Leadership Quote by Scott McCallum

Politics rarely admits what this line says outright: negativity is not a lapse, it is a market response. McCallum frames campaign messaging like a lab experiment gone wrong. They "went positive" briefly, watched the tracking polls dip, and concluded the audience had trained them back into attack mode. The intent is defensive candor - an attempt to rationalize ugly tactics as reluctant pragmatism rather than appetite. If negative ads proliferate, he suggests, blame the incentives, not the operator.

The subtext is sharper: voters are cast less as citizens than as a behavioral dataset. "You do the tracking" turns democratic persuasion into consumer analytics, with feelings measured in percentage points. The sentence also performs moral laundering. By attributing the shift to "the course of the campaign", he removes agency, as if negativity arrives like weather. Even the passive construction - "went negative" - sidesteps the fact that people choose to punch.

Context matters here: mid-century American politics drifted into a consultant-driven era where message discipline and polling became the real campaign trail. McCallum is speaking from inside that machine, where a one-week experiment in uplift reads as an unaffordable luxury. The most revealing phrase is "those type of ads": a slight wince, a distancing gesture, as though the content is beneath mention.

What makes the quote work is its accidental indictment. It doesn't just confess tactics; it sketches a feedback loop in which campaigns assume voters want ugliness, voters get ugliness, and every poll becomes proof that ugliness is what works.