Tired of political ads? Get ready, there are more coming
TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) - October is generally considered the beginning of fall in Arizona.
It’s when temperatures drop, leaves change colors and, in election years, political campaigns change their ways.
Up to now, campaigns have been spending money to persuade voters. Come October, it’s time for the campaigns to lock them in to turn them out.
Arizona will be blanketed with political ads for the next 36 days.
“Make it end, please,” said Tom Volgy, a former Tucson Mayor and political scientist at the University of Arizona. “It’s really not healthy for us as a democracy to be caught in this enormous viciousness.”
But it’s not going to end anytime soon.
For the next five weeks, it’s likely to get more vicious as the candidates, be they national or local, focus less on persuasion and more on turnout.
“Sometimes that becomes the ugliest part of the campaign because, at that point, the negatives begin to fly even more than they have before, to rally the base,” he said.
October can also be a time when panic sets in, especially if there is a small gap between winning and losing.
It’s when the political war chests are depleted because there’s nothing left to lose, so it can create a hostile environment for media consumers.
“The kind of advertising people have seen on television and social media probably gets uglier and nastier during the last four weeks until people get pretty sick and tired of it,” Volgy said.
Which opens the door to the question, ‘If negative campaigns are designed to reduce turnout, will a campaign which is especially negative and especially hostile excite the base or will it encourage people to just stay home and not participate?’
“We’re going to get an interesting test in November because it can go either way,” Volgy said. “It can turn into a low turnout election and we’re in trouble, or it can turn into a high turnout election based on the same behavior the Trump and Harris campaigns are engaged in right now.”
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