The 2024 US election cycle cost $11.1 billion in political advertising — a new record, up from $9 billion in 2020, and nearly double what was spent in 2016. To put that number in perspective: nearly $1 billion was spent in Halloween week alone, more than most major corporations spend on marketing in an entire year.
Why does this number keep climbing? And where does all that money actually go?
The short answer to the headline question is both simple and more complicated than most people realize: politicians advertise because elections are decided at the margins, and advertising is the most scalable way to move margins. But the mechanics of how that works — and why the spending keeps setting records — is worth understanding in detail, especially as the 2026 midterms approach with projections already trending upward.
The Main Reason: Winning Undecided Voters in a Handful of Places
The core logic of political advertising isn’t to convince a Republican to vote Democrat or vice versa. Converting committed partisans is expensive, time-consuming, and largely futile. The real target is much narrower: undecided and low-propensity voters in competitive districts and states, who often decide close races by margins of a few thousand votes.
In 2024, according to Solomon Partners’ analysis, ad spending was concentrated on less than 3% of registered voters in just seven swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. By October 8, presidential campaign ads in those seven states alone had absorbed $1 billion in local TV spending, representing 79% of all local TV ad expenditures nationally.
Pennsylvania became the first state in US history to cross $1 billion in total political ad spending in a single cycle. Michigan hit $806 million. Wisconsin reached $673 million. The advertising arms race is, at its core, a geographic arms race — saturating the specific places where the election will actually be decided.
That concentration explains something that surprises people: more ad spending doesn’t mean a candidate will win. Kamala Harris’s political operation spent $880 million on advertising since the start of 2023, more than double Trump’s $425 million. She lost. Money doesn’t buy victories — it buys exposure at the scale needed to compete, and outspending your opponent doesn’t guarantee the message will land.
Where the $11.1 Billion Actually Went in 2024
Breaking down the final AdImpact figures reported by NBC News and TV Tech:
Broadcast television: $5.3 billion (48% of total) Traditional linear TV still commands the largest single share of political ad spending, despite years of predictions that it would be eclipsed by digital. The reason is reach: broadcast TV delivers the most voters per dollar in competitive markets, particularly older voters who turn out reliably and who campaign data shows are harder to reach efficiently through other channels.
Connected TV (CTV): $2.3 billion (21% of total) CTV — streaming platforms including Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, and YouTube TV — was the fastest-growing category in 2024, up 506% versus 2020. It combines the trust and production value of traditional TV with digital targeting precision. Eight out of 10 US households owned at least one CTV device in 2024, making it the channel that bridged the gap between broadcast scale and digital targeting. Unlike traditional TV, many CTV ads are non-skippable and can be targeted by voter file data — meaning campaigns can serve ads specifically to registered independents in a specific zip code, rather than buying a blanket broadcast market.
Digital (social, display, search): $1.9 billion (17% of total) The Brennan Center, OpenSecrets, and Wesleyan Media Project’s joint analysis counted at least $1.9 billion in digital spending across Meta, Google, Snap, and X alone — and noted this is almost certainly an underestimate, since not all platforms publish spending data. Democrats significantly outspent Republicans online, with Democratic campaigns and allied groups spending over $182 million on Meta compared to $45 million from Republican-aligned groups.
Cable TV: $1.37 billion (12% of total) Linear cable fell by nearly $400 million versus 2020, losing ground directly to CTV. This trend will likely continue through 2026 and 2028 as cable subscriber numbers keep declining.
Radio and other: $440 million (4% of total) Radio remains disproportionately effective in specific markets — particularly rural areas where it reaches commuters and workers in ways digital doesn’t — but its share of total spending has steadily shrunk.
The New Frontier: Influencers, Podcasts, and Dark Money
The $11.1 billion figure, large as it is, may significantly undercount what was actually spent to influence the 2024 election. Two categories are growing rapidly and largely outside the reporting framework.
