I'm getting fed up with this political campaign. I'm wondering, who is with me if we try a boycott? Seems our future politicians have enuf money to spend bashing each other... what about us???

A friend had posted that on her Facebook page last night. It is a great illustration of the old adage that negative campaigning depresses turnout. The goal is to depress the turnout of a candidate’s opponent’s supporters, thereby making it so that the candidate running the negative ads needs fewer votes to win.

Yet perhaps it is time to challenge this adage. If you stay home, you are telling the campaign strategists they are right. You are rewarding them for their bad behavior. The problem is, many voters just aren’t aware that they have choices.

The most recent Quinnipiac poll asks this question:

If the election for United States Senator were being held today, and the candidates were Richard Blumenthal the Democrat and Linda McMahon the Republican, for whom would you vote? (If undecided) If you had to choose today, would you vote for Blumenthal or McMahon?

Blumenthal gets 54% of the vote. McMahon gets 42% of the vote, with 1% voting for someone else, no one listed as not voting and 3% listed as not knowing.

The problem is, the candidates are not just Blumenthal and McMahon. There are two other candidates who are on the ballot and several write-in candidates.

Suffock University conducted a poll a few days ago that listed all four of the candidates on the ballot:

In the race for U.S. Senate your ballot lists four candidates in the following order: Republican Linda McMahon {mick-MAN}, Democrat Richard Blumenthal {BLUE-men-thol}, Connecticut for Lieberman Candidate John Mertens {MER-tins}, Working Families Candidate Richard Blumenthal or Independent Warren Mosler {MOSE-ler}, for whom will you vote or toward whom would you LEAN at this time?

In this poll Warren Mosler gets 2% of the vote and John Mertens gets 1% of the vote; three times the number of people voting for other candidates that Quinnipiac finds.

An interesting question in that poll was

Linda McMahon has released an ad stating that Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam. Does this make you more likely to vote for Linda McMahon, Richard Blumenthal or one of the other candidates for US Senate?

30% said they would be more likely to vote for Blumenthal, 25% said they would be more likely to vote for McMahon and 5% said they would be more likely to vote for one of the other candidates. In other words, 35% of the likely voters are more likely to vote for against McMahon and 25% are more likely to vote for her as a result of her ads. This doesn’t sound like a winning strategy.

Over in the Governor’s race, we see similar results based on the type of question asked. Quinnipiac asks

If the election for governor were being held today, and the candidates were Dan Malloy the Democrat and Tom Foley the Republican, for whom would you vote? (If undecided) If you had to choose today, would you vote for Malloy or Foley?

Malloy gets 48%, Foley gets 42% and 2% say they would vote for someone else. However, the Suffolk poll asks

In the race for Governor your ballot lists three candidates in the following order: Republican Tom Foley, Democrat Dan Malloy, Working Families candidate Dan Malloy, or Independent Thomas Marsh. For whom will you vote or toward whom would you LEAN at this time?

This poll has Malloy getting 49% of the vote, Foley only getting 38% and Tom March getting 4%.

All of these polls focus on ‘likely voters’, that is, those who have not been turned off and are thinking about boycotting the election. How would the results change if these unlikely voters, instead of staying home, came out and voted for a minor party candidate? Could the dynamic be changed so that candidates who run negative campaigns run the risk of causing their party to lose major party status?

Personally, I would like to see more candidates talking about their strengths in solving problems and their stances on issues and less time on negative advertisements. Even more important to me is that we increase voter participation in the coming election.

So please, if you don’t like any of the major candidates, don’t sit this election out. Get out and vote for whichever minor candidates you believe would be the best elected officials. If you do like some of the major party candidates, by all means, get out and vote for them, especially if a backlash against negative campaigning could hurt your favorite candidates’ changes.