Have you ever fantasized about what you might do with the money if you won a lottery, especially an obscenely large one like some of the Powerball payouts?
I have often thought about using such a windfall to create the Quixotic Ad Agency or super PAC to run ads that throw bricks at political campaign ads that are misleading, vacuous, or draw irrelevant inferences. I would not challenge the philosophical right or wrong of a candidate’s positions, just their ads’ disrespect for the voters they are trying to influence.
Consider a few examples from some of this season’s campaigns:
Aaron Ford says he will move Nevada forward without giving us one idea about how he would accomplish this. Nothing is free, but Ford’s ad doesn’t tell us how “moving forward” will be paid for. His promises are political fluff.
Data center malignment has become such a staple of this election cycle that candidates running for offices that have no jurisdiction over them are incorporating it in their campaign ads.
Teresa Benitez-Thompson, for example, is running for a federal congressional seat, but in her campaign ads she threatens to exercise control over Nevada data center decisions — a state, not federal, issue.
Suppose a candidate ran an ad explaining that because of increasing consumer demand for AI and “cloud” storage, they were in favor of data centers built with the latest technology to address the concerns about power and water. Could that change the campaign narrative?
And if a candidate’s decision to support a data center tax abatement was attacked or applauded based on the actual socioeconomic outcomes, couldn’t the voter make better choices in the voting booth?
A perennial campaign ad throwaway line is “eliminate wasteful spending.” “Wasteful” is just about as subjective a term as there is in politics. I would challenge David Flippo to tell us what he considers “wasteful” and how he believes it should be cut.
The ad disparaging Aaron Ford’s $800,000 office remodel spend doesn’t include a disclaimer about the money having been approved by the state legislature, the same as the $571,000 for the governor’s office was. Justified? You decide, but the ad appears to be misleading.
Everything seems to cost a lot more than in 2022, when Joe Lombardo was elected governor, but the slate of “Joe Must Go” ads blame the current governor for the rising cost of things over which he has little or no control. Electricity rates, for example, are managed by the Public Utilities Commission, which is governed by laws passed in the state legislature, not by governor mandate.
The Trump tariffs are another thing over which the governor has no influence. They raise everybody’s costs, but the president doesn’t care what our governor thinks except as it impacts his own ego. Tariffs influence prices from the federal, not state, government.
The same applies to the Iran war's impact on fuel costs. A new governor would have no more influence on the decisions Donald Trump makes about that than the current governor.
Additionally, fuel prices in Nevada are influenced by forces outside the control of the Nevada governor, such as refining and transport infrastructure. Even state fuel taxes have to pass the legislature to become law. This legislature, by the way, is dominated by legislators not of this governor’s party.
In what way does the governor control food costs?
In no case do the anti-Lombardo ads tell us how the governor — this one or one they prefer — can control the costs of any of these things.
We can disagree about what we think is important or who should be in charge of those things. But we should all be using that same set of facts, which is not what is used to make campaign ads.
The list of opportunities to strike out at worthless or misleading campaign ads is nearly endless; my Quixotic Ad Agency would probably be broke before it ever got through one campaign cycle. But I believe it is past time for our electorate to be better educated by political campaigners, and long past time for the electorate to expect better treatment by campaigners who want to have so much influence in our lives.
Winnemucca
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