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted after the 2024 election found that 74 percent of voters said the campaign was “too negative,” a figure that held steady from a nearly identical result in an October pre-election survey.

Travis Ridout, a political science professor at Washington State University and codirector of the Wesleyan Media Project—which tracks political advertising nationwide—said he was struck this cycle by how much of the earliest negativity came from intra-party primary fights.

“There were a lot of races where there was a lot of negativity,” Ridout told The Epoch Times. “This candidate is actually a closet liberal, or this one doesn’t support Donald Trump sufficiently. That sort of thing.”

That dynamic defined the Texas Senate primary, where Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee and Texas attorney general, defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn before facing Democrat James Talarico in the general election.

Since President Donald Trump reiterated his support for Paxton’s campaign in late August, more than $100 million in mostly negative ads targeting Talarico has poured in from GOP-aligned political committees, including the Senate Leadership Fund, which alone spent nearly $66 million in September. These funds have contributed to ads accusing Talarico of being a “radical liberal” and an “extremist.”

“The Texas Senate race is certainly standing out, just because the negativity started so early. … A lot of it is focused on DEI or those sorts of things, so the more cultural issues,” Ridout said.

Talarico, a state representative who has out-raised Paxton but said he received little outside help from national Democratic groups, said “dark money super PACs are flooding the airwaves with lies about me and my record,” at a rally at Baylor University in Waco.

Talarico has also aired ads labeling Paxton “the most corrupt politician in Texas,” highlighting Paxton’s 2023 impeachment by the Texas House. Paxton was later acquitted by the state Senate.

The pattern extends beyond Texas.

In Georgia and North Carolina, the Senate Leadership Fund has aired ads attacking Democratic candidates, including Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, over transgender rights, reviving a line of attack from 2024.

The California governor’s race has produced a new kind of attack ad. Republican Steve Hilton’s campaign has aired AI-generated videos portraying Democrat Xavier Becerra as a puppet and associating him with what the campaign calls the “Democratic machine.”

Meanwhile, Becerra’s campaign has relied mainly on public statements to frame Hilton as Trump’s “lapdog” and accuse Hilton of welcoming immigration enforcement “mercenaries” into California.

In Ohio, a series of political spots connects Republican state Sen. Jon Husted to a bribery scandal and the passage of House Bill 6, the controversial 2019 statute that authorized a $1 billion bailout for two nuclear power plants. State investigative records and federal court filings indicate that Husted has never been indicted, criminally charged, or formally accused of wrongdoing by law enforcement.

A parallel ad campaign in Maine by the Democratic super PAC WinSenate launched a $3.4 million advertising blitz focusing on “pay-to-play” allegations against Republican Sen. Susan Collins and a former defense contractor. Collins has issued explicit denials regarding any such schemes, and an FBI spokesperson told reporters that the agency’s initial inquiry yielded no evidence implicating Collins or her campaign.

Why Campaigns Go Negative

Jay Revell, an adjunct instructor in Florida State University’s Master’s in Applied American Politics and Policy program and owner of the public relations firm Revell Media, shared with The Epoch Times that the stakes explain much of the surge.

“The higher the stakes, the more likely you are to see a lot of negative attacks,” he said.

With control of Congress on the line, he said that dynamic is playing out from the top of the ballot to local races.

Ridout pointed to psychology.

“There’s good psychology in support of a negativity bias, so people might be paying more attention when something’s negative,” he said.

“Part of it, especially, is to define one’s opponent, to draw a contrast. You’ve got to create that contrast, and one way to do that is through campaign negativity.”

Revell said this cycle is also shaped by economic pressure.

Rising prices, including at the gas pump, have widened the gap between voters who are struggling and those who are not, he said, giving challengers an opening to blame incumbents directly.

“There’s just so much fodder out there in the world, based in truth and reality about the scenarios that people are facing, that you’re seeing a lot more negative attacks pointing the blame at people versus just broad negative attacks about who they are,” he said.

He said ads that draw a clear line between a policy and a voter’s daily experience tend to resonate more than ones that simply declare a candidate a “bad person.”

“There needs to be a one-to-one relationship with the truth for a message to be effective,” Revell said.

“People need to hear that message and feel like, yes, that connects. That feels like it’s based in reality.”

Does Negativity Work?

The research on negative ads is mixed, Ridout said. “The best answer political scientists have right now is they work sometimes,” he said.

