What happens when a positive campaign suddenly turns negative? Voters are now witnessing not one but two examples of this phenomenon.
Republicans are watching the painful breakup of the marriage of convenience between billionaire Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz has paid Trump the respect that has otherwise eluded him in the Republican presidential field. Trump has until now refrained from heaping as much scorn on Cruz as the other elected officials seeking the GOP nomination.
Trump was seeking conservative affirmation, Cruz a more responsible image with his party’s governing class by comparison and future inroads among Trump’s supporters. Now that the two are on a collision course in Iowa, it’s all gone out the window.
Cruz has gone from suggesting Trump has “jumped the shark,” meaning he’s peaked and is trying to reclaim his past glory, to directly attacking the reality TV star’s liberal “New York values.” (Though Cruz might try a different tactic after this flopped in the sixth Republican presidential debate.) Trump has said Cruz is weaker on immigration than advertised and might not even be a natural-born American citizen, thus putting the Republican Party at risk if he is elected and turns out to be ineligible for the presidency.
“All [Trump] has to do is sow seeds of doubt” about Cruz’s citizenship status among Iowans, Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told the Washington Examiner. He added that Cruz has delayed his inevitable criticisms of Trump for as long as possible, but has no choice to go on offense now that Iowa is likely a must-win state for the Texan.
On the Democratic side, the once-cheerful battle between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has suddenly taken a sharply combative turn. Sanders has prided himself on never running a negative ad against an opponent in five decades of running for office. Clinton has been a secure front-runner and hasn’t had to criticize Sanders much until this year.
In fact, it once seemed like Sanders’ scruples were going to cost him the opportunity to run a competitive race against Clinton with his dismissal of her “damn emails” during one of the few weeknight Democratic debates of the campaign. But here, too, the polls have forced a change in tone.
Sanders has opened up a double-digit lead over Clinton in New Hampshire and is also ahead by a statistically significant margin in Iowa. So Clinton is simultaneously attacking Sanders’ single-payer healthcare plan from the right, for abolishing private health insurance, and from the left, for undermining Obamacare and supposedly sending existing liberal health programs to the states. They have also highlighted his occasional votes against gun control measures.
The socialist’s turn against Clinton has been more subtle. He described Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky as “unseemly” and has stepped up his criticism of the former president’s role in repealing Depression-era regulations that kept commercial banks out of investment banking. Sanders’ campaign has tweeted out the Clintons’ past praise as well as their attacks on President Obama, often without comment or elaboration.
The Clinton campaign is aggrieved by even this mild descent into negative campaigning. “We were very surprised today to see that Bernie Sanders launched a negative television advertisement against Hillary,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook complained on a conference call with reporters.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a Clinton supporter who served two terms as governor of Iowa, warned that “negative advertising will redefine Sanders.” One Democratic strategist predicted “collateral damage” on both sides.
If Iowans were expecting a quiet, positive campaign on either side, it now seems clear they aren’t going to get one.
