“You can’t pick your family” – The ‘Brill’ negative ad

By Nikki Gommers

For link to quote headline: click here 

“I’m not going to break bread with a racist”. You wouldn’t expect people to say this about you. Especially not your own brother. And on the public stage no less, ending up in media all over the world. But this is exactly what happened in the 2018 Arizona midterm campaign between Paul Gosar and David Brill. We know that US election campaigns can get dirty, but this ad was next level.

If this is new to you, it’s best to just watch the video below.

Source: Brill for Congress, via YouTube

The initial reaction of many was: how is this going to play out? Nathalie Enderle explored the same question in her blog. We are two weeks on from the video’s release, and one can start answering the question: was the ‘PR stunt’ effective?

Why did he do it?

Negative advertising is common in US elections, but why did candidate Brill go for such a provocative ad? His political strategy to ‘go negative’ fits within a wider trend.

Firstly, Paul Gosar is the incumbent and David Brill is his challenger. Both for online and televised ads, it is the trend that challengers are more likely to produce negative ads than incumbents (Druckman, Kifer & Parkin, 2010). Decades of research shows that incumbents have an advantage over their challengers, for example because they can promote their achievements. Often one of the few options the challenger has is to attack the opponent (Nai & Sciarini, 2015). 

Paul Gosar's response on Twitter

Secondly, Brill was behind in the race, which is often an incentive to adopt negative advertising to scare off the opponent’s voters. Losing candidates have very little to risk and more to gain by going negative, regardless of potential backlash (Nai & Sciarini, 2015).

So going negative made sense for Brill, in the face of a strongly Republican state. 

But, did it work?

One thing is for sure, David Brill managed to get a lot of attention for his ad. Within both corporate and political communication, something becomes more newsworthy if it contains conflict and surprise (Schafraad, Van Zoonen & Verhoeven, 2017), which Brill’s ad did.

Also, multiple research shows that the more negative an ad is, the more media attention it receives (Ridout & Smith, 2008; Fowler & Ridout, 2009). This high level of media coverage of negative ads, in return, motivates candidates to go negative (Geer, 2012). Probably a consideration Brill also had in mind when he decided to develop this ad.

Source: OH Predictive Insights

But was it effective? That question can of course only be fully answered on election day, but so far it looks like Brill didn't create much of a change. A poll by OH Predictive Insights shows that to 58% of the people the ad made no difference. Among Gosar's supporters this number is even higher with 63% (click here for detailed results). 

So, it seems that Brill didn’t succeed in scaring away the voters from Gosar. Incredulously, among the Gosar supporters, 32% is now more likely to vote for him. But I wouldn’t say that Brill made a bad PR choice. He had nothing to lose, and in this case, you miss every shot you don’t take.

Nikki Gommers is a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Political Science at Leiden University and has worked for several campaigns of the PvdA (Dutch Labour Party), as well as she is a keen advocate for a less-divided society.