In this election year, some long-held campaign beliefs are being proven wrong. Here are three of them: 

Voters don’t pay attention to politics in the summer 

Yes, they do, when there’s something worth listening to. Voters are always paying attention. But so much campaign political discourse today is all about attacking the opponent rather than offering policy prescriptions for what ails them or the country, and it usually fails in its mission to engage voters. 

Add toxic social media and 24/7 negative news content to the mix and you’ve got an unpalatable diet of political messaging that voters see as bordering on the absurd. It always comes down to which politician says the most outrageous thing to get media attention while the other side tries to exploit it. This is a sideshow for voters that they might find mildly entertaining but equally frustrating, as it reflects political discourse that doesn’t address their concerns. 

When important events do occur, even in summer, voters are paying attention and make judgments about them. It was after the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 that President Joe Biden’s job approval went negative and never recovered. The debate between Biden and former President Donald Trump this June was another example.

A presidential debate had never been held that early, and while the actual TV viewership was only 51 million (although there is no near clear number of how many watched it streaming online, or later via clips), the result was historic. A presidential nominee, in this case a sitting president, saw his public opinion numbers drop dramatically, and he was forced to withdraw. Then Vice President Kamala Harris locked up the nomination in the immediate days following, and the entire nature of the presidential race changed. A headline on Yahoo News defined it perfectly as “the month that changed everything.” 

In both these cases, obviously, people were paying attention, and it wasn’t just a few. It was the entire country. Content matters, and when the political discourse lacks that, it also lacks an audience. 

Candidate favorables don’t matter, only driving up the opponent’s negatives 

Candidate favorables are an undervalued political asset that significantly affect a candidate’s ability to have their message heard. For a candidate with high negatives trying to engage voters, getting by their initial reaction, which is likely to be “there’s that guy I don’t like,” poses a serious challenge. Positive messaging is more likely to get them over that hurdle than an attack on their opponent, which will only reinforce the negative views voters already have of the candidate. 

Biden encountered this problem as his brand image deteriorated. His ability to communicate an economic message was hampered as voters tuned out his statements. Campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon dismissed the idea of improving Biden’s favorables earlier this year, telling The New Yorker: “Historically, favorability and vote choice have been correlated. … I actually think that that’s no longer the case.” 

The unfavorables of both Trump and Biden were dominating factors in the environment, but there was no effort from the Biden campaign to try to rebuild the brand advantage he had in the 2020 race over Trump. 2020 exit polls showed 46-52 percent favorable-unfavorable for Trump, 52-46 percent for Biden. 

However, as Biden suffered through the Afghanistan debacle and inflation, and then went negative attacking a good portion of the electorate, his own negatives went up. So did Trump’s as he engaged in the 2022 off-year elections with the harsh rhetoric his base loves and the rest of the country hates. The 2022 exit polls showed Biden dropping to 41-56 percent favorable-unfavorable and Trump dropping to 39-58 percent. 

Biden was hoping his reelection campaign would improve things. But with continuing high negatives, he wasn’t able to move voters, and the reelection campaign stalled. By the end of July he was out of the race. 

Trump has the same problem with his favorables. Looking at his brand image right after Biden dropped out (42-57 favorable-unfavorable from our end-of-July Winning the Issues survey), it was virtually the same as Biden’s (41-57). A matchup of two candidates with similar unfavorables was working reasonably well for the Trump campaign. 

But a new candidate with a slightly better brand image and lower unfavorables entered the race, making it much more competitive. Kamala Harris’ image was not positive (46-50 favorable-unfavorable), but it’s better than Trump’s, and her current edge in polling has shown the benefit of a better brand. 

Yet most campaigns stick to outdated tactics and focus on attacking the opponent rather than promoting their candidate’s ideas regardless of that candidate’s favorability. It’s a waste of resources for many campaigns but makes consultants money and the media, who believe attacks generate eyeballs, happy.

Voters don’t care about issues 

The Trump campaign has encountered more difficulty since Harris entered the race, and Republicans are clamoring for him to focus on issues over personal attacks. He has an advantage on the economy and is ideologically closer to the electorate than is Harris, but he throws away those advantages when he doesn’t focus on issues, talking instead about topics like Harris’ ethnicity. 

This is a continuation from 2022. In that election, independents trusted Republicans by an 11-point margin (52-41) over Democrats to handle inflation, and it was voters’ top issue. Yet Republicans lost them by 2 points (47-49). This was after winning them in 10 consecutive elections with a Democrat in the White House. This was due to the GOP economic ads attacking former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Biden rather than offering a solution that clearly independents were open to listening to. 

In contrast, the Democrats are continuing their 2022 Senate playbook, with their incumbents running on what they’ve done for their states to create some distance from Biden’s unpopularity and positively define themselves. One of the policy examples we see in Democratic campaign ads is a focus on lowering drug prices. In a high-inflation environment with voters having unfavorable views of both parties, conventional campaign attacks aren’t likely to be enough to close the gaps in these races without some focus on the issues. The GOP’s reliance on negative messaging may explain the tightness of so many target races. 

Issue content matters to voters — an obvious statement that for some unfathomable reason needs to be reasserted in this environment. 

David Winston is the president of The Winston Group and a longtime adviser to congressional Republicans. He previously served as the director of planning for Speaker Newt Gingrich. He advises Fortune 100 companies, foundations, and nonprofit organizations on strategic planning and public policy issues, as well as an election analyst for CBS News.