How the Campaign War Chests Are Being Spent
The Republican spending strategy is about turnout, not persuasion.
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In the weeks heading into next week’s midterm election, President Trump has been crisscrossing the country trying to gin up enthusiasm among his base at rallies—where he’s gone on Islamophobic rants and inexplicably praised a candidate’s backside. Meanwhile, spending on races across the country has been through the roof: His super PAC has been pumping hundreds of millions into campaigns to help vulnerable Republicans, as has Elon Musk; and Mike Bloomberg is spending tens of millions to help Democrats. It’s a sprint to the first Tuesday in November.
But enthusiasm is not really the word to describe most Americans’ sentiments heading into this election. Economic concerns about the price of goods such as gas and groceries, an unpopular war with Iran that has driven that rise in everyday costs, and angst from Democrats about an unchecked Trump administration is fueling the conversation ahead of Election Day.
This week on Radio Atlantic, my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer join me to discuss the closing messages from Democrats and Republicans, the campaign spending blitz, and the issues voters will be taking with them to the polls.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Ashley Parker: You may recall, one of the key things Donald Trump promised was no more forever wars, no more quagmires in the Middle East, et cetera, et cetera. And the war in Iran, which people already don’t like on its merit, is so deeply tied with gas prices in a way that people can make that one-to-one connection. So it’s just a nest of what everyone hates.
Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic, I’m Adam Harris, and we’re a week away from the midterm elections. The stakes have been clear for a while: The election will determine whether President Trump spends his last two years in office with a Congress that continues to allow him to enact his policy agenda with few, if any, checks—or as a lame duck.
The president has been zigzagging the country trying to excite his base, as early-voting numbers are already surging well ahead of 2018 and 2022 midterm cycles.
My colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer are with me to discuss the closing messages for Republicans and Democrats, where they’re spending in the last week, and how voters are responding.
Let’s get to questions. Welcome back.
Ashley Parker: Thank you.
Michael Scherer: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Harris: Ashley, I want to start with the news that the Justice Department sued to block Senate results if Republicans lose in Alaska. What do we know about what’s happening there?
Parker: In Alaska, you have this amusing situation, where you have two candidates named Dan Sullivan. One is the Republican incumbent, and one is an independent. And Republicans and the Justice Department are trying to say that the results may be invalid because of confusion between the two names.
They wanna make sure that someone who goes into the voting booth and votes for Dan Sullivan, the independent, actually meant to vote for him and not Dan Sullivan, the Republican. But my understanding, from what legal experts have said, is that this is a ridiculous case that almost certainly will not hold up in court.
Scherer: But it does serve the purpose of getting this in the news in Alaska, which is, I think, the goal of the case—is to elevate it, to make people recognize again, Wait, there are two Dan Sullivans. I gotta figure out which is the right one.
It’s also interesting there are races across the country where both parties have been trying to create new parties to get fourth candidates on the ballot, or to take over the Green Party ticket in places to bleed off voters. So that trickery is advancing.
Harris: And in Alaska, it’s particularly interesting because it’s ranked-choice voting. So how is that factoring in?
Scherer: There’s a lot of Republican education going on now to try and convince people not to put Mary Peltola, the Democrat, as the second person anywhere. So they’re trying to tell their voters, Just do the real Dan Sullivan, one, and then leave the rest blank, because they’re worried on subsequent ballots she’d pull ahead.
Harris: There’s been haze over the election that the president might try to contest results elsewhere if Democrats were successful. And I wonder: Is this attempt from the DOJ the sort of foreshadowing of the possibility of the administration contesting the election in other states if things don’t go their way?
Parker: That was a point I was gonna make. Michael is right that part of this lawsuit—that, I think, any DOJ lawyer worth their salt knows is not likely to advance or be successful—is helping Republicans in Alaska understand that there is one Republican, Dan Sullivan, and that’s who they should vote for. That’s valuable for Republicans.
