The very first question at the recent debate between Colorado’s gubernatorial candidates Jared Polis and Walker Stapleton concerned negative campaigning. Why, moderators Anne Trujillo and Nic Garcia asked, can’t the candidates campaign more like outgoing Gov. John Hickenlooper, whose famously bipartisan governing style and sunny campaigning approach earned him broad support? Why are they going so negative?
I want to push back on this narrative a bit. No, neither Polis nor Stapleton are quite like John Hickenlooper, but at important times, neither was Hickenlooper. The current governor is only as sunny and bipartisan as changing political circumstances allow.
For one thing, Hickenlooper has had a remarkable and rather lucky journey in state and local politics. A good reason he hasn’t run negative ads is because he mostly hasn’t had to. He won as Denver mayor in a crowded field in 2003, but faced only token opposition to his reelection in 2007, commanding 88 percent of the vote. There was little need to go negative on that race.
His run for the governor’s office in 2010 was also remarkably lacking in bitter, open conflict. Although other Democrats, such as Ken Salazar, were interested in the job, the party largely settled its conflicts behind closed doors, and Hickenlooper never faced a real primary rival. He then had the good fortune of running against a divided Republican Party, with Dan Maes serving as the official nominee but many party leaders endorsing Tom Tancredo. In the same year that Democrats took a bath in congressional and statehouse races across the nation, Hickenlooper cruised into the governor’s office, besting Tancredo by 15 points and Maes by 40. Again, there was little need to go negative.
His reelection effort was not quite so fortunate. In another tough year, 2014, Hickenlooper faced an experienced and skilled Republican challenger in Bob Beauprez, and polls showed the race basically a tossup. Hickenlooper technically didn’t go negative, but largely because the Democratic Governors Association was happy to do it for him, running millions of dollars worth of ads savaging Beauprez. When asked to condemn the ads, Hickenlooper would just claim that he was conveniently forbidden from coordinating with an outside group. In part thanks to this negative ad blitz, Hickenlooper managed to eke out a win, even while Mark Udall and other Democrats lost statewide.
This campaigning style has helped him to maintain very high approval ratings throughout his career in public service. Just months before standing for reelection as mayor, Hickenlooper had to deal with a crisis as heavy snows, followed by a hard freeze, crippled the city. This is the sort of storm that has ended some political careers, but not Hickenlooper’s. Within a few weeks his approval ratings were at 84 percent. More recently, he has distinguished himself as one of the most popular governors in the country.
So by this standard, the 2018 gubernatorial candidates just have to be falling short, right? Not really. A recent Magellan poll found that Polis and Stapleton had favorable/unfavorable ratings of 45-36 and 42-36, respectively. For two politicians locked in a competitive, high profile race, those numbers aren’t bad. Indeed, both of their net favorables (the favorable rating minus the unfavorable one) are considerably better than Hickenlooper’s was right before the 2014 election. At that point, Hick only enjoyed a 4-point net favorability, according to an NBC News/Marist poll.
What we see in Polis and Stapleton are actually pretty normal politicians — they each battled their way through competitive primaries, they each have considerable political experience, and they each are pretty solid representatives of their respective parties’ stances on most, if not all, issues. And they’re in a competitive race, so they’re deploying a wide range of communication strategies, including negative ads, to try to raise concerns about their opponent. This is what nearly all high level politicians do in a competitive and polarized political environment.
As political scientist John Geer notes, negative ads may annoy voters, but unlike their more positive counterparts, they actually contain information, some of it quite useful for voters trying to make a decision. And really, how much did we learn from that shower commercial anyway?
This approach may somewhat limit the candidates’ overall popularity, but each candidate has a pretty realistic and comprehensive agenda for actually governing, and voters actually know something about them.
Competition is one of the core values of our electoral system. We’re critical of districts, states, and even countries where elections aren’t competitive. If Polis and Stapleton seem to lack Hickenlooper’s sunny positivity, itap because they’re competing for every vote.
Seth Masket is director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver.
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