How Do Local Political Campaigns Reach Voters in the Most Expensive Midterm in History?
July 16, 2026 - 32 minutes read
NOTE: This blog is a transcript from a podcast and therefore may contain errors.
Shannon Allen: Welcome to Digital Marketing ROI. I’m your host, Shannon Allen, here with my favorite person, Krystal Vivian. Hi, Shannon. I could say that in my sleep, couldn’t I? How you doing today?
Krystal Vivian: You could, yeah. I bet you do, probably.
Shannon Allen: I probably do.
I’m good. It’s July. We are recording this early ’cause I can take some vacation, but this will kick us off into July, right?
Krystal Vivian: Yes, absolutely. It’s a good, it’s a good hot month. It’s a good time to, enjoy vacation and enjoy time off and all the sunshine. But, with the Fourth of July, America’s 250th birthday this year- Yeah,
Shannon Allen: it’s a good lead-in to this political conversation
it’s
Krystal Vivian: a really good lead-in into the political, so we’re already primed from that.
Shannon Allen: And let’s be clear, this is not a political are you left, are you right, what do you want? This is I found a need, I talked to Krystal about it, and I said, “I want you to help me with this.
We’ve worked with clients on political, but there’s really, there is an art to political advertising. Yeah. And, there has been so much money spent over my lifetime in traditional TV broadcast alone, right? Radio gets a little bit a piece. But the digital world, I would almost say digital is ahead of the game with so many businesses out there, but political took a lot longer to get to where candidates started to realize the value of social, the value of streaming, right?
The midterms are projected to be the most expensive midterm in US history, right? Over $10.8 billion in political ad spend, so I wanna start there. Broadcast is shrinking, cable is collapsing. I wanna lead into how we get messages, how we can target consumers.
I’m not talking about national races, right? I’m talking about the local mayor race, the local, millage that has to pass, the school board. How do you get your message out there, right?
Krystal Vivian: Yeah.
Shannon Allen: So I’m gonna kick it to you, and we’re gonna talk a little about politics today, but I promise it’s not a fighting.
It’s being informed on how the political advertising works and what’s your best bet and why you should work with FDS Political on this, right?
Krystal Vivian: Absolutely. So let’s start, let’s set the stage, what’s actually going on with this midterm cycle in 2026, and why is it the most expensive in history?
Shannon Allen: So I gave the number just under 11 billion. It was 10.84 is projected right now. I’m gonna guess it’s gonna go higher. That is a 20% plus jump- Over 2022 midterms 8.9 billion, so near 2024 presidential, which was 11.2 billion. So I’m gonna guess we’re gonna get like the 2024, which is crazy for midterms, right?
Krystal Vivian: That’s crazy for midterms, indiana we had our primary in May. I know Michigan, you have yours in August.
Shannon Allen: Yes.
Krystal Vivian: The amount of money poured into our state senate and state representative races was wild just for the primaries and we’re seeing
Shannon Allen: that across the country Yeah, that’s just Republicans fighting Republicans or Democrats fighting Democrats, right?
Krystal Vivian: Yep …
Shannon Allen: we’re in a different world. But there’s a lot of things going on with midterms that hasn’t happened in a long time, right? There’s 35 Senate seats in play. There’s special elections in Florida and Ohio. There’s some really big swing states. I live in one of them, it’s Michigan, right?
So there’s razor-thin House majorities, like there’s more people retiring than ever before, so those are the bigger picture, but it’s, there’s a lot more involved than that. So number one, those are the headline numbers. Number two is let’s talk about the, where the money is going. So as I said, I feel like political’s the last to realize that broadcast TV is only on- when you buy broadcast TV, we talk about viewership all the time.
If you look at 100% piece of the pie, 50% is owned by streaming right now, of viewership, and that’s fragmented. Cable owns just under 20%, and then broadcast owns about 20%, but that’s divided up with the Big Five, right? You got ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and a little bit of CW. So I met with somebody yesterday that was still running on Fox, and I said, you’re only owning about 3% of viewership there.”
So for a political candidate or even a small contest to try to go local in their market, if you’re… Do you wanna reach 3% or do you wanna reach a targeted 50%, right?
Krystal Vivian: And think about- . the demographics of who is watching the broadcast versus everybody’s watching streaming.
Shannon Allen: Yeah.
So right now, 49% is still going to broadcast, which doesn’t equal viewership. This is where it’s so confusing to me. It’s down from 2024, but predictions are 49% broadcast TV when you have to buy a lot to even get a little, right? Cable is down 10% already predicted from 2024. We know that. The only growth channel is CTV.
