The Big Money
More than 2.1 billion-with-a-b dollars has already been booked in political campaign ad spending in this year’s midterm elections…that’s for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, gubernatorial and other races. The estimate comes from Ad Age’s “campaign ad scorecard”.
This includes TV, radio, and tracked digital advertising in this calendar year, as of the beginning of the month, and does include both official campaigns and the political action committees that support them. And in this post-pandemic era, one of the few things that inflation has not touched is advertising rates–so this is a true increase in spending from the last midterm.
So far, the most money is being spent on Senate races nationally, at 878 million of the 2.1 billion…Republicans are slightly outspending Democrats, but it’s basically even. Races for governor rank second in spending at 517 million, and again, while Republicans are slightly outspending Democrats, it’s about even.
U.S. House campaigns account for nearly the same amount of spending as governor’s races, but many got a slow start because redistricting plans in many states were not set early on, and some of those primaries are not coming up until August.
It should come as no surprise that the three states where the most money is being spent on U.S. Senate races are Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona…in both Georgia and Arizona, Democrats are far outspending Republicans in order to hold on to those two shaky seats.
It would appear that as in the past, 44 percent of the money will go to broadcast TV stations, with connected TV in second place, and over-the-air radio stations coming in third. But analysts say watch for web ads to tick up late in the campaigns, designed to reach those late to make up their minds.
