Mercedes Schlapp Quotes

A 30 second negative ad can matter more to a candidate's career than a lifetime voting record.

I hate negative ads in general.

During the last 20 years the advent of radio changed all the old rules of political campaigning. Now the successful advent of television, available for the first time this year in a presidential campaign, must again influence the planning of the campaign. Television, with its triple advantages of sight, sound and motion, can make or break a candidate, a party or a platform. In my opinion television must not be considered as supplementary media but as the heart of your program to “win friends and influence people.”

One of the most overused phrases in political commentary is that someone is running a 'negative' campaign filled with 'attack' ads.

Unfortunately, every American citizen takes the same position... that we don’t like negative advertisements. But they work! And, as you see, many a candidate has prevailed by tearing down the reputation of an opponent in a more advantageous position.

I don't think people in Hawaii like negative ads, whether it's done by an independent group or whether it's done by the campaign itself.

The campaign commercials don't tell you anything.

I said during the course of the campaign I didn't like it and I don't like the idea of having an opponent's picture on your ads and it would be nice to see candidates sign a pledge like that.

There's a reason people run negative ads... it's because they work.

I've never, in my whole 30 years in office, run a negative ad.

Anyone who thinks that negative campaigning is a modern invention has never read the nineteenth century press

Candidates who went into an election with negatives higher than 30 or 40 points just inevitably lost.... Drive up the opposition's negatives.

I'm not the inventor of negative campaigning, but I'm an ardent practitioner.

The trouble [with modern political campaigns] is that the technicians of the media and the professional campaign advisors believe that the negative commercials and the attack work better.

Negative advertising is the only way voters can find out that a candidate may be unfit for public office.

Odious campaigns are a national tradition, and so is complaining about them.

The political innovation that produced the strongest impact was the manipulation of moving pictures. Alarmed by the Sinclair threat, MGM's Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg produced fake newsreels, using Hollywood actors. W.R. Hearst helped distribute them. For the first time, the screen was used to demolish a candidate, a precursor of political attack ads on television.

Democratic (campaign) commercials subjected American citizens to the most uncouth mental torture.

In my opinion, the polarization of our politics has mostly been brought about by the massive infusion of money—mostly spent on negative advertising that create divisions among the population that watches television and the two parties.

There is interposed between the voter and hid final judgment the whole mechanism of modern publicity. The final judgment is not the result of direct acquaintance; it is the result of the news reports, the advertising, the oratory, the elusive rumors which are the modern substitute for direct acquaintance.

Microtargeting, as its name implies, is a way to identify small but crucial groups of voters who might be won over to a given side, and which messages would do the trick.

You can't show up at a church every 4 October and say, 'Vote for me,' and call that persuasion.

The main influence on voters should be a series of robust debates among the candidates. It's a free country, so this is a tough problem to solve, but I'd love to see an election season with zero political ads, and all voters had to decide based on watching four national debates over the two months leading to election day.

The infamous political ads like Carly Fiorina's 'Demon Sheep' and Christine O'Donnell's 'I Am Not a Witch' are so confusing, it's almost like they were paid for by Democrats.

Other Republican candidates may retort to personal attacks and negative ads.