No Longer the Candidate of Hope and Change

The 2012 presidential election cost an unprecedented amount of money and one part of the advertising is receiving credit for impacting the election: President Obama’s persuasive campaigning about Mitt Romney’s character. Politico writes that:

“Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign…[these attacks are] designed to portray Romney as too flawed personally to be a viable political alternative.”

Justifying the ads, an Obama campaign aide claimed that, “None of what the Obama campaign is doing is false. Mitt Romney is a terrible human being, and it’s not hard to make that case with the available facts.”

Mueller describes two types of campaigning: persuasive and informative. With informative campaigning, the candidate informs voters of his or her position, and people vote for the candidate closest to their ideal point. If Obama and Romney only engaged in this type of campaigning then they would have increased the likelihood that some voters would vote for them and decreased the likelihood that others would have.

Obama’s personal attacks were a form of persuasive campaigning intended to increase the likelihood that every voter would vote for Obama. By making Americans believe that Romney hated women or that he was responsible for a woman’s death from cancer or that he did not care about other people, Obama accomplished two things. For voters on the left side of the political spectrum, it increased contributions to the Obama campaign. Even though these voters experienced lower utility because of lower spending on consumption goods, they had a higher expected utility because they placed a higher value on an Obama victory and because the contributions increased the likelihood that Obama would win. These personal attacks increased their expected utility of an Obama victory because Romney seemed so abhorrent. In addition, prior to these personal ads, independent and moderate voters had a small difference in utility between the two candidates. While informative campaigning may have convinced many of them to vote for Romney, persuasive campaigning convinced them not that Obama’s policies were superior, but that his character was. While this change in utility may not have been enough to encourage campaign contributions for Obama, it certainly helped to move votes from Romney to Obama. Obama’s personal attack ads demonstrate the efficacy of persuasive campaigning in influencing electoral outcomes.