Fighting in the gutter: Cautionary lessons from America's vicious election campaign

There is a price to be paid for decades of ever-coarser negative campaigning in the US.

- Bhavan Jaipragas

It might seem almost naive to gripe about the surge of negative campaigning and outright nasty rhetoric sweeping through the United States in these final days of the presidential race.

But the reality is attack ads and mudslinging have long been woven into the fabric of US politics, intensifying with each election - a trend well under way even before Donald Trump's 2016 run took campaign trail debasement to new lows. And this isn't just a casual outsider's view; research backs it up.

Political scientists Kyle Mattes and David P. Redlawsk, in their 2015 book The Positive Case For Negative Campaigning, mapped out decades of this adversarial shift. Back in 1960, only 10 per cent of presidential campaign messaging was "negative" - that is, focused on attacking an opponent rather than highlighting a candidate's own positions. By 2008, in the race between Mr Barack Obama and Mr John McCain, that figure had shot up to 60 per cent - a telling sign of how American elections have grown more combative.

A more recent book, Political Advertising In The United States, by Erika Franklin Fowler, Michael M. Franz and Travis N. Ridout, directors of the Wesleyan Media Project (widely regarded as the gold standard in US political ad tracking), confirms this trajectory: Negative and "contrast" messaging now dominate campaigns across both parties.

So, in this final stretch between Republican candidate Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, a descent into fierce negative campaigning was all but inevitable. Political strategists note that, as election day looms, attacks are often more effective than positive messages at energising supporters and unsettling opponents.