Do Attack Ads Work?

A new project that instantly rates political campaign ads answers that question—and more.

The only voice you hear is Mitt Romney’s — singing, earnestly but not tunefully, “America the Beautiful.” The Republican nominee’s rendition plays as the Obama campaign flashes up charges about Romney’s outsourcing of jobs, Swiss bank accounts, and Caymans corporations against backdrops of shuttered factories and empty conference rooms. It is, in short, a powerful political ad.

This isn’t a matter of opinion. Thanks to a new Vanderbilt University/YouGov Ad Rating Project, we now have access to real-time assessments of the effectiveness of political ads — a project that arrives just as America is about to experience the most expensive presidential campaign ever. Expensive, and tough: “I think it’s very likely to be the most negative race since the advent of television,” John Geer, professor of political science at Vanderbilt and director of the university’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, told NPR this week.

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