Monday, October 28, 2024
University of Virginia Political Science Chair Jennifer Lawless appeared on GoLocal LIVE to discuss what to watch for in the 2024 election cycle, with just over a week to go before Election Day on November 5.
“We’re within the margin of error in all of the battleground states – so we just don’t know,” said Lawless. “It’s going to come down to who turns out the vote.”
Lawless spoke about how the presidential candidates are going to approach voters from a political ad standpoint.
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“One thing I would note is that we have such an ability to micro-target and we have such an ability to have different messages in different places in this country right now, that it’s hard to know actually what each campaign is doing to convince that sliver of undecided [voters] – it’s not like old school, where you’d be able to tell from the ads that they’re airing whether they’re engaging in a base strategy or a persuasion strategy,” said Lawless. “Here they can do both things at once and they can do it 50 different ways across 50 different states if they want to.”
Lawless, who ran as a Democrat in the 2006 Congressional primary in Rhode Island, said in order for the party to win, Democrats need a “record voter turnout” this year.
Looking Forward — and Back at History
“Generally speaking, positive emotional appeals fare better than negative fear-based appeals and a good way to even consider this is the Reagan election in 1980. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, it was about turning the page to get out of the mess that the Reagan campaign claimed we were in because of Jimmy Carter — similarly in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected it wasn’t all doom and gloom about the Bush Administration, it was ‘let’s focus on the economy, we can make it better, he did this wrong,'” said Lawless.
“Donald Trump’s message might be about the future but it’s incredibly dark, it’s incredibly fear-based and he’s also not really taking responsibility for the fact that some of the present – a lot of the present – is a result of his past,” she added.
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