How Utah's bipartisan campaign ad came together
"Is it possible that our state could be a better place at the end of the campaign than when we started?"
Politics doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
Last week I interviewed Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Columbia University assistant professor of sociology James Chu about “One Nation,” the bipartisan campaign ad Cox and his Democratic gubernatorial opponent Chris Peterson released in 2020 in which they both agreed to accept the results of the presidential election.
The ad was among the top-performing interventions in a study about reducing polarization conducted among more than 31,000 U.S. partisans that I wrote about last month.
Cox said the ad grew out of a desire to leave his state in “a better place at the end of the campaign than when we started.”
Out of 25 interventions tested by researchers at Stanford’s Strengthening Democracy Challenge, the ad was No. 2 at reducing people's support for partisan violence and No. 4 at reducing people's support for undemocratic practices, Chu said.
One of the key principles to “reduce the temperature” of politics, Chu said, “is to have elites, to have leaders, publicly commit to basic norms of democracy.”
You can listen to our full conversation here:
Here are some of the highlights from our conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity:
How the ad came together:
Cox: “When I decided to run for governor, my wife and I sat down, we met with some friends, and we decided that we were going try to run a different kind of campaign. We felt very strongly that we would not do any negative ads. We actually wanted to invite the people we were running against, starting in the primary, to join us with their supporters in doing service projects all across the state, really trying to send a different message. Our core goal was to answer this question: Is it possible that our state could be a better place at the end of the campaign than when we started? I think usually with politics I think we end up in a worse place, but we wanted to prove that there was another way to do things.”
“We live in a very conservative conservative state so as a Republican, I felt pretty confident about my chances to win, but we saw what was happening at the national level and it was getting more and more ugly, everybody can remember what that looked like in 2020.”
“I had this crazy idea that I should get together with my opponent, see if he would be willing to do an ad, if you could do something together, and not sure exactly what it would look like, but something where we had a Republican and a Democrat standing together on the same stage saying hey, we're Americans first whatever happens, you know, I hope you vote for me, my opponent hopes you vote for him. But however, this works out, let's remember that we're Americans first. Let's remember what this is all about, and that's kind of where the idea came from. It moved pretty quickly after that.”
“I called my opponent, which I think he was a little surprised about, just to get a phone call from me, you know, we didn't have staff talk about it at all. He would admit that he was a little wary at first when that phone call first came in, but as we started talking about it, he said you know what you're right, this is so important. And I have to give him all the credit, I said, look, this is not some political stunt, we're not trying to do anything. You have complete veto power, you'll get as much screen time as I will, we will work on this side by side. I think this is more important than anything else is happening right now. He agreed completely.”
“A friend of ours wrote the script and we had an ad agency that put it together, and from the time I called him to about a week later… we had that ad ready to go and we had it out, and we were a little surprised how quickly it took off.”
Reactions:
Cox: “When I first brought it up, I mentioned it to a few people and they said that's a really bad idea, you know, Politics 101: You never give your opponent a microphone. You never elevate your opponent. You're winning, you're winning handily right now, don't do that. There was a little bit of that from what I call the, well, I have names I probably won’t share, but really the political industrial complex, I guess it's, you know, the more craven side of things. But the reaction was very interesting. We didn't know what to expect.”
“We put it out that morning. We knew some of the local news stations wanted to run it kind of as a PSA type deal, and the reaction was just overwhelmingly positive. I mean I'm sure there was some negativity, but we just didn't see it, and we expected it to get a little buzz here in Utah. We did not expect it to go viral like it did and not just you know, not just nationally, but internationally. We were getting requests and messages from all over the world, millions of views. And you know, we’ve talked about this since, we were both really shocked at how quickly and how far and wide it went.”
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What the study found
Chu: “Researchers aren't really good at designing interventions, but there are people out there in the world who are, and they've been doing this for years, and so what we did was we reached out to practitioners, we reached out to researchers, and of course, we were also delighted to see this ad. We heard about it actually through a group of other researchers who told us that they thought this ad would be very promising as a way to help everyday Americans see, you know, their leaders be in a position of civility rather than animosity, and that might be very important at turning people's attitudes around.”
