Fear-based campaign ads can grab attention, but whether they win votes is less clear

On a Monday night in September 1964, television viewers watched a little girl counting petals on a flower. Her voice gave way to a man counting down, and then a nuclear blast filled the screen.

The ad ran as a paid spot only once, in support of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s reelection campaign. It never mentioned his opponent, republican Barry Goldwater. The ad played on a fear voters already held, that Goldwater might start a nuclear war. Republicans protested loudly, Democrats pulled the spot, and the uproar got it rebroadcast in full on network news.

I study how emotional appeals persuade, from how viewers’ moods shape their reactions to political ads to how anxiety drives people to seek out, and sometimes fail to absorb, information about threats.

The LBJ “Daisy” ad shows why political campaigns to this day continue to reach for fear, and it hints at why the payoff is less predictable than you might think.

Fear is an alarm. It tells you something threatening is close. You feel scared when you believe you are at risk from something dangerous that can hurt you.

Anxiety knocks people off autopilot, sharpens attention and sends them looking for new information. That heightened attentiveness may be exactly what a struggling campaign wants.

When political scientists Travis Ridout and Kathleen Searles tracked Senate ads from 2004, they found that front-runners often leaned on enthusiasm and pride in their messaging, while candidates who were behind leaned on fear and anger.

Sometimes, fear works.

During the 1998 Massachusetts governor’s race, political scientist Ted Brader ran a study that embedded campaign ads in a news broadcast and changed only the music and images, keeping the words identical. Those changes produced completely different reactions. When a negative ad paired grainy black-and-white images of drug use with tense music, viewers paid closer attention to the spoken message and became more open to reconsidering their chosen candidate.

Fear cues – like a nuclear mushroom cloud – can push viewers to weigh fresh information and reconsider their choice. One surprise: Politically informed citizens were more responsive to these emotional cues than less engaged ones. Fear is not simply a tool for swaying the uninformed, undecided voter. It also reaches people who follow politics closely. Emotion provides the motivation, while knowledge provides the ability to think carefully about the issues and positions and seek out more information.

More broadly, a meta-analysis of over 100 studies found that fear appeals reliably shift attitudes and behavior across health and other domains. For instance, public health researcher Lucy Popova tested fear-based messages designed to discourage smokers from trying snus, a smokeless tobacco product. She found that when participants perceived a serious threat but also felt capable of acting on it, they held less favorable attitudes toward snus and were less inclined to try it.

Political attack ads – fear messaging being one type – have a shakier record. A review of more than 100 studies found no dependable evidence that negative campaigning wins elections, and some evidence that it lowers positive feelings toward the candidate who sponsors it.

Communication scholar Kim Witte’s research found that fear motivates action when people believe there is a workable response that they can carry out. When the threat feels big and the solution feels out of reach, people protect themselves from the message instead. They tune out, deny the threat or decide the messenger is the problem.

For example, picture an ad geared toward adolescent vaping that shows teens in hospital beds with ventilators using scary terms like “popcorn lungs.” If the ad also communicates that vaping can destroy lungs irreversibly, the teen audience is likely to experience extreme fear while at the same time feeling like there’s no way to fix the problem.

My colleagues and I have seen this effect in our own experiments. We found that people who felt highly anxious and also confident they could act sought out the most information. Those who felt anxious but lacked that confidence did go looking, yet they recalled very little. Anxiety pushed them to search but got in the way of absorbing what they read.

A campaign that frightens voters without offering a clear step to address the issue could end up producing plenty of anxious attention and very little learning.

Empowerment also helps explain who shows up at the polls. Political scientist Nicholas Valentino and colleagues found that anger boosted voter participation more reliably than anxiety, and anxiety mattered mainly for people who already had the skills and resources to take actions like donate to campaigns, attend rallies, sign petitions and so on.

Fear does its most reliable work when it attaches to a stereotype voters already carry. The 1988 presidential race provides two classic examples.

One controversial ad, produced in support of Republican George H.W. Bush, showed a mugshot of a Black man. The ad named the man, Willie Horton, and a voiceover explained that he’d committed rape and assault while on a weekend furlough from prison as part of a program run under Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate. The spot linked fears about crime to race without saying so directly.

Bush’s campaign followed up with the “Revolving Door” ad, which built on that anxiety. It featured stark, black-and-white footage of inmates marching through a revolving gate while a narrator warned that Dukakis had let murderers out of prison on weekend passes.

Political scientist Tali Mendelberg’s research described in “The Race Card” shows that these implicit appeals to prejudices and fears are powerful. But they lose much of their force once someone publicly names them as racial. Implicit appeals work because they slip past most voters’ commitment to racial equality; once the racial message is pointed out, voters recognize it and many reject it rather than see themselves as endorsing prejudice.

Gender works in a similar way.

In a national experiment, Public Policy researcher Mirya Holman and colleagues found that when campaign messages triggered fears of terrorism, voters turned to their stereotypes of strong leaders as masculine. Those stereotypes hurt a female Democratic candidate, while Republican candidates of either gender were unaffected, since Republicans are already seen as tough on security.

A message communicating a threat does not need to name a candidate’s identity to disadvantage them. It simply makes voters reach for the stereotypes they already hold. There’s less systematic research on candidates’ religion, though the same mechanism – fear pushing voters to rely on the stereotypes they already hold about who can keep them safe – predicts similar vulnerability for Muslim candidates.

Using fear as a campaign tool is nothing new.

In 1828, opponents accused presidential candidate Andrew Jackson of murder and cannibalism. Both parties have leaned on fear in the television era, from Reagan’s 1984 “Bear” ad about an unnamed Soviet threat, to Democrats’ 1996 warnings that seniors’ Medicare was at risk.

What has grown is negativity overall. Political scientist John Geer’s analysis of presidential ads from 1960 to 2004 documents that rise, though he also found attack ads, more likely than positive ones, to focus on real issues rather than personal traits. The evidence that fear specifically has increased, as opposed to negativity in general, is less clear.

The current media landscape shifts this dynamic significantly; while traditional nightly news broadcasts have seen a decline in viewership, targeted social media feeds have become the emotional battleground.

Recent digital campaign data shows that negative ads are highly prized online because they successfully grab attention by provoking strong emotions like fear and anger. Because platform recommendation systems are heavily driven by user activity, campaigns are incentivized to use emotionally charged appeals to maximize viral engagement across feeds.

Fear works less like a switch and more like a spotlight. It grabs attention and opens minds to change, but whether that turns into a vote, a boycott of the ballot box or resentment toward the messenger depends on what comes next.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Monique Mitchell Turner, Michigan State University

Monique Mitchell Turner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.