When it came to inspiring people with optimism in what was often a bitter campaign year, an ad produced by Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders claims the title for most hopeful.
A new study by two political science professors showed campaign ads throughout the year to a group of people to gauge their reaction.
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It found that Sanders’ ad, published at the start of 2016, generated the strongest feeling of optimism in people who viewed it.
“By far, Mr. Sanders’s ‘America’ was the ad from 2016 that made … raters the happiest and the most hopeful,” UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck wrote Friday in the New York Times. She said that almost 80 percent of viewers claimed 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.”
Vavreck conducted the study with John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist.
The Sanders ad, titled “America,” showed images from both rural and urban parts of America and of Sanders greeting enthusiastic supporters. Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” plays over the images.
