The Ad That Moved People the Most: Bernie Sanders America

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The Ad That Moved People the Most: Bernie Sanders’s ‘America’

Lynn Vavreck - DEC. 30, 2016

They may be difficult to recall, but there were some things about the 2016 presidential election that made people happy and hopeful. Perhaps even harder to believe is that some of those things were campaign advertisements.

A few 2016 campaign ads stand out for how happy and hopeful they made people feel, and one ad in particular dominated. That ad was Bernie Sanders’s minute-long spot called “America.”

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It was one of many ads that John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist, and I showed to panels of people throughout the campaign. We ran a weekly experiment called SpotCheck in which we randomly assigned a representative sample of 1,000 people to see one of two campaign ads. We evaluated the ads’ persuasive effects and asked people to evaluate the ads on such criteria as whether the ad made them happy, hopeful, angry or worried.

By far, Mr. Sanders’s “America” was the ad from 2016 that made SpotCheck’s raters the happiest and the most hopeful. Nearly 80 percent of viewers said the ad made them at least a little bit happy and hopeful in the week it debuted — including over half of the Republicans who saw it.

Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/upshot/the-campaign-ads-that-moved-people-the-most.html?_r=0