Remember the worst, most offensive political ad ever made? We talked about it last month, and it seems to have helped catapult Janice Hahn right into office. Alexandra Petri’s take on why that might have been suggests (quite sensibly) that most of the eyeballs on web ads belong to young liberals:
The older you get and the more likely you are to say things at parties that your grandchildren will regard as horribly racist, the less likely you are to be active on the Internet, except to check AOL periodically for emails that you can print out and read aloud to your golf group. […] So by making an ad like this, Ehlinger guaranteed that the people most likely to see it would be exactly the people most likely to feel that it was an affront to all their sensibilities.
Put another one in the win column for candidates attacked by ads that use strippers and other sex workers in their character assassination attempts. Remember John Featherman’s “Stripper Politics” ad? He lost, as did the other two candidates in that post. Clearly, if you use a stripper in your negative ad, you’ll lose your election. Perhaps we can look forward to finding out if the opposite holds true when a candidate (who’s not the mayor of Las Vegas) uses the presence of strippers or other sex workers in an ad touting his accomplishments.
[…] tear themselves away from their Xboxes long enough to vote for the other candidate. Sex worker blog Tits and Sass points out that the same tactic failed for Philadelphia mayoral candidate John Featherman, […]