Democrats and Republicans are playing 3D chess with their spending and ad reservations in the closing weeks before Election Day as polling reveals an unexpectedly competitive Senate map.
One of the clearest ways to trace the parties’ priorities is through the super PACs aligned with Senate leadership, which kicked off a series of dramatic funding shifts in the last three weeks across several battleground states — the most recent of which includes Democrats’ new broadcast ad buy in Mississippi meant to boost Scott Colom.
The spending, captured by Federal Election Commission disclosures filed this fall, embody this cycle’s evolving landscape. It’s an environment characterized by a GOP rush to spend defensively, and somewhat brazenly, in new states while Democrats surgically shift what little money they have to defend candidates with the best chances of securing them a Senate majority.
“It’s one way you can kind of get a good feel for how the parties feel about how their certain races are going, especially in an era where people [feel] that polling has had issues,” Brendan Glavin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, said of the spending shifts.
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Senate Majority PAC, affiliated with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the Senate Leadership Fund, associated with Majority Leader John Thune, have pumped a collective $582 million into the chamber’s main races since Sept. 1, according to financial disclosures.
The moves have been read to, in part, reflect a genuine concern among Republicans about their chances in certain states like Nebraska and Georgia, despite holding a significant fundraising advantage over Democrats.
Both parties decided to pull out of spending more in North Carolina, where Republicans abandoned additional broadcast ad plans for Senate candidate Michael Whatley.
SLF instead began plowing funds into Kansas and South Carolina last week — two reliably red states that attracted spending to ward off surprisingly competitive challengers to incumbent Sens. Roger Marshall and Darline Graham.
On Wednesday, SMP entered Mississippi with a $1.2 million TV spot meant to boost Colom, a district attorney, against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith through Nov. 3. The spend follows an increase of attention from Democratic Senate leadership on the race, reflecting their belief that the one-term incumbent Republican is vulnerable enough to dedicate resources to Colom — though it comes just under two weeks before Election Day.
“Senate Majority PAC is committed to seeing these battleground races through to the finish line, and making the strategic decisions needed to ensure we have the coverage on air and on digital needed to ensure voters hear the reality about the price-gouging agenda Republicans are backing,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for SMP, said in a statement to The Washington Sun.
An SLF spokesperson declined to comment.
David de la Fuente, a former research analyst with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the pullbacks in North Carolina and Georgia are not “head fakes,” but represent races that seem to be “moving away from Republicans too much to warrant spending.”
“You don’t bluff with money at the Senate level, the map is too small,” de la Fuente, who now serves as a deputy director at Third Way, told The Sun. Shifting funding is a sign that at one point, “Republicans were really hoping they could give Jon Ossoff a real race. They were hoping they could defend the open North Carolina seat.”
Last week, SLF reported having $155 million in cash on hand after raising $511 million last quarter — much of it boosted by tech mogul Elon Musk — while SMP disclosed $112 million in cash on hand, having raised half of what its counterpart did. The difference in the political committees’ coffers is slowly shrinking as Republicans turned their high fundraising totals into a burst of frenetic spending in the cycle’s last weeks.
SLF and its affiliates have long surpassed their Democratic counterparts on spending. Based on disclosures filed between Sept. 1 and Oct. 21 — which do not include future broadcast reservations or projected spending — the Republican PACs have spent nearly $405 million across 13 Senate races, more than double the $177 million political committees associated with Schumer have spent in the same period.
SLF is heavily outpacing SMP in nearly every state that both parties have made investments, erasing any advantages Democrats had by kicking off general election spending in August — earlier and more intensely than Republicans did, particularly when ad rates were cheaper. Democrats have only outspent their GOP counterparts in New Hampshire by $5 million in the last seven weeks, hoping to boost candidate Chris Pappas as he leads opponent John Sununu in polling by single digits.
Even with the new Mississippi spend, Schumer-aligned PACs have not gotten involved in as many races as the Republican committees: SLF and its affiliates have allocated a combined $13 million to candidates in Florida, South Carolina and Nebraska since September.
In states where both committees have spent money — Georgia, Ohio, Kansas, Iowa, Alaska and Texas — Thune-aligned PACs have crushed their Democratic counterparts by margins of a couple million to a $170 million gulf in Texas, which represents nearly half of SLF’s spending last quarter and has historically not seen large Democratic investment. SMP’s affiliate Texas Forever made $11 million worth of media buys this month, starting with a $2 million digital ad campaign bashing state Attorney General Ken Paxton over his handling of a child sex abuse case.
Both parties have spent nearly equivalent amounts in Maine and North Carolina since Sept. 1.
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