Analysis: Almost all political ads are produced to achieve a very narrow goal: winning the next election. What if parties instead took a longer view, producing ads designed to win them new partisan supporters in election after election?
. Winning over those voters, as well as converts from the other side, would be a huge boon for either party. Loyalists don’t only vote for the party in one election, after all. They vote for the party inelection, up and down the ballot, year after year. And this kind of behavior isn’t on the wane:Yet, remarkably, neither party devotes substantial advertising effort to cultivating converts., but those ads were almost entirely focused on candidates and policies, not partisan attachments.
After the firms made the ads, over a two-year period, we enrolled nearly 18,000 people in online experiments, in which we randomly exposed each participant to an ad designed around one of the four theories. We already had measured our participants’ party identification beforehand. About two weeks after the ads were shown, we contacted the participants to ask them again about their party identification. Then we contacted them a year later and asked again.
Our ads didn’t just affect partisan identification. We also found that showing people higher doses of party-promoting ads shifted whom they planned to vote for in coming elections and affected their evaluations of then-President Donald Trump. Partisan identity is usually understood as a root cause of political behavior. By moving it, we also appear to have moved real-world political decisions.
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