By Alexander Lomax
Photo Credit: PBS
Every time you turn on your television, almost regardless of the channel, you see it: Ruben Gallego is great, Kari Lake is awful, Kari Lake is great, Ruben Gallego is awful. Rinse and repeat for Trump and Harris. If you watch network television, there’s any excellence chance that the majority of the commercials you see, if not nearly all of them, are some combination of the above.
Welcome to living in a swing state. The multi-billion dollar industry that is the Federal Election Consultancy Complex has a ton of money to spend in limited places, with only about five or so truly competitive states for the Electoral College to decide the presidency, and out of 33 US Senate races, probably less than half are actually competitive, and all of them will host tens of millions of dollars of ads.
Just how bad is it? $150 million…that is the dollar amount of ads in Arizona that have already been reserved. Television? Of course. Social media, definitely. Radio? You betcha. And God help you if you are a regular voter that is registered independent; you can probably expect a few dozen mailers clogging up your mailbox from the start of October until election day.
And like always, we have to question…is it even necessary? When so few voters are truly undecided and most voters are annoyed, what is the point of so much advertising? And you’re largely correct; it comes down to the fact that because the funds are raised, they need to spend them. They need to find every single angle to get your vote, because if a candidate loses by a tight margin but didn’t spend down their account balance, they will never live that down.
But perhaps the biggest proponent of this strategy is the consultancy class. Note that for every television ad you see, the firm that placed that ad gets a 15% commission on that television buy. It’s an extremely scalable business model; you make one 30-second video and can ostensibly spend $5 million advertising a single commercial. 15% of $5 million is $750,000…an incredibly lucrative payday for relatively little work. Perhaps that is the biggest reason why you see so many ads; because the consultants who make the money off of them push for their necessity.
Only 50 or so more days; in the meantime, it almost makes one long for the days when Arizona was a one-party state, so Presidential campaigns never spent a dime here, and no one could compete against Senators John McCain and John Kyl so they never really tried. It was a simpler time, and for those who can’t stand political ads, it was a better time.