Do Political TV Ads Really Change Minds?

Every U.S. election cycle, political campaigns bombard American televisions with advertisements for candidate X versus Y. But can these ads really make a difference, especially with shifts in the way we watch TV? Learn when they actually work in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/do-campaign-tv-ads-change-voters-minds.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, BrainStuff. Lauren
Vogelbaum here. The 2026 United States midterm elections are fast approaching.
And if you live in a state with a hotly
contested race, you're probably being blasted by political TV ads.

(00:22):
As of late September, campaigns across the United States are
projected to spend a total of $ 11. 6 billion on advertising
on TV, in print, and online by Election Day in November,
according to the intelligence firm Ad Impact. That's far more
than the 2022 midterms, which came in at just $ 8. 9 billion,

(00:43):
and even the 2024 presidential cycle, which came in at
$ 11. 2 billion. This year's record spending on television and other
types of political ads reflects the high stakes of the
2026 midterms. The Republicans hold both chambers of Congress by
slim majorities, the Senate by 53 versus 45 seats, and

(01:03):
the House of Representatives by 218 versus 212. That means
that the Democratic Party needs to gain a net of
only four seats in the Senate and three districts in
the House to win majorities. Back in 2022, during the
last and also blisteringly contested midterm cycle, HowStuffWorks spoke with
Christopher Warshaw, now a political science professor at the McCourt

(01:27):
School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. He said, campaigns
hope that by buying a few extra thousand ads, they
can put their candidates over the top and win control
of the government for their party. the American public is
more polarized than ever before, but there's still this swath
of independent voters in the middle who are trying to decide.

(01:50):
And political ads, despite how annoying and even stressful they
can be, have proven effective, especially in the tightest races.
A bombardment of ads doesn't necessarily turn people off, but
research has shown that the 1,000th ad is basically no
less effective than the 10th. Take the 2016 and 2020

(02:10):
presidential elections, for example. The 2016 election was decided by
razor-thin margins of victory for Republican candidate Donald Trump in
battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In 2020, Joe
Biden and the Democrats spent heavily on political TV ads
in those same battleground markets. As Election Day 2020 approached,

(02:33):
pro-Biden TV ads outnumbered pro-Trump ads by the thousands in
key markets, and Biden won the day. Back in 2022, Warshaw,
along with two other researchers, published a study in the
journal American Political Science Review that looked at data from
more than 2,250 U.S. elections from the years 2000 through 2016,
not just presidential races. They found that for every additional

(02:58):
thousand TV ads that a campaign runs compared to its opponent,
it can capture 0.2 percentage points more of the vote.
And the results of the 2020 presidential election seemed to
bear this out, with small but significant swings happening in
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. However, it's a complicated equation. In the

(03:20):
2024 presidential election, The volumes of ads that were pro-Harris
versus pro-Trump were very close. Pro-Democrat groups spent more on advertising,
nearly 1.8 billion versus pro-Republicans 1.4. But neither the numbers
of ads nor the sheer money spent could win the

(03:40):
election for Harris and the Democrats. Warshaw and colleagues did
find that TV ads had a much greater effect on
down-ballot races compared to presidential contests. three times greater for
Senate races, four times greater for gubernatorial races, and 12
times greater for the more obscure races like state treasurer.

(04:01):
The reason may be that political TV ads function to
convey some sort of new information to the voter. Warshaw said,
At the presidential level, ads don't give you much new
information that you didn't already have. We already knew so
much about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Whereas the races
for the House or Governor or Senate people are following

(04:22):
those a lot less closely. Voters might not know anything
about those candidates beyond their party affiliation. For that target
demographic of undecided voters, any new information provided by a
TV ad about a state or local race could swing
them in the campaign's desired direction. This is also a
lesson for political donors who want the most bang for

(04:44):
their buck. A donation to a presidential campaign is a
drop in the bucket, but that same donation to a
down-ballot race could buy more ads that actually influenced the outcome.
Television advertising has been part of the presidential election landscape
since 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower's team hired the Madison Avenue
ad man who also came up with the Eminem's Melt-in-Your-Mouth,

(05:06):
Not-in-Your-Hand campaign. At that time, only around 35% of American
homes even had a television. And there was serious debate
about whether it was appropriate for political candidates to run
ads on TV at all. Eisenhower's opponent, Adlai Stevenson, felt
that they should be above it. He said, Even TV

(05:31):
networks like NBC and CBS discouraged the campaigns from buying
ad time in a move to maintain the dignity of
the office. But Eisenhower and his TV-inclusive I Like Ike
campaign wound up winning in a landslide, with the highest
popular vote total since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. It wasn't

(05:52):
until the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race that negative campaign ads debuted.
The Kennedy team actually pulled a quote from Eisenhower slamming Nixon,
who was Eisenhower's vice president in that 1952 election. And
it wasn't until the 2008 Obama-McCain race that complex data
analytics entered the picture, with Obama's team pulling ahead with

(06:13):
help from ad micro-targeting. Lots of studies have been done
on the effectiveness of political TV ads over the years,
and have shown mixed results. It seems that when you
look at the big picture over time, these ads do
have limited persuasive power. And the content doesn't necessarily matter.