The flip side is, as you point out, there is a tremendous angst going back to January 6, where Democrats and a lot of the electorate is terrified that Donald Trump and his team will not accept the results of a free and fair election. You talk to the reasonable people in Trump’s inner circle, and they say—and Michael did a great story on this that he can talk about—they say, Yes, there is a contingent in the president’s ear trying to get him to declare martial law, but that’s a very tiny contingent. That’s not what’s gonna happen. But I do think the concern is this shows, for instance, that the Justice Department is willing to go forward with something that is objectively, on its face, according to lawyers, absurd, because the president wants them to do it. Which fairly raises the question: What else might they be willing to do simply because the president wants them to do it?
Scherer: I think there’s two categories of things, and the problem is you can’t easily define them ahead of time. One is: You very often have litigation after elections. And so I think there will be races that are close; there will be races where lawsuits are filed, where the DOJ might intervene. But I think the American people can rest assured, at least at the moment—the courts have been almost unanimously rejecting the president’s efforts to intervene in this election.
He’s tried five or 10 different ways—stripping voter rolls, banning mail-in ballots, all kinds of things. And the courts have just struck them down consistently. And so I think it’s likely that the litigation that follows a close race will be the way litigations follow[ing] close races have been in the past.
Now, the concern that Ashley mentioned is this other idea that the president tries to do something that’s never been done before, which is to declare, say, The election machines are fraudulent, and we can’t trust the vote; or to say, We have to seize these ballots; or even the martial-law idea.
Another concern is that Republicans refuse because of a dispute to seat the winner of a race. So you could have an effort that would have to be litigated and fought, where Republicans try and prevent a Democrat who was elected from taking power next year. And that would be a mess.
That said, I think it’s unlikely that that second category of things goes forward right now. And the reason is that there’s very little appetite in the Republican Party, and there’s very little appetite in the senior ranks of the White House. So to do it, the president would have to basically overrule his own advisers and pick a fight with the Republican Party in a way that he probably comes out worse from, not better. And the bottom line is he’s been expecting to lose this race since the beginning of the year. So it’s not like it was in 2020, where his entire reputation, his entire legacy, was on the line.
Parker: Right. And I was gonna say, he might be willing—that’s the sort of thing he was clearly, in 2020, willing to do on behalf of himself to try to stay in office for four more years. I don’t know that he’s going to expend that sort of reputational capital for a random House Republican.
Scherer: Although, the other thing we should say is it’s certain that, after this election, he’s gonna continue to demand changes to the voting system, and he’s gonna continue to launch investigations into the voting system.
And so the noise around this is gonna continue. He wants the voting system we have now changed. And he basically wasn’t able to do it before the midterms, but he has another window here to try and do it before the next presidential.
Harris: Michael, I want to talk about the spending. Trump’s super PAC has spent nearly a quarter-billion dollars to help Republicans this election cycle. What do we know about where the president is spending now in this last week, and why is he spending in those spaces?
Scherer: So the president, he claims that he will spend $400 million, and that includes some money—it’s on his [501(c)(4)], his dark-money side; we don’t have easy ways of tracking it when all is said and done—which is an enormous amount of money. This is basically additive money that didn’t exist in other cycles. Presidents don’t usually raise money separately to do this.
And so the result has been, in the key Senate races around the country, something like 30 or 40 percent more spending on the Republican side than on the Democratic side, all-in. Now, that doesn’t translate to 30, 40 percent more ads, because Democratic candidates are raising more money and candidates get to pay less money for their ads. So every outside dollar that comes in has to pay a different rate than the candidate has to pay.
In the House races, it’s closer to even. There’s a slight Republican edge, but again, Democratic candidates tend to be raising more, so on points, they’re doing better. There’s differences in spending by race, but those seem to be intentional strategic differences; different parties have different places. There’s not a huge margin there.