It’s still not at where it should be, and this is why I saw a need to really help certain campaigns with understanding where they should be looking for that voter journey, right? We talk about the consumer journey. This is the voter journey. So right now, we have sales teams in Michigan and Indiana, and because I think there’s a value to showing local.
We are national. We can run national. We can run any state we need to. It’s where my sales team is gonna be feet on the ground because I think there’s value in walking into a local, campaign location and saying, “We can help you.” So the Midwest piece is a big piece.
Michigan alone is 1 billion plus projected this cycle during midterms. That’s more than the entire country spent in 2006 midterms. That’s crazy.
Krystal Vivian: That’s just 20 years ago.
Shannon Allen: I know. I know.
Krystal Vivian: That’s crazy.
Shannon Allen: And we wanna direct the money to be, you get the most bang for your buck. And, this is where it becomes very strategic, and so we’ll talk about that a little bit more in some of these questions.
But we get to do a lot with digital that broadcast can’t do.
Krystal Vivian: So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what broadcast can’t do, because for decades it was the only place that a campaign would spend serious money. But why is it not working anymore?
Shannon Allen: I just always bring it back to viewership, right?
If you look at a piece of pie streaming in January was at 47 to 49% of viewership. And granted, those are on multiple platforms, but if you buy it programmatically, you have the ability to be very targeted of who you’re going after. We’re closer to 50% now.
So again, just take a piece of the pie. Do you wanna reach 50% viewership, or do you wanna reach 20% of broadcast? Oh, and by the way, you have to go out and buy every single network that you wanna be on, right?
Krystal Vivian: So that’s five different people that you have to deal with to only
Shannon Allen: get-
Krystal Vivian: 20% of the audience.
Shannon Allen: Exactly and still not targeted. You can say I wanna be on the news,” right? But so does everybody, so rates are different then. YouTube alone is 12.5% of TV viewing out of that 50%. YouTube alone is beating out broadcasts, any network individually.
And by the way, we’re talking about US households that are 60% plus, I think that number’s even higher, that use streaming as their primary TV source and how they consume content, right? From an entertainment or a news specific.
So we are talking about really big numbers here. So that’s number one.
Go where the viewers are. It’s a really… Where’s the voter journey? Where’s the consumer journey at? Where are we spending most of our time? It is not broadcast anymore. Number two, the lowest unit rate trap. So the FCC requires broadcast stations to give candidates their lowest commercial rate before elections, okay?
I worked enough years in radio to know when, radio, it doesn’t get as big of a pie, but I had to be very careful what my rate was. So if I gave a customer a really low rate because I was trying to get them in and I was trying to have rate integrity, but I gave them one deal, I have to match that rate.
So there’s a lot of things going on. It sounds like a win. You get the lowest rate, but it’s limited inventory.
We tell our clients all the time if you’re buying TV right now and it’s an election year, you’re probably gonna get bumped because somebody’s gonna outbid you at some point.
Oh, 100%. So candidates also have that problem, is they’re gonna get bumped if somebody like Menards comes in and says, “Oh, no, I want my inventory,” where it’s, “I’ll pay the higher rate.” So a broadcast has to legally give you the lowest rate. It doesn’t mean they have to legally run you there.
So it’s a trap.
It’s a trap. So a 5:00 AM Saturday spot you bought may never air, and who wants to be 5:00 AM on a Saturday?
Krystal Vivian: And that’s the thing, is that if they’re airing, if they’re broadcasting it at 5:00 AM on a Saturday, how many people… Of that 3% of people who are watching broadcast- … that broadcast channel that you’re on, how many people are actually seeing that one ad?
Right,
Shannon Allen: that one ad. And it’s not targeted. Cable has a little bit more targeting capabilities than broadcast, but broadcast is do you wanna be on the news? Do you wanna be on the weather spot? You’re guessing it, and you need a lot. You need a lot.
High frequency, a lot of spots, okay? When it comes to CTV, we don’t come up against the lowest unit rate trap, right? That’s, they call it an LUR. CTV can do whatever they want. They can sell you the rate. And here’s the good news. A rate is a rate.
We don’t give different rates for political than we give to the local, dentist, to the local credit union. We all are paying the same rates- And that’s the way it should be. And then you’re buying impressions, and we know we can deliver. We’re not… It’s not like buying live sports where you only have Monday Night Football to run those impressions, and then you’re limited and you better buy it before it’s gone.
That’s how broadcast lives. I don’t have to live in there. I’m not limited to inventory. I have a plethora when it comes to the programmatic buy, right?
