With just over a month until Election Day, there are a number of very close races – but that isn’t the case in Michigan, where Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer commands a 17-point lead over Trump-back Republican challenger Tudor Dixon, according to the latest polls. In September, Democrats had funded millions of dollars in TV ads – while the Republican Party has been relatively quiet.
The result is that Whitmer continues to surge ahead in the race for the governor’s seat in the Great Lake State.
“It’s not tightening because nobody has done the work within the Republican electorate to let them know who their candidates are,” Richard Czuba, a pollster and founder of the Glengariff Group, told The Detroit News on Monday.
Tudor Dixon’s campaign has not produced any new ads to sway voters, so a group from the Gratiot County Republican Party stepped up with their own. The low-budget clip, which features a small group of elderly bikers discussing the issues in Michigan, was first noted by Craig Mauger of The Detroit News, who shared the video on Twitter.
“Republican Tudor Dixon’s campaign for governor hasn’t been running TV ads this fall. So the Gratiot County Republican Party apparently came up with its own. From the county party’s Facebook page,” tweeted @CraigDMauger.
It is unclear if Mauger helped the video go viral, but it has already been seen nearly a million times. It has been widely mocked for its production values and bad acting – so much so that it even caught the attention of Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing, who wrote, “I demand that the Discovery channel gives this ensemble of septuagenarian motorcycle outlaw cosplayers their own reality show. Look at the swell performance they gave for the Gratiot County Republican Party, who produced this delightful campaign ad for GOP Tudor Dixon’s gubernatorial campaign.”
Gone Viral – And Cost Little
Despite the fact that it is receiving plenty of mockery, the “characters” in the minute-long video do essentially bring up Dixon’s main talking points. Even if most people are laughing, the video is certainly getting a lot of attention.
“Humor is not generally included in the political propaganda canon – which these campaign ads very much are. That’s because humor – or satire – can backfire, offend, and do precisely the opposite of what a candidate seeks to do – attract votes,” explained Susan Campbell, distinguished lecturer in the Department of Communications, Film and Media Studies at the University of New Haven.
“A satirist such as Pat Paulsen in his multiple runs for the office of president knows precisely how deeply to cut,” added Campbell. “The rest of us should stick to being serious. Remember Mike Gravel’s 2008 ad where he threw a rock into a body of water and walked away? What did that mean? What does he stand for? The candidate was actually pretty outspoken, but not in this ad.”
The recent ad from the Gratiot County Republican Party hasn’t apparently received an endorsement from the Dixon campaign, but it also appears that the candidate hasn’t tried to distance herself either. Given the lead her opponent currently commands, perhaps there is the feeling that this will bring attention to the issues.
With nearly a million views and counting, the ad might not change voter opinions but it could give the Dixon campaign some needed buzz.
“The hope, I suppose, is that people will look at these ads, laugh, and then do some research, but I think history shows that that last part of the equation rarely happens. People don’t dig deeper. They watch an ad, and they move on,” explained Campbell.
It also shows how social media can change the role of ads, especially in an era where people are able to fast-forward past commercials, and where many younger voters have increasingly turned to streaming platforms – which are typically free of political ads.
“In the case of some of these home-grown, unintentionally funny ads, I think they do more harm than good, and when I first saw the Tudor Dixon aging-biker-gang ad, I thought it was a witty effort by her opponent,” Campbell continued. “Anyone who’s even mildly paying attention to politics would see the Dixon ad and laugh at the poor script, bad acting, and general backyard feel of it. For good or ill, campaigns on the scale of gubernatorial races demand professional messaging, but that doesn’t seem to be a concern for Dixon, whose plea online is for people to donate so she can ‘crush Democrats.’ Even this particular ad only laments the job done by the current governor.”
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