In terms of how the president is spending his money, there was concern—we reported back in August—concern that he was gonna spend all this money on himself. And it’s true: He has spent a portion of the money on ads about how great he is, which is not something Republicans wanna see. It’s something Democrats love to see. It really doesn’t clearly affect in a positive way these races. That message works if you narrowcast it to Trump supporters. It doesn’t really work on broadcast TV when Trump is polling at 30 percent in the state.
But in terms of the other spending, you can’t really separate the Trump spending from the ecosystem spending, and that’s because it’s all being coordinated. So what the Senate Leadership Fund, Congressional Leadership Fund, those are the outside groups tied to the Republican leaders in Congress; what Elon Musk is spending—all of that’s being coordinated. And so they’re basically divvying it up amongst themselves and operating as a single unit.
So to say, Well, the president’s priorities are here, and other people’s priorities are there—with the exception of that money that he spent on his own vanity ads, it’s all part of a single strategy.
Harris: Thinking about the spending from Musk, the spending from the president, the spending from the various PACs that are out there, spending from candidates themselves, Bloomberg sort of giving $80 million to Democrats. The money is becoming almost exorbitant to the point of nonsensical. And I wonder: Does having more money at this point even really matter?
Parker: The airwaves, at the end of the day, can get saturated. In terms of TV broadcast, at the end of the day, there is a finite amount of ads you can buy. And if you’re traveling to cover a race, and you are in Maine, or you are in Iowa, or you are in Texas, it is possible you turn on the TV and all you see are political ads. Gone are the somewhat sketchy prescription-drug ads, and it’s just candidate ads.
But I think the money does matter.
If you look at how much money they’re pouring into Texas to help prop up a pretty mediocre Republican Senate candidate in Ken Paxton, there is a sense that if Elon Musk had not put in the money he did, if Trump had not put in the money he did, that Ken Paxton would be floundering. And it’s also an open question about: If they weren’t putting all that money into Texas, could that money be more helpful in some of these other states that are close?
So I think at the end of the day, money still matters tremendously.
Scherer: The political science on this is that if two sides spend roughly equal amounts of money, they kinda cancel each other out. And generally, that’s true, unless you have new information being presented in the ads that really changes people’s mind, and I think that’s why you’ve seen a lot of data-center ads. It’s new information that’s being added to some of these races, and that’s mostly benefited Democrats.
What’s interesting is the late spending. So, the Senate Leadership Fund had just bought a bunch more ads, and they were buying ads in Mississippi, Kansas, South Carolina, and Nebraska—all deep-red states. There wasn’t very large sums of money, but that’s a situation where they’ve seen things in their polling that has made them panic at the late stage. They’re diverting money into deep-red areas, and I think spending in places where there is not a lot of spending, or where people aren’t used to it, could have a better, bigger effect. The real thing Republicans are after right now is not persuasion; it’s turnout. So that’s the other question here. There’s a lot of advertising that’s going on TV, but there’s also a lot of advertising that the Trump team is doing, for instance, on Facebook, using the list they have of Trump voters saying, You really have to get out to vote. Go vote; go vote; go vote. A lot of the Elon Musk spending is that. All the polling we have says those voters don’t wanna vote right now. They’re just not as excited as they were in 2024. But if they’ve found a new magic formula to do that, and that turns up on Election Day, it could have an impact.
Harris: Is that also why you’re seeing the president go and host these sort of boots-on-the-ground rallies in these really deep-ruby-red states, where people might say, Your energies may be spent better elsewhere, in states where races are more competitive?
Parker: That is precisely why. I was with the president in Grand Island, Nebraska, which is a very rural part, and red part, of an already red state. And it seemed confusing. At first, the thinking was, Trump is just going on a glory-days tour. He just likes the adulation, and these are places he can go. And that’s all true. He does like the adulation. But in talking to his advisers, they say they track the numbers before he goes into the state and when he leaves, and those trips are all about turnout.
