Our Mission

We, The Republican Watchdogs, seek to encourage increased participation in the ongoing political conversation. In order to facilitate this we hope to promote HONEST communication between the Republican candidates and the public. We feel that fact checking statements and advertisements by the candidates is paramount to an honest American political system. As such, we promise to uncover dishonest communication before it taints the public.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Negative Campaigns: The Only Game in Town?

Tonight we're going to take a departure from our normal format, which is us analyzing an ad and finding the issues with it. While this is a tried and true method, and will definitely be resumed in the future, today we're going to talk about the reasons candidates run negative campaign ads with, often, incorrect or partially incorrect facts.

Usually you'll find that a candidate runs positive advertisements until they feel as though they are threatened in the polls, at which point the campaign begins to get quite nasty. Is this always the best tactic? The Watchdogs think not, however candidates do it time and time again. Why?

I think the reason is that most of the voting public is just not motivated enough to call the candidates out on their lies and half truths. We think this is simply unacceptable. Please tell us what you think in the comments, we'd love to hear why you think negative ads are used so extensively.

Are negative ads used to such a great extent because they're effective? Do these ads really have no negative impact on our views of the candidates? Is it truly impossible to run a completely positive campaign at a national level?

We'd love to hear from you on this! This Sunday we'll have a regular post, but on Monday we'll have a special post to discuss the issues we introduced today, as well as addresss your commentary on negative ads.

See you then!

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