The deluge of political advertising in this year’s midterm elections is shattering previous records.
Almost half of that money is going to a surprising place: your local TV channel.
Advertisers, following the changing viewing habits of Americans, have increasingly shifted their marketing dollars to social platforms, streaming channels and other digital media. Yet when it comes to federal and state races, politicians and PACs are brushing aside concerns that TV ads are costlier to produce and less efficient in targeting prospective voters — and are showering local stations with billions of dollars.
This election will show how much that calculus still holds in a transformed media environment.
“I think the Democrats and Republicans are both spending a disproportionate amount of their budgets on broadcast TV at this point,” said Danielle Butterfield, a Democratic strategist and the executive director of Priorities USA. “Because you can see so clearly what’s happening on the other side, there’s this muscle memory needing to chase and match.”
Political consultants and television executives argue that while broadcast TV may not be what it once was, those ads can reach a larger swath of the population more quickly than through other media. And that audience watching their nightly news programs, not to mention their favorite sitcoms, dramas and football games, is a devoted one.
“Local anchors and reporters are trusted, familiar voices,” said Gregg Siegel, senior vice president of national sales at Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the country’s largest owners of local TV stations. “They don’t just cover the communities they serve. They live there, raise their families there and are part of the fabric of those communities. That connection creates a level of credibility that is difficult to replicate on other platforms.”
The amount of money being spent on political advertising this election cycle is staggering, helping to boost the bottom lines of the biggest local broadcasting companies like Sinclair, Nexstar Media Group, Gray Media, Tegna and the E.W. Scripps Company.
The research firm S&P Global projects broadcast television advertising this year to be 15 percent higher than the last nonpresidential election year in 2022. And political ad revenue alone is expected to account for 16.3 percent of total broadcast revenue for the year, which would be a record for a nonpresidential election year.
During this election cycle, total political advertising is expected to reach $11.6 billion by Election Day, according to AdImpact; $5.6 billion (48 percent) is flowing to broadcast. That dollar figure is even higher than the one during the 2024 presidential race, when $5.3 billion was spent on broadcast advertising, still 48 percent of the total.
That growth is an outlier in the overall advertising market, where TV’s share continues to shrink as do the overall dollars. In 2024, for example, TV made up 15 percent of all ad spending in the United States, according to the research firm eMarketer. This year, projections envision that figure to be 10 percent.
Nowhere is the broadcast TV blitz more evident than in Texas, where more than half a billion dollars will be spent in the Senate runoff, primaries and general election campaigns.
Oscar Rodriguez, the president of the Texas Association of Broadcasters, said stations in all 20 media markets across the state were seeing ad buys, rather than just a few individual markets. “This is an election where clearly every single vote is going to matter,” he said.
In the tight Senate race between Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate, and James Talarico, his Democratic opponent, $220 million had been spent on broadcast ads through Oct. 28, more than half of the total spending, according to AdImpact. The Paxton campaign and its Republican allies account for most of the broadcast TV outlays, and much of that has been supported by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with deep business ties to Texas.
Nick Maddux, a senior adviser to Mr. Paxton, said that it was most efficient for the campaign to spend money on linear television because of federal rules that ensure candidates (and at least for now, political parties and joint fund-raising committees) get low-cost TV ad rates.
The campaign’s statewide ad onslaught in October resulted in some ad breaks airing three Paxtons spots for every one Talarico ad.
“You go big and fast,” Mr. Maddux said.
Luke Warford, a Democratic political consultant in Texas and chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party, said the Talarico campaign had focused more on building Mr. Talarico’s brand on social media. But the campaign and its Democratic allies have still spent heftily on broadcast TV, devoting 45 percent of their budgets to the medium through Oct. 28, according to AdImpact. (Republicans are at 60 percent.)
Advertising on television can be a blunt force approach to reaching prospective voters, particularly in House races where viewers are often bombarded with ads for candidates in districts not their own. Danilo Yanich, a University of Delaware professor who runs the school’s Local Television News Project, said that’s a trade-off campaigns and PACs will take. “They’ll tolerate those inefficiencies because they’re not sure which voters they will not reach if they try to do those directed kinds of advertising campaigns.”
“Local television viewers are very serious voters,” he added.
And the people who watch broadcast television are often those who vote.
“The kinds of people who tend to be very likely to vote in midterm elections tend to lean older,” Joshua Kalla, a professor of political science at Yale, said. “And those people still watch a whole bunch of broadcast TV.”
There’s another incentive driving this advertising strategy: money. Consultants and media buying firms typically take up to a 15 percent commission on their ad buys, which, given some of the multimillion dollar spends, can quickly add up.
Aaron Evans, a Republican campaign consultant, said that while broadcast had historically “been the beast that moves the numbers,” it was getting less effective every election cycle.
“The thing that is making that industry really outlast its effectiveness is the fact its been a cash cow for these consulting firms for decades,” he said.
Some political operatives bemoan what they see as an outdated approach to advertising. During this year’s primaries, several candidates who were vastly outspent on TV ads still prevailed, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who triumphed over his Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, in Michigan.
Ms. Butterfield, the Democratic strategist, pointed to internal research from Priorities USA that found that 83 percent of registered voters reported in using YouTube and 82 percent used streaming services in a single week in September, while just 61 percent said they watched linear TV. She said that ads on digital platforms, which were much cheaper than TV ads, could see a higher reach and have a more targeted impact.
“The biggest difference between a broadcast television strategy and a digital strategy is how much the campaign actually uses the internet to not just broadcast and shout at a voter, but understand where that voter is, what they care about,” she said.
Mr. Warford, the Democratic political consultant, said Tuesday’s vote would help answer a question about the broadcast television-heavy ad strategy in support of Mr. Paxton. “Is there an amount of money that can save an incredibly weak candidate in a tough environment at the end?”
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