Because you have to keep in mind that the Trump coalition that got him elected was a very unlikely coalition of people who specifically liked him, and so that’s why you see him saying, Pretend that I’m on the ballot. And those are people who don’t regularly vote in presidential elections, let alone in off-year midterms. And so, if Trump coming to your city and you standing in line and going to a rally can make you remember to mail in your ballot or go early or show up on Election Day, they believe that’s worth it.
Scherer: The problem is that if you’re in a state like Nebraska or Kansas, more than half the people are Trump supporters, naturally. If you’re in a state where it’s less than half, and only 30 percent of the people approve of Trump at this moment—which is a lot of states right now—and he says, Pretend I’m on the ballot, that means something very different for the 70 percent who don’t like him and the 30 percent who like him. So there’s a risk to that. Really what they wanna be doing is narrowcasting that message just to the hard-core believers.
Parker: Right. They don’t wanna turn out Democrats.
Scherer: But Trump doesn’t always get that nuance and is not convinced that he needs to be cautious.
Harris: And actually, to that point—where it could turn out Democrats—we are seeing in the early turnout numbers that they’re outpacing 2018, outpacing 2022 in places like Georgia and among Latino voters overall, who are largely dissatisfied. That coalition that the president had built in 2024 is deteriorating to an extent, if the poll numbers are taken at face value. And historically Democrats vote early; Republicans typically vote day-of. What are we learning from the early-voting numbers at the moment?
Scherer: I have a rule I adopted after the 2020 or 2016 race to never count early-vote numbers to mean anything. And the reason is that, like you said, different populations vote at different rates. Every election is very different. Midterms are very different from presidentials, and every district is reporting their own early votes. And so what you end up getting is like this barrage of numbers. It is clear that Democrats right now are voting with more enthusiasm and higher numbers than the past, but I don’t know what that means. Those Republicans can still go to the polls on Election Day. It doesn’t mean they’re not gonna vote. So I don’t know what any of it means. You just can’t. If person X has not yet voted, you don’t know whether they’re going to vote. And that’s the problem with relying too heavily on the early-voting numbers.
Parker: And good campaigns have lists and rolls that tell them person X hasn’t voted yet but probably supports you. So there’s a world in which, three days before Election Day, they get a phone call from their neighbor, and the knock on the door from the canvas, and someone from their church offering to drive them to the polls. So I’m with Michael.
Harris: When we come back, we discuss the issues driving voters to the polls.
[Music]
Harris: We’ve talked a lot about the logistics of the campaign, but I wanna get into some of these issues too. We know that affordability is troubling Americans. There was an AP story that I was reading where they were talking about the F-series truck, the F-150, and it’s the most purchased car in America, and it has been for some while. And right now, it costs about $100 to fill up a Ford F-150. That’s about $30 more than it was in 2025. So it’s the affordability issue in a nutshell there.
And then you have the Iran war that’s really unpopular with voters as well. As we’ve reported, the president is considering another escalation in the Middle East. What is the play there? Why is the president considering this sort of reescalation in Iran when it is already a deeply unpopular war with voters?
Scherer: The play is not a political play. There’s no political advantage to what he’s doing. The Republican campaign this cycle was always gonna be about prices. They had a playbook in February. It was blown up by the Iran war. Since then, you can track the president’s popularity in the generic ballot, which is, Do you plan to vote for a Republican or a Democrat in your congressional race by the price of gas? If gas goes up, Democrats do better, Trump does worse, and reverse.
And gas became very expensive in September, which totally explains the drop in polls. It’s gotten slightly better since then. It’s not a lot better, but it’s not getting worse, at least right now. What’s going on in Iran is you have a combination of Israel about to have an election, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister there, clearly wanting to amp up the idea of a conflict that Trump has to deal with. You have the Houthis continuing to attack places. You have U.S. intelligence saying diplomats in the region are unsafe, and so they’re having to evacuate people. And you have the president, who’s tried for weeks now to say, We’re gonna deal with this, but we’re gonna deal with this after the midterm, which is the politically sound thing to do.
