SOURCE: Kantar Media/CMAG (Campaign Media Analysis Group). Spending includes broadcast TV, local/regional cable and satellite TV, radio and Spanish-language local TV from January 2017 through Election Day (including advance bookings) as of Oct. 30, 2018. *Figures include spending by candidates and PACs, as well as spending during primaries by other candidates. Names shown are for the eventual nominee. Numbers rounded. Spending totals by party exclude advertising by advocacy groups that doesn't explicitly support a specific candidate or party. There are certain peculiarities to the 2018 midterms that have exacerbated the advertising arms race. For example, Florida's governor, Rick Scott, is term-limited and couldn't run again, so he mounted a wildly expensive race for a U.S. Senate seat instead. The lack of an incumbent candidate always creates a vacuum that's handy for sucking up campaign-ad dollars, but things got extra nutty when Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum defied all the odds (and polls) to win the Democratic primary. That means millions were wasted by assorted Democratic gubernatorial wannabes who crashed back to Earth when voters chose Gillum to take on Republican nominee Ron DeSantis. The Democratic machine then had to scramble to give the mayor of Florida's seventh-largest city wide exposure. (Tallahassee's population is just 189,907 in a state with 21 million people.) In Illinois, meanwhile, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, J.B. Pritzker, is a billionaire. By October, he'd blown through more cash—$161.5 million (spent on his campaign operations overall, including advertising)—than any other self-financed candidate in U.S. history, according to NPR. Beyond ad dollars spent, there's another harrowing way to convey the degree to which Americans have been bombarded this midterm season. Kantar Media/CMAG's nationwide political spot count—the total number of TV ad placements for federal- and state-level races—is 4.5 million, Jan. 1-Oct. 30. For the equivalent period in 2016, the tally was 3.2 million—a 43 percent increase. The temptation on Nov. 7 and thereafter is to think, well, at least it's over for now. But of course it's not. A few weeks ago, the Federal Election Commission revealed that President Trump has already amassed a $100 million reelection war chest—the biggest ever for a sitting president. That's going to buy a lot of ads. Ad Age Datacenter (Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Catherine Wolf) partnered with Kantar Media/CMAG (Campaign Media Analysis Group) for this report.
Ad campaign spending in 10 of the most closely contested US mid-term election battles could have exceeded $ 1bn , according to the Ad Age Datacenter ’s analysis of figures from the Ad Age Datacenter which said $ 967.5 m had been spent on the eve of the poll with more spending possible. High spending was shared between Democrats and Republicans , said J.B. Pritzker , depending on the importance of individual areas and politicians. Kantar Media/CMAG ’s statistics also showed the number of mid-term election ads reached 3.2 million the first 10 months of 2016 compared to 3.2 million in between January and October 2018 before the presidential election.