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The 3 November 2026 midterm elections are already the campaign that has spent the most public advertising in history. With $11.6 billion projected, they surpass the 2024 presidential election, representing an increase of about 30% versus the 2022 midterms and about 190% versus 2018.
In an unprecedented move, the most expensive race is now the Texas Senate, with more than $440 million. Elon Musk alone has poured nearly $190 million there. Terrestrial television is expected to capture nearly 50% of the spending, while streaming is the only medium up compared to 2024; the rest is split between cable, digital, and radio.
While most polls suggest Democrats are on track to retake Congress, perhaps the Senate, a 2021 study shows that a $2 million television advertising edge over your opponent in a Senate race can lead to about 10,000 additional votes – enough to tilt several tight races. The study’s authors also estimate that in the 2016 presidential election, a $10 million advantage in a state could have yielded around 27,000 votes, a margin sufficient to overturn the results in five states (Nevada, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire).
We have selected the videos that most marked this cycle and that sketch deep trends as well as potentially radical transformations of the American political offering.
1/7 In Texas, James Talarico (D) is reshaping Democratic doctrine
Texas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. Yet this is the cycle’s closest race, with more than $440 million in advertising according to AdImpact. Republican super PACs have spent over $150 million, versus about $4 million on the Democratic side.
James Talarico, 37, Austin-based member of the Texas House, a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian whom the magazine has been following for more than a year, faces Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Beyond the Texas tilt and the Senate balance, this race could quickly take on a presidential dimension, signaling the emergence of a new doctrine of American progressivism, perfectly summarized in this campaign video titled “ Anthem.”
This three-minute short, watched more than 1.4 million times on X in a single day, celebrates the Texas of ordinary people with Talarico’s distinctive aesthetic.
Warm lighting, saturated grain. It sits somewhere between Lana Del Rey’s nostalgic Americana, the most carefully curated Instagram reels, and Terrence Malick’s filmed meditations, combining three registers that Democrats had separated: an openly professed Christian faith, a centrism on immigration or fossil fuels, and an economic populism. One word recurs, “hope,” the one that powered the campaign of another young senator who became president in 2009.
The second spot is more aligned with TV standards. Talarico faces the camera and accuses Paxton of “selling” Texas to data centers in exchange for billions in tax relief in return for nearly half a million dollars in campaign donations.
The spot ends with the line “made by humans, not AI,” a dig at the Republican campaign’s AI videos that sits within the AI populism wave embodied by Talarico.
2/7 In Ohio, has Ramaswamy (R) produced the worst political ad of all time?
This was meant to be October’s surprise. The Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign manager described this advertisement as the moment that would finish off his Democratic opponent’s bid for Ohio governor.
Donna Arthur, Amy Acton’s mother, on camera, calls her daughter a liar and urges voters not to vote for her.
The video was posted October 19 by an Ohio blogger. The next day, Ramaswamy’s campaign claimed it and announced it would invest $4 million to air it on television through the election.
Yet the video hides a particularly sordid backstory. Acton, 60, former Ohio Health Director during the Covid-19 pandemic, has not seen her mother since she was 12 years old.
In 1978, Donna Arthur’s husband was indicted by a grand jury for rape, then fled. The mother loses custody of her children, who accuse her of allowing her husband to commit pedophilic sexual abuse.
The backlash is bipartisan. The outgoing Republican governor Mike DeWine and his predecessor John Kasich asked for the ad to be pulled. But Vice President J.D. Vance, a former Ohio senator and ally of Ramaswamy, urged critics to stop “whining,” while the U.S. president boasted of having convinced Ramaswamy to keep the spot.
Acton responded with a spot in which her brother, Phil Stearns, testifies to the abuse.
3/7 In California, Steve Hilton (R) shakes up the rules
Born in London to Hungarian parents, Steve Hilton was David Cameron’s strategy director at Downing Street and the architect of the “Big Society,” before becoming a host on Fox News. He presents himself as an outsider, even though no Republican has won statewide office since Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006.
In this barely one-minute video, published October 1, two young women on a bed, in a setting borrowing from LGBT+ visual codes, are nervous about trying “that” for the first time. The punchline shows a ballot: one convinces the other to vote for the Republican Steve Hilton against the Democrat Xavier Becerra.