Krystal Vivian: So you choose your impressions, and then you’ll actually see in the reporting how many people were served that ad.
How many devices were served
Shannon Allen: I get to be really strategic. Isn’t a political campaign all about strategy? When you are buying broadcast, they call it spray and pray. You buy a designated market area, a DMA, and you just hope your viewers are watching. You just hope. It’s like yesterday when I talked to a shoe company that specializes in orthotics, and they do all these amazing things, and they’re buying Fox, and they’re praying that somebody watching that Fox station during American Idol wants to buy their shoes.
And it’s the same thing for a candidate. You hope you can convince somebody. But let’s stop doing that. So this worked in 1996. It’s not gonna work in 2026.
Krystal Vivian: No,
Shannon Allen: absolutely
Krystal Vivian: not. So
Shannon Allen: those are the main things about broadcast that I want anybody that’s running a political campaign to remember.
Krystal Vivian: So let’s talk a little bit more about what CTV is actually able to do, and a little bit more of the targeting.
Why is this the smarter buy in 2026 for political campaigns?
Shannon Allen: So number one, anything to do with digital has digital capabilities, and for the sake of this podcast, I’m talking mainly about streaming versus broadcast. There are a lot of other elements that we can do. You’ve been digging into the rules and regulations.
There’s a lot of, regulations we have to comply with. Political in itself has, you have to be compliant. And so we make sure, number one, with CTV, that we’re compliant in everything we do. But here’s the benefit that we have that broadcast will never bring: We can match your voter file to a streaming household.
We can serve ads only to registered Republicans in one district if we wanted to. We can take a list that they’re using and target that through addressable geofencing. We can go after undecided independents in a swing precinct, right? One candidate that, let’s say they are a Republican candidate, but they’re more in the middle, they are like, “I got the Republican vote, but what I need is women, Democrats that have children.”
We can do that. Broadcast will never do that, right?
Krystal Vivian: Yep.
Shannon Allen: We have that speed and creative flexibility, broadcast, two-week minimum insertion orders. You get preempted. You have locked rates. Programmatic is update creative and targeting in near real time. You got another video for me?
You wanna run a different one this week than last week, this weekend versus- Yep … if you’ve got the content, I can run with it.
Krystal Vivian: And you- Any time … can have multiple creatives going at once. I think back, again, the May primary, the amount of mail that we got, mailers from campaigns, from our highly contested local races here I know where we’re on lists, I know what lists we’re on because we get all the mail.
How much more impactful it would’ve been for those candidates to, instead of sending us pieces in the mail that we ignored, to show us a non-skippable ad in front- … of the TV show that we were streaming that night, right? Yes. And telling that story. We actually did not see very many streaming ads.
We saw a few, but we did not see very many streaming ads for candidates in the primaries. We should have. We absolutely- … should have. It’s a huge missed opportunity for campaigns that are not investing in CTV.
Shannon Allen: And let’s think about how politics works. It’s a headline every day.
Something’s changing every day. And so in, in broadcast, you’re just locked in and you’re just going after the masses. In CTV, you can be like, “You know what?” my audience, I’m realizing I need the younger audience. Maybe I’m gonna pull out of this, or I’m gonna select this, or I’m gonna use Meta.
We have those opportunities. So I wanna say we can reach beyond the CTV streaming as well. We have that full stack. That’s why we’re FDS Political. We specialize in digital, but we also know how to go after a strategy of a very specific audience. So we can do addressable display, which is more affordable.
Maybe you’re the local mayor race, you don’t have as much money. You don’t have the money to run that, but you want to follow consumers wherever they’re at. Display has the best conversion rate because it’s trackable, it’s more affordable, right? We can do paid search. We have Meta. We can do YouTube pre-roll, right?
We have all these extra tactics that traditional doesn’t ever offer. Everything that we do on the vertical of FDS Political is we’re the experts in digital strategy. Politics is a strategic game, so don’t use, caveman basic marketing to get your name out there.
Krystal Vivian: And partnering with somebody who actually understands the platforms that people are using and can deliver your message to the right people in a targeted way is really powerful. Let’s bring it home to FDS Political. Talk to us about why we have this division, why expertise and credibility matter so much for a digital agency in the political space.
Shannon Allen: I originally built this because I’ve kinda stayed away from political over the years. I’ll take it if it comes to me. I’m not out searching for it. But I realize I am already the expert in the political space because we do strategy from day one. Everything we do is following the consumer journey, and in this case, we’re following the consumer through the voter journey.