(06:35):
All types of ads— positive, negative, partisan, nonpartisan— seem to have the
same small effect on voting outcomes. Warshaw and colleagues' research
showed that the largest plausible effect of TV ads influencing
people to vote for a certain candidate is only one
to two percentage points. So, if he was consulting a

(06:56):
campaign on how to spend its money, he said he
wouldn't automatically recommend pouring millions of dollars into television. It
would depend on the market you're pitching to. A solidly
red or blue state isn't going to be swung by
such a small amount. But as we've seen in the
past few election cycles, there are plenty of contests that
have been decided by less than one percentage point. Your

(07:20):
vote always counts, even if you feel like you're shouting
into a red or blue void. But okay, it's 2026.
The way that we consume media is changing fast, so
is the influence of TV ads changing too? We're going
to get into that, but first we're going to get
into a quick word from our sponsors. The research from

(07:49):
Warshaw and colleagues that we've been talking about looked at
data from the years 2000 to 2016, a time when
most American voters watched hours of cable television every day.
But subscriptions to cable or other paid live TV services
peaked in 2011, with some 82% of Americans subscribing. Between

(08:11):
then and now, 46% of Americans have cut the cord,
and the number is growing every year. As of 2025,
according to a Pew Research Center report, only 36% of
Americans subscribed to cable or satellite TV at home. Compare
that to 83% who watched streaming services. There's obviously some

(08:34):
overlap there, but 55% of people said that they only
watched streaming at home. Nevertheless, broadcast TV ads are still
the single biggest spending category in 2026's campaign advertising, estimated
to make up some 48% of the aforementioned $ 11. 6 billion
that's projected to be spent. A rising category of ad

(08:58):
spending is in the relatively new market for connected television,
which encompasses ads on streaming services like Netflix and apps
like YouTube. A relatively small 23% of 2026 campaign ad
budgets are estimated to be going to connected TV ads. However,
the increase in spending that we're seeing over the 2024

(09:20):
election cycle is expected to be almost exclusively in this category.
Digital ads in general have been found to have an
even smaller effect on voters than traditional TV ads, but
political advertisers are getting smarter. On ad-supported apps and streaming services,
campaigns can run hyper-targeted ads based on the subscriber's personal data.

(09:42):
Not all streaming platforms currently allow political ads, but for
those that do, two people who live on the same
block and watch the same show could be served different
campaign ads based on all kinds of household data, including
the resident's age, sex, race or ethnicity, voting record, party affiliation,

(10:02):
or even the home's estimated market value. This might be
key because research has shown that campaign ads tend to
reinforce or confirm viewers' existing biases. That, for example, showing
a pro-Republican ad to self-identified Republicans will mobilize them to
vote Republican. But that showing the same ad to self-identified

(10:25):
Democrats will backlash, mobilizing them to vote against the Republican.
So ad targeting could come really in handy for maximizing mobilization,
minimizing backlash, and perhaps most importantly, reaching those undecided voters.
And campaigns are getting really granular. Obviously, not every ad

(10:47):
is going to resonate with every audience, but it's not
just preferences for positive versus negative campaigning or issues versus
personality anymore. Research has shown that as of the past decade,
a lot of traditional wisdom about what makes a campaign
successful has gone out the window. Instead, it increasingly seems
that every demographic of voters going into every race has

(11:11):
its own priorities and preferences. Big money is now going
into experimentation with different iterations of campaign ads. In such
a fractured and contested political environment, you can run from
campaign ads, but you can't hide. Of course, all of
the ads in the world won't make a difference if

(11:31):
you don't actually vote. Look up your state or local
elections office and make sure that you're registered and know
how to vote, either via a mail-in ballot or in
person during early voting or on election day. There are
a few scams out there right now, so be sure
that the website you check has an address that ends in. gov.

(11:56):
Today's episode is based on the article, Do Campaign TV
Ads Really Change Voters' Minds? on HowStuffWorks.com, written by Dave Ruse.
BrainStuff is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with
HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more shows
from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.