Why Campaign Spending Is Less Important Than Everybody Thinks

As Democrats continue to lead in the polls heading into the midterm elections, the Republican case for optimism increasingly hinges on the party’s apparent advantages in independent spending resources—a subject of extensive mediaattention over the past few weeks. One recent article even boiled the midterms down to a fight between two contrasting financial indicators—high gas prices on one side versus bulging Republican campaign war chests on the other.

That’s a clever frame, but it’s a bit misleading. Spiking fuel costs and other consumer expenses will matter a lot more to the outcome in November than differential party spending. Survey evidence already makes it clear that affordability concerns are the main reason why voters are dissatisfied with the job performance of President Trump and his Republican allies, and now express a preference for Democratic control of Congress despite substantial reservations about the Democratic Party and its leadership. Democrats are not guaranteed a sweeping victory—but if they fall short of the analysts’ current bullish projections, the explanation will almost certainly involve a combination of biased polling, an unfavorable electoral map (especially in the Senate), and a late change in the national climate rather than a decisive knockout at the hands of Republican super PACs.

Money surely matters in politics, but it’s subject to diminishing returns. Once candidates have enough resources to introduce themselves to voters and make their case for why they deserve election over their opponent, the marginal impact of each additional dollar spent begins to decline. And in virtually all pivotal races these days, both parties are well-funded to the point of saturating the airwaves, muting the power of any numerical advantage. If a persuadable voter sees 2 ads for Candidate A and only 1 for Candidate B, that might work to Candidate A’s benefit. But if he or she sees 40 ads for Candidate A—or the same ad 40 times—and 20 for Candidate B, it’s pretty hard to imagine the disparity being decisive.

And even repeated exposure hardly guarantees that a message has any effect. Most viewers are instinctively skeptical of the claims made by politicians, parties, and political groups. Creating the “killer ad” is far from an exact science, and the constantly shifting political environment means that an effective playbook in one election might fail in the next. Republican attacks on Democratic cultural liberalism appeared to work in 2024, so it makes sense that Republicans are trying them out again this year. Maybe voters will respond similarly—or maybe they’ll decide that they now care more about economic issues on which Republicans currently face a reputational disadvantage.

Political scientists have repeatedly found that campaign spending in general elections normally produces, at best, modest and evanescent effects in voter preferences. But conventional wisdom gives it much greater weight. One reason is the prevalence of cynicism about politics, which makes it easy to believe that elections can easily be bought by wealthy elites or special interests—a view encouraged by left-aligned government reformers happy to claim that more stringent campaign finance regulation will cure the ills of politics. Another factor is the quantifiability of fundraising and spending, which provides an accessible and seemingly objective indicator of candidate and party success in the midst of an otherwise murky pre-election season.

Perhaps most importantly, political practitioners and media members inhabit a world in common, where smart strategies and ruthless tactics appear more decisive to electoral outcomes than they do from the relative remove of academia. In the midst of the fight, the deployment of millions of dollars here or there feels like a central part of the story. But with distance, the fumdamental factors that shape each year’s contests come more into view. Republicans don’t need to despair yet about this November, but whatever hope they have lies in those fundamentals more than whatever magic their ad wizards might cook up.

Does It Matter That There’s No “Resistance II”?

As polling results in pivotal races continue to favor Democratic candidates in this year’s elections by increasing margins, the 2026 midterms are starting to feel distinctly reminiscent of 2018—when Democrats gained 41 seats in the House of Representatives and won 7 new state governorships by exploiting popular backlash to the first Trump administration. Many familiar signs of a national Democratic victory have begun to emerge, from public gestures of independence by formerly Trump-loyal Republican candidates to privately-expressed pessimism by GOP operatives that they will be able to defend key congressional seats. Even if the Senate electoral map and partisan gerrymandering of the House limits the magnitude of potential Democratic gains, the newfound battleground status of places like Texas, Iowa, and Alaska testifies to a substantial shift in partisan fortunes over the past two years.

But there’s one big difference between 2026 and 2018. Eight years ago, a great deal of popular attention fell on the “Resistance,” a network of anti-Trump citizens who were busily organizing and coordinating support for Democratic candidates. The Resistance inspired innumerable media stories, several books, and studies by academic scholars, and received widespread credit for contributing to the Democrats’ electoral success. It was frequently portrayed as a distinctively women-led movement, growing out of the protest marches held in response to Trump’s inauguration and reflecting an especially pronounced antipathy provoked by his record of treating women.

