Dem
47
GOP
53
A vast amount of money will be spent on congressional races this year and next. In the Senate, it will be concentrated in maybe five to seven states. Certainly Georgia, Ohio, Maine, Michigan and North Carolina, and possibly Kentucky if Mitch McConnell jumps out and Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) jumps in. Maybe New Hampshire, if Chris Sununu decides to run for the Senate. The chairman of the NRSC is Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC). He expects all spending records to be broken.
Scott thinks the total spending in Maine, where Democrats will try to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), will be in the $400-600 million range. It is hard to see how they will spend it. Maine has only 15 full-power TV stations. He thinks the North Carolina race, with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) trying to defend all his Senate votes for incompetent people, will top out at $700 million. He believes these two races alone will add up to more than a billion dollars. These are numbers that used to be far more than a presidential campaign spent. But because politics is now so partisan and ferocious, supporters and opponents of Donald Trump see control of the Senate as a life or death matter, so the money will flow like water.
And it is not even clear that force-feeding a voter the same ad 30 times a night is really more effective than force-feeding the voter the same ad 10 times a night. At some point people are going to get angry at the ads and they might become counterproductive. Besides, many voters simply vote for their party's candidate and no amount of advertising will change that. This means each party might be spending a few hundred million dollars to try to convince 10,000 undecided voters that their ad is less obnoxious than the other side's ad. (V)