And that’s why, the most critical months really are August, September, October as we lead into midterms. And so you don’t need to be doing this year-round. You just need a very specific plan. So you wanna hit the ground running. That’s why it’s July now. We need a game plan now. You need a game plan now.
But politics works a lot with I, I’m gonna pivot at any moment, so you’re never too late to the game. I also built it ’cause I come from Michigan, and I know how critical Michigan is right now. We, sit in the border of Michigan and Indiana. But we’re here for anybody.
It doesn’t just have to be Michigan or Indiana. But it, to me, the reason why we really are rolling this out now and just talking about it is ’cause I really think we can help a lot of campaigns out there. We’re the experts at this. We know the rules. We’re making sure you’re compliant. We take the thinking out of it.
You have everything set up so it’s turnkey. And we’re not here to talk to you about traditional. We’re just here to talk to you about your digital strategy. So we work with candidates, federal, state, local. We work with, PACs and ballot committees. We can help party committees at county and state level.
We can do issue groups. So everybody has grant money. Everybody has campaign money. They have the money to get out the school board, the county commission, the judicial races races, right? These are often underserved by traditional agencies that don’t even know where to begin, and the traditional agency’s trying to put you in all traditional buying cycles So really, to me that’s where we’re at.
Krystal Vivian: Yeah. And you get the high-level strategy and the service of an extension of your team. It’s not just a media buy where it’s like, “Okay, I’m placing this order and I’m walking away,” right? It’s the strategy. It’s me and my team on the campaign side just making sure that we’re hitting the right messaging to the right people.
And I come from a political background. I come from news. I come from newspaper- Yeah … and radio.
Shannon Allen: Why do you think I said, “I want you to help me with this one”?
Krystal Vivian: Because- I know. I was excited.
Shannon Allen: Yeah. And let’s be clear, I’m diving right into your question about ROI, but I can even ask you you see the value of this. You’re my director of the campaign team. You understand that the reporting that we can bring to them and show them is something they’re not getting with anything else right now.
Krystal Vivian: Oh, absolutely. To truly understand, the voter journey, I think, is an incredible way to frame it. And people are at different levels, right? You have some people who are always gonna vote for the Republican or always are gonna vote for the Democrat.
You have people who are swing voters who are, they’re gonna vote, split ticket down the way. You have people who are really mad about their current party and might be motivated to, vote the other way. It all depends on your candidacy and your strategy and what you’re doing. But being able to match your marketing to your strategy and then actually seeing it in the reporting is really impactful because we can show you exactly how many devices, how many impressions, what platforms were you delivered on. And we know that every impression is a near 100% completion rate because it’s non-skippable inventory, so it’s incredibly impactful. But I do I want you to answer it, too, Shannon. So what is the ROI of working with a strategic digital agency on your political advertising?
Shannon Allen: You just basically covered it for me. I can literally show you, I can take your spend, show you who we reached, show you how often we reach them. I can show you if they’ve come back to your website. We also can pull it in real time. We don’t usually report out, weekly to clients, but this is something in political we understand that they might need us to pull and see how things are performing, ’cause we might need to pivot partway through.
You don’t get that with anything else. So that alone has return on investment., It will be your blueprint to tell you what’s going on that you can’t get out of a survey. We can be like what’s working good?” You can do A/B testing. You can have two different types. You can have a negative type of campaign that’s running or a positive, and see which one’s performing better.
You don’t get that across the board with, in real time. So that ROI in itself is, it’s money spent on wherever the consumer is as they decide who they’re gonna vote for.
Krystal Vivian: And the actual data I think is so incredible, and like you said, the A/B test and to be able to pivot on a dime.
Shannon Allen: Yes.
Krystal Vivian: If you’re relying on broadcast, then that means that the only data that you’re getting is polling data that comes out-
Shannon Allen: Yep
Krystal Vivian: on a regular basis that you don’t control.
Shannon Allen: Exactly. And that in itself is ROI. So- we know the midterms are gonna test a lot of things going out. We’ll probably all be exhausted by the time, second week of November rolls around. First week of November, right?
Yeah. But this was fun. I’m excited to leap into this and jump into this and see how we can help a lot of campaigns out there. Yeah. And we don’t care if you’re, what party you are. No. We just wanna help you.
Krystal Vivian: We just wanna help with the strategy- Yeah … and understand that it’s about reaching, it’s about reaching the people that you wanna reach.
Yeah. And it’s not about ideology for us. No. It’s about really helping make a difference.
Shannon Allen: It is. Thanks Krystal for today, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in, and tune in to our next episode of Digital Marketing ROI.