What do campaign ads buy you in 2026? It may not be much, experts say.
If ads do sway more people to vote, current research suggests they increase turnout only by about 1%, said Katherine Haenschen.
Much of the campaign storyline leading up to the 2026 U.S. midterm elections can be summed up in two words: big money.
Spending on political advertising this cycle is on track to be the highest in U.S. history, with ad expenditures expected to reach $11.6 billion, according to the advertising intelligence firm AdImpact. That anticipated spending surpasses the 2022 midterm record of $8.9 billion, as well as the $11.2 billion spent in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
Key races have generated eye-popping contributions from single donors, with billionaire Elon Musk pouring more than $366 million into super PACS supporting Republicans. A roughly $158 million check Musk wrote last month went to a group in Texas backing Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
The midterms on Tuesday are also on track to set a record for outside political spending by PACs, super PACs and other groups. Outside groups had reported roughly $3.49 billion in independent expenditures by Oct. 27, about 79% more than at the same point in the 2022 midterm cycle, according to an independent analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.
For many observers, the spending generates questions about the return on investment — and where that money is most effective.
Take political advertising, which can account for a significant chunk of overall expenditures. If ads do sway more people to vote, current research suggests they increase turnout only by about 1%, said Katherine Haenschen, an associate professor in Northeastern University’s departments of communication studies and political science.
The difficulty, she said, is that it’s hard to separate the persuasive effects of the ads from all the other factors influencing a voter’s decision.
The question of ad spending really has to do with persuasion — whether an ad moves people to get out and vote, she said. “Certain factors seem to make ads more persuasive than others, but effect sizes aren’t particularly large,” she said.
That said, “they’re large enough to matter when elections are going to be close,” Haenschen added.
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But not getting out the vote can also be a major goal of political ads — particularly negative ones, said Koen Pauwels, distinguished professor of marketing at Northeastern.
“A lot of the negative ads that a candidate may use to target audiences who prefer your opposing candidate is not to make them prefer you, because that’s impossible — it’s to stop them from making the effort to go to the voting booth,” Pauwels said. “If you can just convince people not to make the effort to go out and vote for your opposing candidates, that’s a benefit.”
One large study of 146 political advertising experiments conducted through the platform Swayable during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles found that ads had measurable but generally small persuasive effects. Haenschen said that comparative research has found that some ads perform better than others, but that historically “there’s no clear pattern” to what makes an ad persuasive across different campaigns and election cycles.
Compared with many other countries, the U.S. has a loosely regulated campaign finance system with relatively few limits on independent political spending, particularly by outside groups and wealthy donors. Candidates can raise money directly for their campaigns, while individuals and organizations can also spend independently to support or oppose candidates.
Super PACs can raise unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations and unions for independent spending, but cannot legally coordinate their expenditures with candidates’ campaigns. The system is largely a product of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling, which paved the way for those entities to spend unlimited amounts independently to influence elections.
Political campaigns have adopted many of the same digital marketing strategies as commercial brands in recent years, with a focus on using online data to tailor ads to particular groups of voters and track whether those ads generate interest, said Yakov Bart, the Patrick F. And Helen C. Walsh research professor of marketing at Northeastern.
In the 2024 presidential election, about $1.9 billion, or roughly 17% of overall ad spending, was directed toward social media platforms such as Meta, Google, Snap and X, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan research and policy institute. Roughly $1.6 billion has been spent on digital platforms so far this cycle, according to AdImpact.
The problem for campaigns leveraging social media channels is that eyeballs alone don’t necessarily translate into votes — nor do they provide any measurable indication of candidate support, Bart said.
With so much ad spending, there’s also the issue of saturation, essentially too many advertisements to capture the attention of voters: When there’s so much money being thrown at ads — and so little data on their effectiveness — campaigns might be “lighting their money on fire” at this point, Haenschen said.
The cost of advertising on Texas television has become so high, Haenschen said, that some super PACs reportedly bought into national football broadcasts because a nationwide ad placement was cheaper than targeting Texas alone. She attributes this to the sheer volume of spending in the Talarico-Paxton race.
“I think we’ve reached the point of saturation,” she said.
Northeastern Global News Reporter Cyrus Moulton contributed to this report.