The reception in the conservative camp was very mixed, but the candidate’s campaign likely achieved its aim: to generate discussion around a bid with little chance of success, RealClearPolling’s average showing Becerra ahead by more than 20 points, i.e., 57.6% to 34%.
4/7 In Ohio, Sherrod Brown (D) denounces the class contempt of the Trumpist elite
Cost of living is omnipresent in this campaign, marked by inflation and rising energy prices. We are seeing a return of a populist-class rhetoric in Democratic discourse. A reversal for a party that Trumpist nationalist populism had accused, until the previous term, of abandoning the working class and non-college-educated workers.
This 29 September spot from Sherrod Brown’s campaign is formally very minimalist: thirty seconds, no voiceover.
Ohio residents watch on their phones a March video clip in which Senator Jon Husted explains that the poor lack real-world experience and that they must be taught to budget, citing a young woman who has always paid her groceries with food stamps. A man opens with “Listen to this sh*t,” a woman ends with “F*ck that.”
Brown, who served as senator for eighteen years, lost in 2024 to Bernie Moreno. He is attempting a comeback against Husted, appointed by Governor DeWine in 2025 to replace J.D. Vance, who became vice president.
Despite the Democrats’ lead in the polls, the race remains uncertain, which perhaps explains why it has seen some of the largest advertising expenditures of this cycle.
As elsewhere, it could mark a transformation of the Democratic offering, with the shift from the “Brahmin Left” analyzed by Thomas Piketty toward reclaiming the working classes with linked messages and policies focused on the dignity of work.
5/7 In Georgia, against rising star Ossoff (D), Republicans bring in deepfake and AI
With James Talarico, but on a more centrist line, Jon Ossoff embodies a possible presidential trajectory. He seems to be aiming to follow in Obama’s footsteps, to whom he is often compared for his eloquence and youth (at 39, he is indeed the youngest senator in the country).
On September 15, the Senate Leadership Fund, the main Republican super PAC, targets one of his key strengths: his image.
In a beauty salon, a client says the senator spends more on hair and makeup than any other Washington elected official, women included, and suggests he “hides something.”
We follow AI-generated imagery and see Ossoff with dark circles under his eyes, then getting his nails done.
Ossoff has denounced a slippery slope toward the destruction of truth in political debate. His actual spending amounts to about $1,200 for the cycle, a modest expense for a practice common to both parties.
Yet this spot is emblematic of a deeper phenomenon. 2026 is the first midterm election where AI-generated ads regularly appear on television. The Wesleyan Media Project counts 220 as of October 11, totaling $137 million in expenditures. Funded 88% by the Republican camp, only 27% of them carry an IA disclosure and no federal law governs them.
6/7 In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn (R) crushes the “China commies”
At 74, Marsha Blackburn has been a senator since 2019. She is running for Tennessee governor to succeed outgoing Bill Lee. For her first TV ad, aired in July, she chose a caricatured register.
Seated at a table with a small bottle of soy sauce, she declares: “How far will I go to clamp down on China? Here’s a clue.” Then she crushes fortune cookies. And to make the message crystal clear, she concludes: “No need for a fortune cookie to guess: here in Tennessee, we’re going to stop Communist China and protect Tennessee’s lands.”
A Cold War-sounding voiceover promises to safeguard the state’s lands from Chinese shell companies, to plug legal gaps, and to track “every communist who would dare challenge us.”
The spot, shot at Elliston Place Soda Shop, an emblematic progressive Nashville diner, set off a biscuit‑war with the Democratic mayor. Freddie O’Connell posted a video on his social networks in which he’s seen dining at the same table, then opening a Chinese fortune cookie reading: “Fear divides. Nashville unites.”
Ironically, the fortune cookie isn’t really a Chinese tradition. It derives from a Japanese cookie, the tsujiura senbei, became popular in California in the early 20th century, and remains almost unknown in China.
7/7 In North Carolina, Jennifer Balkcom (R) reveals that her mother has shot at someone
Jennifer Balkcom, 48, a North Carolina House member, is a late‑breaking candidate. The party selected her on August 10 after incumbent Chuck Edwards withdrew amid a scandal. She thus had less than three months to establish herself in the 11th district, covering the Appalachians, Asheville, and the Hurricane Helene recovery, one of the country’s most contested districts.
Around a wooden table, two cups of coffee and a homey atmosphere contrast with remarks unusually harsh.
