Why so many candidates want to scare you to the polls this midterm election

As the 47 panicky fundraising emails that attacked your inbox since the start of this sentence may have mentioned, the most important election of all time is upon us. Again.

“Elections are always important,” former President Obama said in an ad for Senate candidate Maggie Hassan last month. “But this year, the future of our country really is on the ballot.”

If Obama’s rhetoric isn’t convincing enough, just listen to the money: Our fourth consecutive existential-threat election has been marked by unprecedented political ad spending, estimated at nearly $10 billion. Whether it comes from dark money groups, Super PACs, or a candidate’s own pocket, all of that cash just goes to show how much this election matters to the most powerful people—while the ads themselves communicate how much the election should matter to you. (Even more than the last one! Or the one before that!)

As the brutally long and unruly campaign cycle winds down, here’s how both sides have been making their closing arguments.

The Republican ramp-up on crime messaging

One effective way to paint your political opponent as maybe not a great person is to depict that candidate attending a Villains’ Anonymous meeting with the Joker and Satan. Another is to dress up a bunch of Boomers as history’s least intimidating biker gang and have them complain that the candidate in question killed one of the troupe’s grandmothers. However, the most reliable Republican tactic for slinging mud is to brand one’s adversary as soft on crime.

Some candidates have been using this classic strategy since the start of the race—including one who falsely insisted last year that his opponent wanted to free a cannibal killer—but for a long time the main thrust of GOP messaging seemed to be about inflation and high gas prices. The message certainly resonated for a while. Blue-leaning PACs like House Majority Forward rebutted with ads about gas price-gouging, but they were of little relevance to anyone having to choose between gas and, say, dog food. As pain at the pump started to subside in August, though, it seemed like a different line of attack might fare better in November.

Although inflation is still a big part of GOP messaging—as in a recent pair of ads featuring the same woman playing, alternately, an outraged Georgian and an outraged Nevadan—crime has now taken center stage. In lockstep with the huge explosion in crime coverage on Fox News since September, more and more conservative ads present the opposition as pro-crime. (Never mind how many GOP ads paradoxically also appear to advocate for political violence.)

Among the most popular ways these ads portray their opponents as crime-lovers is to misrepresent any effort at criminal justice reform as putting murderers back on the street. Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, for instance, has centered ads this past month around opponent Mandela Barnes’s past support for a cashless bail system. Anyone who has supported bail reform in the past two years has apparently made crime worse and, according to this ad, also fueled an “illegal stream across Biden’s open border.” And only when Dr. Oz started drilling his opponent John Fetterman’s push for clemency in recent ads did he start gaining ground in the crucial Senate race in Pennsylvania.

Highlighting any association with the Defund the Police movement is also popular, no matter how tenuous the connection. One of Senator Johnson’s ads places Barnes, a Black man, on a Mt. Rushmore with left-of-center Dems Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and Ilhan Omar; the word “DIFFERENT” floating under their faces. (Make of that what you will.) Democratic candidate for Governor Tina Kotek “stood with Defund the Police,” her opponent claimed in an October ad, which turned out to mean she has an endorsement from an Oregon teachers union . . . that posted a Facebook message about defunding the police . . . in 2020.

Why must these far-left extremists be so extreme?!

The focus on crime has Democrats on the ropes, distancing themselves from the moment in summer 2020 when everyone briefly had wacky ideas about curbing police brutality and overreach. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has new ads out bragging about tougher bail laws, while the Fetterman campaign recently put out an ad in which a sheriff boasts about how the candidate has voted with law enforcement 90% of the time. These defensive ads are probably not the kind these candidates thought they would be making so close to election day.

Here is what they’ve been doing when they go on the offense.

The Democratic embrace of a woman’s right to choose

After ads calling him “Glenn Trumpkin” failed to keep Republican Glenn Youngkin from winning a Virginia governor’s seat last fall, Democrats seemed to have an epiphany: Maybe linking candidates to Donald Trump isn’t the best and only way to turn persuadable voters against those candidates. (Not everyone had this epiphany.) Strategists working for Dems in the midterms knew they needed something else to build ads around—besides President Biden’s popularity, of course—and then along came the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Protecting reproductive rights had long been a pillar of the Democratic platform and, in 2022, that pillar was knocked down in several states. The resulting chaos and uncertainty added untold urgency around electing pro-choice candidates around the country—and that urgency is reflected in the ads for these candidates. NBC News recently reported that in the first half of September, abortion was the leading topic among all political ads, with Democrats overwhelmingly running more ads on the topic.

Last week, Fetterman’s campaign quickly turned around an ad based on Dr. Oz’s debate night line about women consulting their doctors and “local political leaders” before getting an abortion. One of the most effective political ads of the year, though, had already made Dr. Oz’s line literal several months earlier.

The ad, from a group called Mothers Against Greg Abbott—yes, MAGA—shows a doctor giving a pregnant woman and her partner the worst possible news about their unborn child. The doctor appears to be steering the couple toward aborting the pregnancy, but then adds, “There’s only one person who can make this choice—and that person is Greg.”

“Who the f—k is Greg?” the husband rightly wonders. (Greg Abbott is the Governor of Texas.)

It’s as smart and funny as it is dark, depicting just one of the many complicating factors of the abortion argument while also showing how preposterous it looks to leave that argument up to some guy named Greg. Some other Democratic political ads have also dramatized life in a post-Roe world in their spots and come across as perhaps too Handmaid’s Tale-esque.

The idea of women being arrested for having an abortion isn’t exactly the stuff of science fiction, though. After a Missouri woman told her true story of having to cross state lines to get a life-saving abortion in an ad for the Democratic attorney general candidate last month, that woman became the subject of a state health department investigation. If some ads are a bit too dramatic, well, so is the reality. The greater danger in Democratic ads in the topic is exaggerating opponents’ stance abortion to include no exceptions, as some have done.

Ultimately, though, the closing argument for Democrats has to be about more than the fight for reproductive rights, and the ads are starting to reflect as much. Louisiana Congressional candidate Katie Darling recently released an ad in which she gives birth on camera (!) to underscore her thoughts on reproductive rights—while also managing to express concern about climate change and underperforming public schools.

The latest ad against North Carolina Senate candidate Ted Budd spends half its runtime on his abortion stance and then pivots to fileting his stance on Social Security. Finally, Minnesota rep Angie Craig’s latest ad touts some recent Democrats accomplishments, mainly the drug pricing reform in the Inflation Reduction Act, before getting into her opponent’s thoughts on women’s bodily autonomy. It’s the rare ad from a Democrat that even flicks at what the spending bills Republicans have nailed them on will actually do for people.

There are practical reasons why Democrats can’t shout from the rooftops about their bipartisan gun bill or how much money the recent climate bill will save Americans in the future. The fact that both sides mainly seem to run ads in which fear is the prime motivator, though, is dispiriting. The level of danger seems to always be going up, like the rent, and the language to describe it feels like hyperbole even when it isn’t. The only way to get people to vote seems to be convincing them that the future of the country uniquely hinges on this particular election.

Will there ever be an election that doesn’t feel like the most important of all time again? Or are we civically yoked to an all-hands-on-deck, full throttle emergency every two years in perpetuity? Perhaps we’ll find out in 2024, the next most important election ever.