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American politics is saturated with cash, and each election cycle seems to set new spending records—and yet, with the midterms in the home stretch, neither party thinks it has enough money. The irony is nearly as rich as the biggest donors.
Filings released this week show that $1 billion was spent on the campaign in the first two weeks of October alone. This year’s elections are expected to be the most expensive midterms in U.S. history, beating 2022—which beat 2018, which beat 2014, and so on. This will not surprise anyone who lives in a state or district with a competitive race this fall. (I’m sure I can still recite the Senate Leadership Fund’s ad attacking the North Carolina Democrat Roy Cooper, weeks after it stopped running.) Democratic and Republican voters don’t agree on a ton these days, but they’re united on one position: There’s too much money in politics.
Ask officials and candidates in both parties, though, and you’ll hear that they don’t have nearly enough. Democrats are feeling fairly confident about capturing the House and are getting more hopeful about their chances at winning the Senate, yet officials worry they don’t have enough cash. The party got a big boost on Monday, when Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor and presidential candidate, announced that he would pour $80 million into helping Democrats before Election Day.
Republicans came into this election with a huge money advantage, and they continue to have millions available to spend. Even so, major GOP organizations are finding themselves having to make unpleasant choices to stop spending in races that seem to be slipping away from them. Senate Leadership Fund, which is the top Republican PAC supporting Senate races, didn’t spend any money on TV ads last week to support the Georgia candidate Mike Collins, who is expected to lose to Senator Jon Ossoff. SLF had already pulled back from helping the Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley in North Carolina. (To make matters worse, President Trump hosted a rally with Whatley on Tuesday in Greenville, where he said that Cooper is “going to become your senator, and it’s crazy.”)
One reason both parties are scrambling for money is that the map has shifted. As Trump’s political position deteriorates and he drags GOP candidates along with him, races that once seemed like foregone conclusions are now real battles. Democrats worry that they don’t have enough funding to match their potential. Republicans, by contrast, are having to play defense in what they thought were safe seats. SLF has moved money from North Carolina to Kansas, a state where a Democrat hasn’t won a Senate race since 1932 but where Adam Hamilton is posing a real threat to Senator Roger Marshall. Republicans are also finding that their decision to squeeze new gerrymanders out of some states before this election has been costly: Districts that they expected to be easy Republican pickups are now close combat. Punchbowl News recently reported that although the GOP has a lock on five of 14 new districts, “Republican candidates and super PACs have spent nearly $100 million on ads trying to flip the other nine districts” since September 1.
Another reason is that not all money is created equal. Some Democratic candidates are very well funded. The Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, for example, raised $64 million in the third quarter of the year alone—the highest total for any candidate in that period ever. (Because Texas has so many voters and so many media markets, it’s an expensive place to campaign.) But Democratic committees, including top PACs, are much more strapped. This is partly because the sitting president’s party always has a leg up in fundraising, but it’s also because many donors have grown disillusioned with the Democratic Party, upset with strategic decisions in the 2024 presidential loss, chaotic management of the Democratic National Committee since, and uninspiring leadership by elected officials.
Republican candidates (such as Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton) have relatively little money on hand, but committees and PACs are still flush. Much of that money comes from independent-expenditure groups, such as super PACs. An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice finds that these groups spent $2 billion through the end of September, leaning heavily toward Republicans. The single largest donor is Elon Musk, who has spent $366 million this cycle alone. But one disadvantage of independent-expenditure groups is that they have to pay higher rates for advertisements than candidates.
That’s perhaps the dominant theme of the late campaign: Republicans have lots of money, but they’re not necessarily getting much bang for their buck. At this stage in the campaign, the time to build serious infrastructure, such as canvassing operations, is past. Money can buy a lot of advertising, but TV time is either booked up or more expensive. Besides, Republicans have already spent lavishly to fill airwaves, websites, and mailboxes with ads. So far, they don’t seem to be seeing much impact: Races either remain close or appear to be shifting even further toward Democrats.
Understanding why the GOP candidates are stalled is not difficult. Voters are upset about high prices, especially for fuel, and they are turned off by a president who is dismissive of their affordability concerns, distracted by vanity projects, and bogged down in an unpopular and inflationary war in Iran. Trump’s super PAC has $164 million left to spend, but as any orthodox Lennonist knows, money can’t buy you love.
Related:
- Small-dollar campaign donors are hurting the political system.
- A Supreme Court decision that might improve politics
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- The man in the middle of Trump’s deeply conflicted Ukraine policy
- Why Trump can’t sell Putin a deal
- The DEI language that’s doing more harm than good
Today’s News
- Russia and Ukraine agreed to a temporary cease-fire beginning October 29 in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Oleshky, the White House announced today. The agreement, brokered with help from First Lady Melania Trump and Pope Leo XIV, will allow humanitarian aid to enter the city and civilians to evacuate amid a worsening food crisis.
- Israel ordered a full lockdown of the occupied West Bank after, according to the Israel Defense Forces, a shooting attack killed two Israeli soldiers and left three soldiers injured; the two Palestinian attackers were also killed, the IDF says. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that troops would conduct house-to-house operations and destroy suspected militant infrastructure in the men’s neighborhood, just days before Israel’s national election.
- The Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s Senate election results if the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, loses to Democrat Mary Peltola. The administration argues that a different candidate on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan could confuse voters, but legal experts question its case.
Evening Read
‘If Anything Happens to This Guy … Everyone Is Screwed’
By Charlie Warzel
On Tuesday, the world found out about two massive security vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that is used by roughly 70 percent of websites. The flaw was discovered by cybersecurity researchers using a frontier model from OpenAI. If they exploited it, attackers could gain full control of servers, stealing or copying anything inside or simply taking sites offline.
The PHP Foundation, the organization that maintains the programming language, had recently learned about the security flaws, but the disclosure was leaked on a forum before a patch could be released. What happened next was a frantic race with numerous participants: the foundation, which needed to create and release a patch; developers around the world, who would need to deploy it; and attackers looking to exploit these vulnerabilities in the interim. Matthew Prince, the CEO of the hosting company Cloudflare, wrote that in the 10 hours before the flaws were publicly announced, “we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”
More From The Atlantic
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- Welcome to the valley of pain, Matteo Wong writes.
- A congressional district where the Iran war is personal
- Galaxy Brain: The Armageddon economy
Culture Break
Watch. Wicker (out now in select theaters) is a charming anti-marriage marriage movie, Faith Hill writes.
Read. Tope Folarin, a past winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, addresses the suspicion that this year’s recipient used AI—and wonders whether AI’s arrival has imposed yet another set of expectations on writers of color.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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