Overall ad spending has broken $1 billion in federal elections and state governors’ races, with the total number of ads exceeding 2.2 million.
According to a new report by the Wesleyan Media Project in partnership with the Center for Responsive Politics, the total number of ads run in House, Senate and gubernatorial races has dropped slightly from 2.4 million at this point in 2010. But from Sept. 1 to Oct. 23, where data is available, ad buys in Senate races have increased over those in the last midterm elections, with pro-Democratic groups jumping 37 percent over the same period in 2010 and pro-Republican groups climbing a more modest 7 percent.
The data in the report generally supports the conventional wisdom that control of the House is not in play in 2014. But with enough vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election this cycle, the stakes are high for control of the upper house, which likely explains the late increase in advertising.
Much of the Senate increase is a product of spending by independent interest groups. These interest groups — which are made up predominantly of super PACs and politically active 501(c) organizations — bought 112,853 ads in the final weeks of 2014, more than double the 55,476 they bought over the same period in 2010.
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Despite the overall attention to Senate races, House Majority PAC — a pro-Democratic super PAC focused on House contests — bought more ads than any other single group in the last two weeks, with 6,907 ads run in two dozen House districts. However, that total is dwarfed by a pair of linked conservative organizations, the 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS and the super PAC American Crossroads, which together bought 10,000 ads in the last two weeks for which data is available.
As super PACs, both American Crossroads and House Majority PAC disclose their donors to the public, but groups like Crossroads GPS do not.
House Majority PAC and Crossroads GPS are among the top five organizations in terms of number of ads bought this cycle. Another group among the five is the pro-Democratic super PAC called Senate Majority PAC. The other two are conservative groups, the Republican Governors Association and Americans for Prosperity – the latter of which, like Crossroads GPS, doesn’t disclose its donors.
Overall, 38 percent of the ads bought by outside interest groups were bought by “dark money” organizations that do not disclose their donors to the voters they seek to influence. In the heated battle for control of the Senate, nearly half — 48.6 percent — of the ads were bought by such groups, most of them conservative. In fact, 48 percent of pro-Republican interest group ads in 2014 came from dark money groups, compared to 23 percent of pro-Democratic groups’ ads.
Though dark money groups account for a significant share of the ad buys in critical races, they don’t spend the same way other organizations do. In the top races, they tend to start earlier, with “issue ads” that may paint a candidate in a positive or negative light but don’t ask the public to vote one way or the other. Those ads don’t have to be reported to the FEC until 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election — by which time many of these groups wind down their efforts. At that point, parties and candidate committees, as well as some regular PACs, ramp up their spending. This trend is evident in this cycle’s top Senate races.
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Whether they disclose or not, these outside groups’ advertising efforts are significantly more negative than the ads of the candidates themselves. More than 90 percent of the ads run by pro-Democratic outside interest groups in Senate races were negative, and more than 70 percent on the Republican side were. By contrast, only 33 percent of the ads made by Democratic Senate candidates were negative and even less, 26 percent, of Republican Senate candidates’ ads were negative.
This negativity in outside spending fits with the sense many observers have that outside groups free up candidates to stay positive in their campaigns while outsourcing the mudslinging to nominally independent groups that are less accountable to the public.
For further details, read the report.