Political Ads Are Getting Nastier (Thanks To Dark Money)

Do you think it's just your imagination that campaigns seem to be getting nastier these days? Well, you would be wrong. Although their have always been a certain amount of negative political ads in American elections, there are more of them now than in the past.

That's what the Wesleyan Media Project found when they did a survey of political ads. They surveyed all the political ads (for governor, U.S. House, and U.S. Senate) in the same time frame in 2010, 2012, and 2014. They found a significantly higher number of negative ads in 2014 for all three kinds of races, and in the senate races the negative ads actually made up a majority of all the political ads.

Why are their more negative ads this year? A major reason is the influx of "dark money" into our campaigns. Ever since the Supreme Court's Citizen United decision, corporations and rich donors have been donating to super-PACS. These super-PACs don't have to report who their donors are and there's no limit to the amount of money they can spend (as long as they don't openly coordinate their ad spending with a candidate's campaign). Since this is "dark money" (secret donations) that doesn't have to be reported to the FEC, these organizations can get as nasty with their ads as they want -- and there will be no repercussions, since the public cannot know who is paying for the nasty ads.

This is having some bad effects on American campaigns. It is allowing corporations and the rich to secretly buy the candidates of their choice, and it is lowering the tone of our campaigns -- and it is turning our representative democracy into a plutocracy (rule by the wealthy class).

Here is how Texas progressive Jim Hightower describes it on his own blog:

When five Supreme Court justices decreed that corporations are entitled to full free speech rights in our elections and that corporate money is a form of speech that cannot be restricted, they produced a nightmare tsunami of corporate cash that is now drowning our People's democratic rights. After all, if money is speech, then speech is no longer free – it's for sale.

This year, we're seeing what the Court's absurd edict is costing us. First, the corporate purchase of political speech has in fact reached tsunamic force in the current Congressional races. Spending on TV ads will likely top $2 billion, 70 percent higher than four years ago, when the Court issued its Citizens United money ruling.

Second, the bulk of this speech is not being bought by candidates or parties, but by secretive outside front groups that hide the corporate interests funding the ads. In Senate races alone, these shadow groups have already run some 150,000 TV spots. The Koch brothers' main front group, Americans for Prosperity, is by far the biggest buyer of speech, having laid out $44 million on Congressional races in just the first six months of this election year. 

Third, and most pernicious, the court-created "right" of moneyed front groups to flood the airwaves has handed them the power to dictate any campaign's message. The ads of those secret fronts now define the issues and even the candidates themselves before the race really gets going. Worse, because the outside groups are anonymous, their "speech" consists almost entirely of the nastiest, most vituperative attacks on candidates they oppose, turning our election-year discourse into toxic slimefests that turn off voters and shrivel turnout.

To help stop the corporate purchase of the People's political speech rights, connect with www.MoveToAmend.org.