“On average, they probably work as well as positive ads, but it depends on the context and the stage of the campaign.”

Timing matters too, he said.

Negative ads can help define an opponent early, before voters form lasting impressions, but the tactic carries risk.

“There’s a risk of a backlash,” he said. “People won’t like that negativity, and they’ll take it out against the sponsor.”

Speaking with The Epoch Times from Plano, Texas, Sheila Rondeau, a marketing strategist and CEO of MOGXP, said perception can matter more than substance.

“The prettier the person, the prettier the messaging; it seems to do better,” she said.

“It seems very superficial, but it is just like artwork. It is just like labels. People pick the pretty bottle, the pretty label on the bottle of wine they choose.”

Rondeau pointed to Paxton’s primary as a case where negative advertising didn’t decide the outcome.

He absorbed heavy attacks and still won by a wide margin over an opponent who outspent him roughly ninefold, she said.

AI Enters the Ad Wars

Ridout said this cycle also marks a leap in AI-generated content. “We’ve tracked about 170 different ads this season that have used AI,” he said.

“That’s undoubtedly an undercount.”

Some are deepfakes showing a candidate saying or doing something that never happened, he said. Others are subtler, implying a candidate’s presence by showing only the back of a person’s head or a pant leg, or using AI to generate backdrops like a county fair or a bait shop.

“Other times they’re just using AI more as a tool for video editing,” he said.

That uncertainty is exactly what worries Mark Grebner, a Michigan-based political consultant who has run campaigns since 1973 and been elected 25 times as a county commissioner.

He said most negative advertising this cycle, including ads targeting Michigan congressional candidates Abdul El-Sayed and Will Lawrence, has become so generic that he suspects some of it is not written by people at all.

“It would not surprise me if this dreadful level, this soup of negativism, comes out of an AI generator,” he told The Epoch Times. “It has all the feeling of third-rate thinking, not quite right, stock character.”

Interchangeable Attacks

“I kind of think that we’ve gotten to the point that it’s just like the weather or something,” Grebner said. “You can complain about it, and you can pay attention if you want, but it’s just endless and unavoidable. So I think that the average person isn’t really affected anymore.”

He said the messaging is nearly indistinguishable from race to race.

“It’s all the same thing. It doesn’t really have anything particularly to do with the candidates. It’s just the word “dangerous,” “socialist,” “frightening,” and “un-American,” he said.

“Negative campaigning, in order to work, has to actually tell you something new about a person that you can kind of apply to them.”

By contrast, he said the most effective negative ad he ever ran, decades ago, worked because it was specific. He mailed an opponent’s own attack, that Grebner wasn’t a 22-year-old student anymore—like his opponent—to the older, non-student voters in his district, quietly reminding them he was, in fact, an adult homeowner.

“That was devastating to his campaign,” he said, adding that a version of the mailer was later reprinted in Harper’s magazine.

Grebner cited informal estimates suggesting it can take roughly a million ad exposures to shift a single vote. “I can believe that,” he said. “I think that’s the experiment we’re doing.”

AdImpact projected total political ad spending for 2025-2026 at $11.6 billion, the most of any election cycle on record.

AdImpact data show a sharp partisan divide in political advertising during the first half of October. Republicans devoted 80 percent of their ad spending to negative ads and the remaining 20 percent to contrast ads, with none classified as positive. Their messaging focused heavily on taxes and transgender healthcare.

Democratic advertising was more often framed as contrast. Roughly 58 percent of spending went to contrast ads, 23 percent to negative ads and 19 percent to positive ads. The October figures come amid a record-setting cycle.

Voters Keep Watching Anyway

Ridout, Revell, Rondeau, and Grebner all pointed, in different ways, to the same disconnect. What voters claim to want and how they behave rarely match.

Rondeau compared it to rubbernecking at a traffic accident.

“People say they hate them. But they listen to them, and they repeat them,” she said. “It is almost like the people who are in the cars who get so angry because there is a traffic jam, but they can’t stop turning to look at the ambulance.”

Revell said the anonymity of many campaign donors compounds public unease.

“When you put shadows in place where the money can hide, and you don’t know who’s sending out messages and you don’t know who’s paying for it, it just adds to that anxiety,” he said.

Rondeau said the cycle is unlikely to break as long as it keeps working.

“As long as people listen and share, and it gets picked up by the media, they will continue to go negative,” she said.

“When we stop listening to it, and it stops working, then we will have debates about true content and character.”