Trump is less popular today than he was in 2018, or than Barack Obama was in the Tea Party year of 2010, but 2026 lacks similar proclamations that a national grassroots movement opposing the president has emerged or been reactivated. It’s a dog that doesn’t seem to be barking this time. There have been sporadic organized public protests on the left, such as the “No Kings Days” that have periodically occurred since Trump’s return to office (another one is scheduled for October 17), but less evidence than before of an ongoing conscious national network of activists focused on candidate recruitment, fundraising, and electioneering. Is this a problem—or at least a missed opportunity—for Democrats?

Local citizen activism and protest is often sentimentalized as the purest form of democracy in action. But there isn’t much evidence that it makes a big difference in general elections. Campaigns, interest groups, and engaged citizens often invest significant energy in phone-banking, door-knocking, and other intensive forms of “mobilization” or “visibility,” but academic experts seeking to measure the impact of such activities on electoral results have struggled to find significant effects. The Democrats almost certainly did not need the Resistance to take control of the House eight years ago, nor was the Tea Party a necessary element of the Republican sweep eight years before that. Voters who are strongly dissatisfied with the performance of the president don’t require much encouragement to express their feelings at the ballot box, and those who are fairly indifferent to the march of political events will nearly always remain so even after receiving a visit from a passionate and insistent fellow citizen.

It’s even possible that opposition parties benefit more from keeping the focus on the unpopular actions of the incumbent than by gaining attention for their own side via high-profile protests and media coverage. This year, Democratic candidates running in traditionally red states like James Talarico and Mary Peltola would almost certainly prefer their constituents to view them as individual, independent public servants based in their local communities than as representatives of a rising national liberal movement.

This doesn’t mean that protest and activism don’t matter. The Resistance enduringly changed the composition of the Democratic Party by encouraging record numbers of Democratic women to seek elective office in 2018 and 2020, just as the Tea Party left a long residue on internal Republican politics that is still visible 16 years later. But electoral competition between the parties is less responsive to short-term investments of citizen energy than Americans often wish to believe. It isn’t necessary to build a movement to build a wave.

A Defense of the Midterm Convention “Trumpapalooza”

Aside from the predictable cheerleading of reliably pro-Republican outlets, media treatment of this week’s midterm convention in Dallas has been critical or mocking from the moment that it was first announced in June to last night’s concluding balloon drop. The logic behind this response is understandable and even defensible. But in this case, it’s not entirely convincing.

The argument that the midterm convention was a bad idea is straightforward, even self-evident. Donald Trump is currently an unpopular president with unpopular policies. Any effort to raise Trump’s profile as the leader of the Republican Party, give him a public platform to remind voters of their dissatisfaction with his substantive record or personal manner, and associate him with Republican candidates running in close races this fall seems thoroughly counterproductive. Committing avoidable strategic blunders is one of the worst imaginable sins in the eyes of campaign consultants and their like-minded friends in the political media world. Moreover, the irony of Trump’s need for personal attention and praise holding privately unenthusiastic GOP leaders captive to a multi-day celebration of self holds undeniable dramatic appeal to the professional authors of campaign storylines.

What’s missing from this otherwise sensible analysis is a full reckoning with how bad things look for Republicans right now. Of course, polls can be biased and there are still two months until the election. But the best evidence we have today shows Republican candidates in poor and deteriorating shape across a range of pivotal seats in both congressional chambers. Most aggregation models now indicate that Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to flip the House and have an even shot of gaining a majority in the Senate even though it would require winning at least two seats in states that Trump carried by double-digit margins in 2024.

If the spectrum of realistic outcomes for the GOP this November indeed ranges from “tough night” to “total nightmare,” calculations about Trump’s role begin to change. That Trump is a serious net liability for his party is both undebatable and, at this point, impossible to remedy. But if the true worst-case scenario this fall would result from a combination of energized Democrats, angry swing voters, and disengaged Republicans, maybe Trump can at least try to do something useful about the latter group. Trump himself told the convention crowd to “pretend that I am on the ballot,” suggesting that he has been appraised of the need to bolster enthusiasm among citizens who gladly vote for him but might not bother turning out for the likes of Ken Paxton or Jon Husted.

It may seem counterintuitive that Trump becomes more valuable as Republican fortunes decline. But we’re long past the point at which the closest races in 2026 are likely to be concentrated in normally competitive “purple” constituencies. The red states are poised to decide this election, and if Trump can make sufficiently effective appeals based on personal or party loyalty to a population of voters who supported him three times for president, a Republican wipeout will be averted and the loss of just one house of Congress will seem like a relief, if not a victory. Trump will certainly take credit.