This will be the most expensive election in American history.
AdImpact projects $11.6 billion in political advertising for the 2025-26 cycle. That beats the $11.2 billion spent in 2024, which included a presidential race, and it dwarfs the $8.9 billion spent during the last midterms.
Total spending and future reservations crossed ten billion dollars this week, with less than three weeks to go.
To put that in human terms: the television portion alone is roughly equal to what advertisers spent on the first fifty-nine Super Bowls combined.
Now look at what it bought.
Republicans are not being outspent. Republicans are being out-organized.
Since Labor Day, Republican groups have put more than $740 million into House and Senate races. At least $220 million of that came from Trump-aligned groups. Elon Musk has given another $276 million to Republican organizations since July, bringing his cycle total to $366 million.
The Senate Leadership Fund raised a record $272.9 million between July and September, roughly $122 million more than its Democratic counterpart. The Congressional Leadership Fund raised a record $94.4 million in the same quarter and entered October with $156 million in the bank.
Across the whole cycle, Republicans have outspent Democrats on broadcast and digital advertising.
And CNBC's assessment of what that produced is blunt: the spending advantage has generated little movement in the major Senate battlegrounds.
Little movement. After three quarters of a billion dollars since September alone.
Worse, the money is buying less than it should.
Here is a detail most conservatives have never been told, and it should make every donor angry.
Federal law guarantees candidates the lowest unit rate for broadcast advertising. Super PACs get no such protection. They pay market rate, which in the final weeks of a competitive race is dramatically higher.
So when money flows through a super PAC instead of to a candidate, the same dollar buys substantially fewer people watching. CNBC found Republican super PACs often paying considerably more than candidates for comparable exposure.
Most of the Republican advantage this cycle arrived late, and it arrived through super PACs.
Late money, bought at a premium, in a saturated market, aimed at voters who have been watching political ads since Labor Day.
And then they started pulling out.
In April, the Senate Leadership Fund announced a record $342 million advertising program across eight states, designed to protect the majority and expand the map.
By October, the group pulled most of its remaining North Carolina reservations after spending roughly $32.8 million there, as Roy Cooper held a double-digit lead.
The Congressional Leadership Fund cut off support for two vulnerable Republican incumbents, including Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa, one of our eleven. Another Republican super PAC moved fourteen million dollars to bail out Kansas, a state no Democrat has won for the Senate in ninety-four years.
Those are not the moves of an operation that believes advertising is working.
Here is why it is not working, and it is not complicated.
Ads persuade. The problem is that persuasion is not what is broken.
Trafalgar has the Texas Senate race at 46.4 to 45.2 and Iowa at 44.0 to 42.1. In both, the Libertarian candidate is polling larger than the margin between the two major candidates. Iowa still has more than ten percent undecided this late.
Those voters are not confused about which party they prefer. They agree with us on taxes, on the border, on energy, on nearly everything that matters. They are registering a protest, or they have not gotten around to it, or nobody has asked them.
You cannot thirty-second-spot your way out of that. A commercial does not know whether a man in Burlington has mailed his ballot. It cannot tell him his signature needs to match. It cannot drive his mother to the county office.
A neighbor can.
The cheapest vote in American politics is the one you already have.
Every analysis of this cycle says the same thing. Republicans hold the money advantage. Democrats hold the enthusiasm advantage.
Enthusiasm cannot be purchased in the final three weeks at any price, and eleven billion dollars is the proof.
But it can be organized, and that costs almost nothing.
Early in-person voting is open in roughly twenty states. Ballots are out in twenty. North Carolina is voting. Texas, South Carolina, Colorado, Alaska and Arkansas opened this week. Florida opens the 24th.
If you have a ballot, return it this week and follow the signature and identification instructions exactly, because most rejected ballots are rejected over envelope defects.
Then take three conservatives who vote irregularly and make them your personal project. Not persuasion. Logistics. Do they know the date. Do they know where to go. Do they need a ride.
Seventeen days.
Eleven point six billion dollars will have been spent by November 3, and the consultants who spent it will have other clients in 2028 regardless of the outcome.
The majority will be decided by a few thousand people in a handful of states who either returned a ballot or did not.
No amount of money reaches them. You can.