The ad “ended up being at No. 4 in reducing people's support for undemocratic practices, which we thought was very interesting, and it also came in No. 2 at reducing people's support for partisan violence. And what do those things mean? Well, support for undemocratic practices encompasses a series of practices such as overthrowing an election or trying to withhold votes from people from the opposing party, gerrymandering is in there, so as a whole set of practices that we ask people whether they support or don't, and I think what happens is when everyday Americans see their leaders committing to basically accepting the results of an election, committing to civility, it helps everyday Americans to recalibrate their perceptions about American politics and that seemed to have a very important effect on reducing their support for these practices.”
Politics as religion or war:
Cox: “There are far too many people that see politics as religion or politics as war, and neither of those things is healthy for a Democratic Republic like ours, a pluralistic society, and so losing our values just to win is, what profiteth a man to gain the whole world if loses it his soul, that's how how I feel about this.”
“I still believe there's an exhausted majority out there that want us to do things differently, that believe that we can do things better and that will reward that type of behavior. But this race to the bottom just isn't aligning those incentive structures right now.”
“Far too many really good people are losing their souls when it comes to the way we do politics, and certainly I think that candidates have an opportunity to lower the temperature, to get back to you know, politics being politics, to being a competition of ideas. That's certainly what we're trying to do, but it's getting harder every day because the incentives just aren't there right now for people to do, you know, as much as we did, and that was our whole purpose, again, the whole way I ran my campaign, the whole purpose behind this ad was to try to show that there is a different way. I still believe there's an exhausted majority out there that want us to do things differently, that believe that we can do things better and that will reward that type of behavior. But this race to the bottom just isn't aligning those incentive structures right now.”
Misperceptions:
Chu: “What we're trying to do in this large-scale experimental study is to develop a toolkit of lots of different possible approaches. Obviously in practice some approaches will be applicable in some situations and others won't be, but we wanted to have a space where we could look at all of these at the same time and understand which principles were more effective or not. And I think Gov. Cox put it very nicely, it's one of the key principles here to so called ‘reduce the temperature’ of politics is to have elites, to have leaders, publicly commit to basic norms of democracy. And yeah, that's right, it's not going to work in every case. We have a whole bunch of other results that I think might work in places like Arizona.”
“You know, when you open up Twitter, you're gonna see obviously the most extreme versions of what people are saying, when you open up the news, they're gonna select on the most extreme opinions and everyday Americans really aren't at those levels of extremity.”
“One of the people who submitted an intervention we call it ‘Misperceptions.’ Basically, it works by helping people to understand that the extreme views they have of the other side are actually a little over-inflated. It turns out that this zero-sum game of you know, you don't want to be a person who brings a knife to a gunfight right? And it turns out that in America, a lot of our polarization, it comes from this sense that we're at war. If somebody else is coming at you with a gun and you don't want to be left as a sucker, so you want to come at them, you know with with equal violence, and it turns out that helping Americans see that the truth is it's not actually that, you know, people are not as extreme as you you might think they are. You know, when you open up Twitter, you're gonna see obviously the most extreme versions of what people are saying, when you open up the news, they're gonna select on the most extreme opinions and everyday Americans really aren't at those levels of extremity.”
Optimism about reducing polarization:
Chu: “I don't want to oversell the results. You know, it's not like by doing these 23 things all of American democracy will be saved, but I definitely was left feeling that the problems are far more tractable than it seems. It's not that we live in a society where polarization is a fact of nature, that politicians have to behave this way because politics is just a zero-sum game. It doesn’t have to be that way. I think this experimental research that, you know, I was coming in with a lot less optimism. I'm leaving with more optimism.”
“It's not that we live in a society where polarization is a fact of nature, that politicians have to behave this way because politics is just a zero-sum game. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“I think there's a lot that everyday Americans can do, journalists can do, and definitely politicians at the highest levels can and should be doing to help to reduce polarization to so-called ‘turn down the temperature’ and get us back on track to talking about issues that really affect all Americans and make this democracy work for everyone. So I'm definitely leaving with more optimism, but I think there's still a huge amount of work to do.”
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