The Breakdown: Do Negative Campaign Ads Sway Voters?

The Breakdown: Do Negative Campaign Ads Sway Voters?

The Breakdown: Do Negative Campaign Ads Sway Voters?

With attack ads battling it out on airwaves across the country, Chris Hayes asks Stanford professor Shanto Iyengar: do negative ads ever have positive effects?

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

With candidates’ campaign ads battling it out on the airwaves and on our TV screens leading up to next week’s elections, Chris Hayes and Stanford professor Shanto Iyengar get to the bottom of whether negative ads ever have positive effects.

The Breakdown With days to go until the midterm elections and with buckets of money being poured into this year’s races, negative campaign ads are battling it out on airwaves and on TV screens across the country. But are these smear campaigns actually beneficial to the candidates who fund them? Do they leave a lasting impression in voters’ minds or just a bad taste in their mouths? And if they do work in swaying voters, why? On this week’s edition of The Breakdown, Stanford political science professor Shanto Iyengar joins The Nation‘s DC editor Chris Hayes to figure out whether negative ads ever have positive effects.

 

Related Links

Matt Lauer asking Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown to just get along.
A round-up of the worst negative campaign ads from this year’s primaries.
More information about guest Shanto Iyengar.

Subscribe to The Breakdown on iTunes to listen to fresh takes on the confusing concepts that make politics, economics and government tick. A new episode every week!

Disobey authoritarians, support The Nation

Over the past year you’ve read Nation writers like Elie Mystal, Kaveh Akbar, John Nichols, Joan Walsh, Bryce Covert, Dave Zirin, Jeet Heer, Michael T. Klare, Katha Pollitt, Amy Littlefield, Gregg Gonsalves, and Sasha Abramsky take on the Trump family’s corruption, set the record straight about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s catastrophic Make America Healthy Again movement, survey the fallout and human cost of the DOGE wrecking ball, anticipate the Supreme Court’s dangerous antidemocratic rulings, and amplify successful tactics of resistance on the streets and in Congress.

We publish these stories because when members of our communities are being abducted, household debt is climbing, and AI data centers are causing water and electricity shortages, we have a duty as journalists to do all we can to inform the public.

In 2026, our aim is to do more than ever before—but we need your support to make that happen. 

Through December 31, a generous donor will match all donations up to $75,000. That means that your contribution will be doubled, dollar for dollar. If we hit the full match, we’ll be starting 2026 with $150,000 to invest in the stories that impact real people’s lives—the kinds of stories that billionaire-owned, corporate-backed outlets aren’t covering. 

With your support, our team will publish major stories that the president and his allies won’t want you to read. We’ll cover the emerging military-tech industrial complex and matters of war, peace, and surveillance, as well as the affordability crisis, hunger, housing, healthcare, the environment, attacks on reproductive rights, and much more. At the same time, we’ll imagine alternatives to Trumpian rule and uplift efforts to create a better world, here and now. 

While your gift has twice the impact, I’m asking you to support The Nation with a donation today. You’ll empower the journalists, editors, and fact-checkers best equipped to hold this authoritarian administration to account. 

I hope you won’t miss this moment—donate to The Nation today.

Onward,

Katrina vanden Heuvel 

Editor and publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x