“What’s at risk in 2024 are our freedoms and our democracy,” warned President Joe Biden at a campaign event last month.
But if this is truly a battle to defend the republic, why are Democrats mostly deploying a single, flawed, conventional weapon that may not even work anymore?
The weapon is the old grandfather clock of political persuasion: the 30-second television ad. First used for election purposes in 1952, TV spots quickly became the dominant tool for campaigns to talk with American voters. That made good sense when our population was glued to a television set several hours a day and couldn’t fast-forward past commercials. Data from as recently as the mid-2000s—when TV viewing peaked at an astounding eight hours per day per American household and ad-skipping tech like TiVo was in its infancy—indicate that ads affected both election turnout and candidate choices.
Television ads still dominate campaign budgets. U.S. spending on political advertising is projected to rise at least 30 percent in 2024 to as much as $16 billion, and television will suck up most of it.
But a great deal has changed in America since the 1950s.
TV viewing is in free fall. Finding the target audience for marketing has become a needle-in-haystack sifting exercise through streaming services, social media platforms, gaming platforms, and even messaging apps. And among those still lingering on ad-supported TV, two-thirds skip the ads.
Beyond TV, the entire advertising industry is in a quiet crisis: people now detest all forms of ads. And, in today’s hyper-negative political climate, substantial swaths of voters go the extra mile to avoid even the whiff of overt political messages. The late Democratic campaign guru Hal Malchow summed up the situation: “People hate ads, people pay money not to see ads. Advertising is a weak way to communicate with anyone, and political advertising is worse.”
This is why a growing number of recent studies have called into serious question whether campaign advertising across multiple forms of media—but especially TV—still has any effect on voter behavior. One from political scientists at Yale, University of California San Diego, and UCLA found that “regardless of content, context, or audience…pricey commercials do little to persuade voters” and that the effect of ads was “a statistically insignificant 0.007 of a percentage point.” Another by Seth J. Hill, James Lo, Lynn Vavreck, and John Zaller showed that any minuscule effect from ads evaporated within days. And perhaps the most comprehensive review, a meta-analysis of 40 separate field experiments by Joshua Kalla and David Brockman, found that “the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.”
Real-world evidence is also piling up. In 2016, Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump on TV by a crushing 3-1 ratio in the late stages, to no avail. In 2020, on the way to a razor-thin Biden victory, Democrats outspent Republicans almost 2-1 on TV and again nearly 3-1 in the presidential campaign, but during those ad blitzes, they barely changed the margins either in national polling or in swing states. Michigan—with a 4-1 Biden advantage, including a period where the Trump campaign aired no ads at all yet rose 1.6 percent in the polls—is a prime example, but the same basic story happened everywhere. In the top six states with the most campaign spots, the Biden side aired 202,878 more ads than team Trump post-Labor Day, with no clear correlation in state polls.
Democrats also need to consider their particular challenge in 2024. Biden is neck-and-neck with Trump largely because voters simply don’t remember, misremember, or never heard some of the most salient things about the presumptive Republican nominee and his presidency, like his Covid blunders, autocratic plans, or felony indictments. Trump’s competitiveness is built on voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics and are willfully trying to tune out new information—not exactly prime candidates for more advertising.
So how can Democrats remind these voters about how they once felt or convey new information that tends to change minds? How do you communicate with an electorate that hates ads and avoids politics?
The answer is don’t do more political ads. Take some of your money and do something else.
Democrats are actually sitting on a gold mine of the most talented storytellers on Earth. Snark aside about “liberal Hollywood,” what percentage of the creative talent there is friendly to Democrats? And what might they do with a tiny fraction of the money the party is planning to spend on ads?
After all, Christopher Nolan, the director, spent $100 million to make a story about physics and government boards, turning Oppenheimer into the world’s biggest movie hit. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a feminist parable wrapped in a story about dolls, made $1.4 billion. Jordan Peele has redefined what you can do on a shoestring budget in horror (indeed, what other genre for the Trump story) while talking about race.
So, what if Democrats took a portion of the billions of dollars that, collectively, all their campaigns and outside groups are expected to spend, turned it over to the best creative talent on Earth, and asked them to deliver entertaining content that conveyed the political information that they need voters to see?
What about a series of short films that dramatize some Trump-era horrors, like what BMW did with actor Clive Owen a decade ago, wrapping branding inside a spy thriller? What about a YouTube series of Mr. Beast-style stunts (if you don’t know, ask your kids) that focused on political ideas like voter registration or highlighted Trump’s criminality? What about a streamer show that mixed dramatization and documentary? What about reality television, game shows, or any number of ideas that actual entertainment experts might concoct? (And no, the Biden campaign’s tepid experiments with getting TikTok influencers to say nice things don’t qualify as breakthrough thinking, especially since Trump’s account grew to sixfold the size of Biden’s one day after its launch).
Academic research has long shown that ostensibly non-political or lightly political entertainment can affect viewer positions. Researchers Todd Adkins and Jeremiah Castle found that movies durably changed political attitudes across voters of different parties and information levels. Another study from UCLA’s Matthew Baum showed that “soft news” focused on personalities and human interest can break through to inattentive voters.
Even single films move attitudes. Stanford University academics showed that watching the conspiracy-oriented movie JFK affected viewers’ willingness to vote. All the President’s Men shifted perceptions of the media, according to a study by William Elliot and William Schenck-Hamlin. Political scientists Kenneth Mulligan and Philip Habel showed that watching The Cider House Rules changed views on abortion.
By no means should Biden and the Democrats jettison traditional ads entirely—far from it. For one thing, some ads do appear to work still—though researchers can’t predict which—and paid advertising seems to have added value in smaller races at the Congressional or state level. No one can predict how voters would react if only one side were doing traditional ads. No one’s ever tried that. Given the stakes, running that experiment this year would be madness.
But so is just doing the same old things in the face of so much evidence of diminishing value and American democracy on the line.
It’s not too late to supplement them. Rather than plunking even more down into the already oversaturated airwaves for Presidential ads in the few actual swing states, diversify the communications portfolio by diverting a few hundred million into more creative storytelling approaches. Facing America’s greatest challenge in generations, Democrats must deploy their greatest untapped resource.
