I found an LA Times article online featuring a list of the best and the worst campaign advertisements of 2016. The majority of the ads are from candidates who are no longer in the race, but the article was still interesting. (LA Times Article)

The advertisement that stood out to me most was Hilary Clinton’s “Brave” (which can be viewed here). The ad features a young Latina girl speaking in a shaky voice at a Clinton event. In it, she expresses her fear of her family being deported after receiving a notice of deportation in the mail. She begins to cry and Clinton promptly comforts her and tells her not to worry, because she’ll do all the worrying for her. Clinton is clearly the democratic party’s candidate, so the ad was targeted at liberals, but more specifically it was target towards Latino and immigrant voters. And very effectively at that. The ad yanks at the heartstrings and makes Clinton seem personable and compassionate towards the plight of illegal immigrants and overall promoting her platform on immigration.

I’m registered to vote in Gwinnett County, and according to the sample ballot I am able to vote for president, congress members, house and congress members, the public service commissioner, house and congress members for the the state of Georgia specifically, district attorney for the Gwinnett judicial circuit, sheriff, tax commissioner, county commission chairman, county commissioner, school board commissioner, soil and water conservation district supervisor, and a number of ballot measures, none of which I was aware of until I looked at the sample ballot. There is also a special election for an local sales tax referendum. Since Georgia is a Republican state, all of the unopposed runners were Republicans. Go figure.

These advertisements very much encourage gender stereotypes. The boys’ ads are hyper-masculine in every way, which is a little difficult to notice until you isolate the audio from the visual part of the ad. The voices in the boys’ ads are ridiculously exaggerated, and the girls’–extremely feminine and dainty–aren’t much better. The male-targeted ads almost exclusively promote violence and rough play, with the female-targeted ads were mostly concerned with fashion and caring for pets and babies (or a bizarre combination of both). These ads a perpetuate gender roles and stereotypes in every way imaginable, and what’s worse is that they are specifically marketing their products to young children who will surely internalize these stereotypes for perhaps the rest of their lives.