Democrats hold slight edge in ad wars as election nears, report says

As the midterm election nears, Democrats are hanging on to a slim edge in the expensive television ad war for control of the U.S. Senate, according to a new study that says overall ad spending in the races is approaching the $1-billion mark.

Driven by a flood of spending by outside groups, more than 728,000 ads have been shown in Senate races, and an additional 700,000 have aired on behalf of candidates running for governor, the analysis released Tuesday by the Wesleyan Media Project says.

Overall spending on House, Senate and governor campaigns is already more than $917 million. By election day, broadcast stations will have aired more than 2 million political commercials – a total that’s unlikely to surprise voters in competitive states like Iowa and North Carolina, where the barrage of ads has been unrelenting for months.

In spite of an influx of spending on behalf of Republican candidates, more ads favoring Democrats aired Sept. 26 to Oct. 9 in 10 of the 15 top-spending Senate races, the analysis shows. That’s largely because Republicans are relying more heavily on outside groups to buy the commercials, rather than the candidates themselves, who are entitled to the lowest rates offered by television stations in the last 60 days before an election.

Republicans “are not getting as much bang for their buck as Democrats,” Michael Franz, the project’s co-director, said in the report. He said, though, that the strategy may pay off, because research shows that ads by outside groups may be more effective at swaying voters.

The study confirms the increasing dominance of “super PACs” and other outside groups that accept unlimited contributions. Forty percent of the Senate ads are paid for by outside groups, up from 32% in 2102. The biggest spending group, at $3.8 million, was Crossroads GPS, a conservative nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its donors; more than a quarter of ads in that two-week cycle were paid for by so-called dark money groups, the report found.

Many Republican ad buyers are writing checks for another round of bashing the Affordable Care Act, with the volume of ads criticizing the law up by nearly half in House and Senate races in that two-week period. While Democratic themes vary from state to state, GOP-leaning commercials across the country stick closely to themes of Obamacare, deficits and jobs.

If it seems to voters that many of the airwave campaigns are drowning in negativity, the report confirms it. In the Arkansas Senate race, about 69% of ads were negative, the report found, the highest percentage in the country.

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