Balkcom explains that her mother raised her alone and that she shot at a man who broke into their home. The mother, with a strong Appalachian accent, sums up the house rule: anyone who breaks in gets shot. Her daughter promises to carry this “mountain toughness” to Washington.
With over 800,000 views on YouTube by mid‑October, this ad solves the candidate’s main problem, namely her lack of name recognition, and defends the gun-rights position without ever naming it explicitly.
She sits in a lineage of Republicans whose classic is probably Squeal, Joni Ernst’s 2014 Iowa Senate spot. In it she recounted growing up castrating pigs, before promising to make “Washington squeal” over public spending.
Bonus 1/2 Obama, Saddam Hussein and Donald Trump’s Cheesecake Factory
This isn’t an ad, but it is one of the most discussed sequences of the campaign’s end. On October 24, at a rally in Cleveland supporting Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown, Barack Obama mocked the White House renovations, estimated at $900 million.
The U.S. president, he says, is disengaged from running the country, but he seems to want his own decorating show. He’s building “a ballroom bigger than the White House itself,” with “gold. Always more gold,” and has it resemble “a Cheesecake Factory opened by Saddam Hussein.”
The Republican administration has since mobilized. It denounces the elitist disdain of a man who, according to commentator Scott Jennings, would never have set foot in that restaurant chain.
The Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, “a former hedge fund manager in the mid‑billions,” as Obama put it, echoed the elitism accusation and had himself photographed in front of a Cheesecake Factory.
Trump himself revisited these remarks several times. He claims to have paid for the renovations “himself,” mocks Obama for failing to see “the filth and grime” on walls that had not been cleaned for years, and concludes that this comparison proves he was a “pathetic president.”
Four days later, in Georgia, Obama doubles down: Trump did not flinch at being compared to Saddam Hussein, but the Cheesecake Factory deeply wounded him. As for the elitism charge, he settles it with one line: a father of two daughters, he spent ten years frequenting “Chuck E. Cheese, , and the Cheesecake Factory.”
Obama’s involvement in the campaign, though he had largely stayed on the sidelines until now, has enough to irritate Donald Trump: he is indeed the most popular living former president. According to a May CNN/SSRS poll, 57% of Americans hold a favorable opinion of him, versus 34% for Trump and 30% for Joe Biden. He is also the one most able to play kingmaker: according to a September NBC poll, 43% of voters say they are more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Obama, compared with 33% for Bernie Sanders and 30% for Trump.
Bonus 2/2 Donald Trump’s obsession with the appearance of men and with Talarico’s meat
Since the start of October, Trump has often opened his rallies by persistently commenting on the appearance of the men he supports. It began with former NFL coach Jon Gruden, who told him that Jon Husted had been a formidable defender at the University of Dayton. On October 12 in Youngstown, Trump says: “I don’t do this very often with men. I started examining his body.” He looked him up and down, at his butt, then his hands, “like claws, his jaw.”
On October 20, in North Carolina, he repeats this passage, which becomes increasingly popular in his rallies. He describes the guy’s butt “as a pile of muscles” and talks with a knowing air about “his legs, his shoulders,” swearing that it’s still “not his thing.” On October 25, in Michigan, he also talks about his feet “enormous” and his fingers “sausage‑size.”
The pinnacle of the act is reached with James Talarico, whom Trump falsely presents as a “disgraced vegan.” On September 9, at the midterm Republican convention in Dallas, the American president wrongly asserts that James Talarico ran a campaign titled “beat meat,” which literally means “to beat meat” but is also slang for masturbation.
On October 27 in Corpus Christi, the act reaches its peak. According to Trump, Talarico did not have the flu but food poisoning, “because he cannot stand meat.” He then imitates him at a barbecue: “I love the meat! Ahhhh! I love it, look!”, while miming bites, with a groan and hand gestures that many judged to be a pornographic imitation.
The double entendre is obvious. In American slang, “meat” also refers to the male sex. After the Dallas “beat meat,” “I love the meat,” accompanied by that groan and those gestures, becomes a barely veiled allusion to a blowjob, continuing Republican insinuations about Talarico’s masculinity.
For The Atlantic, this is October’s real surprise. Obsessed since forever with appearances, his own as well as others’, Trump seems to have lost all filter, and crowds’ laughter reinforces the belief that the bit works. With a substantial lag in the polls and his popularity at its lowest, Trump prefers to talk about “almost anything, rather than the price of gas, even the candidate’s buttocks.”