From what I see most elections always are.
Comment on A Black woman has never lost the general election for POTUS in US history but 46 white men have lost
Vinny_93@lemmy.world 5 months ago
What really bugs me is that both sides are just attacking the other rather than talking about why they are the right choice. US elections are always about smear campaigns
halvar@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Vinny_93@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s not what I’m used to in the Netherlands. There are personal attacks sometimes, but mostly by guys who don’t have the best reputation in the first place.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
This is most of my memory of Canadian elections too. I wish even mentioning other parties wasn’t allowed in campagin material, like how in some parts of government politicians can only refer to each other by title and not by name.
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Ok, but then who informs the public about the other party actually doing something bad
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Debates and actually adressing the problems.
You can’t say “Party X just wants your money”, try “Our party will help you keep your money”, or even “Unlike some parties today, we will put your taxes to good use”.
It’s a lot harder to make a compelling attack without a concrete focus. “Some parties are corrupt” is so trivially true that’s it embarassing, but “Party X is corrupt” is a rallying cry.
It won’t prevent lies by any means, but since specific claims can only be nade about your own party it gives an advantage to talking about your own party instead of every ad being incredibly negative claims one step off of a flame war. Hopefully that leads to building a strong case and then defending that case during debates, but at least the ads will have less direct negativity.
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
There was a time, a few decades ago, when there was a real demand to get away from the negativity of most campaigns. Everyone says they wanted it, polls clearly showed it, etc.
But then there was another study which analyzed the effectiveness of campaigns (i.e. if they won) vs how negative they went.
Negativity was clearly proven to be the winning tactic.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 5 months ago
I remember the first election I was old enough to vote in paying close attention to all the political ads I saw and, at least for that election, only the Republican ads were focused on “other guy bad, so vote me.” The opposing side’s ads were entirely focused on their own platform and never even mentioned the other side.