Zoe Engberg:
Think there's a couple of reasons why these negative attack ads are so effective in these judicial races. You know, one thing I think that is really important to consider is just the nature and format of an ad. Ads are typically 30 to 60 seconds long. They are almost uniformly pro prosecution, painting an opposite, an opposing candidate, as being soft on crime. Typically what they do is they pull an individual decision or an individual case, and present maybe the most inflammatory facts about that case to the viewers without providing any of the context that's really necessary for understanding why the outcome of that case may have actually been appropriate in that case or why the judge made that individual decision in that case. And there's a lot of research that shows that voters and members of the public, they actually don't necessarily want incredibly punitive sentencing. But it all depends on what information they have when they're judging whether a sentence is too harsh or too lenient. So, when somebody only has the headlines, only has, you know, the crime that somebody was convicted of and the sentence that was imposed, they tend to think that judges were too lenient and should have imposed a harsher sentence. But when a voter or a member of the public has the full context, all of the information that a judge considers when imposing a particular sentence, so you know the background of the person being sentenced — what their life has been like, the circumstances of the crime, any mitigation that may have been presented to the judge — then people actually think that judges tend to impose sentences that are too harsh and too punitive. But in a 30-second ad or a 60-second ad, it's really difficult to get that full context. So all voters have are these headlines which tend to kind of inflame them and make them want people to be sentenced more punitively.