Influencer spending. According to the Brennan Center’s analysis, more than a quarter of digital content creators were approached about promoting political content in 2024. The Harris campaign paid over $4 million to influencer-focused firms including Village Marketing Agency and Good Influence. Turning Point USA claimed to have partnered with hundreds of online content creators for the Trump side. These payments are not required to be disclosed by platforms, advertisers, or the influencers themselves — meaning this spending is essentially invisible to the tracking systems that produced the $11.1 billion figure.
Podcasting. Political advertising’s slow shift to digital has lagged commercial advertising significantly — while commercial advertisers put 78% of their media budgets into digital, political campaigns allocated just 36% there in 2024. But podcasting is where the asymmetry was most striking. Right-wing podcasts had nearly three times the audience of left-wing ones as of late 2024, and four of the top 10 podcasts overall in the US in April 2025 featured right-wing voices. Joe Rogan’s endorsement interview with Trump attracted 50 million views — an audience reach that no conventional ad buy could replicate at any price.
Dark money. The Wesleyan Media Project’s analysis found that 35% of all federal election ad spots were sponsored by outside groups, and that the vast majority of outside group ads in the final seven weeks came from “partial disclosing groups” — organizations that accepted contributions from dark money sources, making it impossible to trace the underlying donors. A mysterious network of paid influencers ran a coordinated attack on Harris with participants reportedly earning over $20,000 for their involvement. The Department of Justice indicted Russian operatives for allegedly funneling $10 million to Tenet Media for right-wing content promotion.
Why Campaigns Start Spending Earlier Every Cycle
The chatgpt article on this topic mentioned that campaigns start earlier — but it didn’t explain the structural reason why. It’s not just ambition or paranoia. It’s the media environment.
Tech for Campaigns’ 2024 digital advertising report makes this explicit: “Political persuasion has fundamentally changed. Persuasion shouldn’t begin a few months before Election Day. It requires continuous engagement throughout the four-year cycle with candidates, left-wing groups and other advocates building the brand and the relationship with voters.”
The reason is audience formation. By the time an election year arrives, voters have already received consistent messaging for years from partisan media ecosystems — podcasts, YouTube channels, newsletters, social media accounts they follow every week. A campaign that starts advertising six months out is trying to compete with content that’s been shaping opinions for four years. The only way to do that effectively is to extend the timeline — which means spending starts earlier and never really stops.
The result is a permanent campaign economy where ad spending between cycles is now treated as table stakes, not as unusual.
Does Political Advertising Actually Work?
The honest answer from the research is: it depends on what you mean by “work.”
What advertising can do: Motivate existing supporters to actually turn out and vote. Raise name recognition for lesser-known candidates who would otherwise never break through. Frame issues in ways that stick in voters’ memory. Sway genuinely undecided voters at the margins — and in close races, margins determine outcomes.
What advertising often can’t do: Convert committed partisans. Overcome fundamentally unfavorable conditions like a bad economy or an unpopular incumbent. Make a weak candidate appear strong to voters who have other sources of information.
The 2024 result illustrates this clearly. Harris massively outspent Trump on advertising by most measures. Trump won anyway — partly because, as Solomon Partners notes, Trump received 62% of all news media mentions between July 22 and October 7 compared to 38% for Harris, giving his campaign an effective “unpaid media” advantage that no ad budget can easily replicate.
That dynamic — where earned media (coverage, viral moments, podcast appearances) increasingly substitutes for paid media for well-known candidates — is one reason campaign strategists are investing more in influencer relationships and podcast appearances even as broadcast ad spending remains high.
What This Means for 2026 and Beyond
The 2026 midterm cycle has already begun. Incumbent senators in competitive states are running ads. PAC money is moving. CTV spending is projected to continue its steep growth trajectory, and influencer spending — largely untracked and unregulated — is expected to grow faster than any other category.
Solomon Partners predicts 2028 will be another record cycle for political advertising. There’s no structural reason to expect otherwise. The attention economy keeps fragmenting. The number of platforms keeps expanding. The campaigns that understand the current media landscape earlier and better than their opponents will have a meaningful advantage — and the price of that advantage keeps rising.
The $11.1 billion spent in 2024 isn’t the ceiling. It’s the floor for whatever comes next.
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