No Off Year for Money
This old year ending soon, 2023, is supposedly an “off year” for elections. But you wouldn’t know it from the money spent on political ads nationally.
The political tracking firm AdImpact says $1.35 billion was spent on political ads this year…a record for off-year races. It’s up 1.3 percent from two years before…and a whopping 24 percent increase from just four years ago, in 2019.
There were races for governor in both Kentucky and Louisiana…nearly $93 million was spent in Kentucky, and more than $30 million in Louisiana.
Ballot initiatives in states like Ohio also attracted a lot of attention, and ad spending. $28 million was spent there on an August ballot proposal that would have raised the vote threshold for amending the state’s constitution from 50 percent to 60 percent. Then in November, a ballot measure to put the right to abortion in the Ohio constitution led to another $42.3 million in ad spending from a variety of issue groups.
Another record was set in our neighbor to the northeast, Wisconsin…the most expensive state judicial election in U.S. history, with more than $40 million being spent. We have retention votes here in Iowa; they elect members of the state Supreme Court directly.
And of course, with the Iowa Caucuses barely two weeks away, there’s been a lot of spending on that as well–$277 million spent so far, primarily in Iowa and New Hampshire, and virtually all by Republicans…although Democrats have spent $54 million in support of Joe Biden’s re-election.
By the time of the Caucus, AdImpact estimates that Nikki Haley is on track to spend $49 million on ads, ahead of both Ron DeSantis at $47.4 million, and Donald Trump at $43.1 million.
The new year will be just the beginning of no doubt another record.