The problem is that the Iranians know the same thing. And the best leverage they have right now over the president, barring whatever they’re gonna do if there’s another attack by the U.S., is to weaken him in the midterms.
Parker: And politically, the reason it’s such a problem for the president and Republicans is that people aren’t happy about affordability. People—independently of affordability—are unhappy about the war in Iran. Because you may recall, one of the key things Donald Trump promised was no more forever wars, no more quagmires in the Middle East, et cetera, et cetera. And the war in Iran, which people already don’t like on its merit, is so deeply tied with gas prices in a way that people can make that one-to-one connection. So it’s just a nest of what everyone hates.
Harris: As we mentioned throughout, the stakes of this are kind of clear. If Democrats win back control of the House and the Senate, Trump would be a lame-duck president. He would likely be subject to investigations. We saw, before the House left, even a Republican-introduced impeachment, articles of impeachment, against Pete Hegseth. If you were to open your reporter’s notebooks, what are some of the things that you will be thinking about and looking for from the president and the administration, and from Democrats as well, in the last couple of days?
Parker: So two things. I think, on the investigations front, you’re absolutely right. That is the biggest reason Donald Trump wants Republicans to win—is because he wants to shield himself and his staff from what will be myriad investigations. But I think one thing on the Democratic side is there is a risk of overreach. Remember, this is an affordability election. So there is a risk that Democrats can potentially go too far in their investigations in trying to impeach everyone. So that’s a debate the Democrat caucus will have to have themselves.
I’m also interested—there is this sense that if Democrats retake control of both chambers of Congress, that Congress will finally again be a check on Donald Trump because Republicans have fundamentally abdicated that role.
But my counterintuitive take is: I just don’t know how realistic that is. If Democrats win, especially in the Senate, it is not going to be by huge margins. It is going to be incredibly tight, and Donald Trump has mastered the art and the willingness of doing things without congressional approval, in the face of congressional approval, through executive orders, and other creative levers of power, and sort of saying, I’m gonna smash through everything until a court or someone stops me.
Harris: And once it’s broken, it’s harder to put back together.
Parker: Right. Once you’ve taken a wrecking ball to the East Wing and a court ruling says you weren’t allowed to do it—well? So I am skeptical of how effective Congress may be in Trump’s last two years if he chooses to try to bulldoze them.
Scherer: Trump needs money from Congress. He’s gotta pay for this war; he’s gotta fund his government. The more Democrats in power, the harder that is for him to get his priorities. They’re gonna have more leverage over him. He’s gonna have to eventually bend on some things. But it’s so remarkable, over the last two years, how much has changed and how little of it has had anything to do with legislation.
There was one tax bill—the last major piece of legislation they passed, which was a housing-affordability bill—he wouldn’t even sign, because he was so disinterested in it. It was a bipartisan bill. So the investigations will matter. They’ll fill the news cycle. There’ll be more disclosures. That sets the stage for 2028. But Trump did not have a legislative plan for the last two years.
Parker: It’s not like he’s Obama trying to pass the Affordable Care Act, and you need to really lift it through Congress.
Harris: There’s not some big omnibus legislation.
Parker: Yeah, exactly.
Scherer: And what he has is foreign policy. There’s something [that’s] gonna happen in Cuba in the next six months. He has his building projects, his hometown hobbyist stuff. He’s got the Olympics coming up. He’s got tariffs still he can play with, and he has an ability to pick fights all the time that have nothing to do with legislation, which he’ll continue to do.
Harris: So cementing his legacy is more about the things that he can build and the things that he can put together as opposed to—
Parker: Yeah, like the physical monuments to himself, rather than the legislation that lives on after him.
Harris: Well, Michael, Ashley, thank you so much for giving us so much to think about and helping us understand the last couple of the days before the election better.
Parker: Thank you.
Scherer: Thanks for having us.
Harris: That’s all for today’s show.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson. It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic podcasts, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.
