With the balance of Congress at stake and many races—particularly in the Senate—fiercely competitive, candidates have pulled out all the stops in their campaigns while their parties turn to ad spending at historic levels. According to the analytics firm AdImpact, this election cycle is now the most expensive in history. With $11.2 billion on ads and future reservations, 2025-2026 has now overtaken all other cycles, including 2023-2024, despite the latter involving a presidential race.
Spending is predictably higher in this year’s battlegrounds, peaking at half a billion dollars in Texas, the majority of which is pro-Republican. AdImpact initially expected only $124 million to be spent on this seat, though it revised this up to what still proved an underestimate of $446 million in June. And beyond the scale of spending, the content of certain midterm ads themselves has also appeared—to some—unprecedented.
Whether due to poor taste, poor timing or evidently poor political instincts, this election cycle has witnessed a number of ads roundly seen as hurting the candidate who approved them while giving a boost to their opponents. Here are five of the most prominent examples, ranked by how roundly each was criticized, how poorly it communicated the intended message and by how much the resulting backlash could be seen as damaging the candidate's chances. The Ohio gubernatorial contest between the democratic candidate Amy Acton and the Republican Vivek Ramaswamy was blown open in mid-October, when the latter pushed an attack ad featuring the former’s estranged mother.
In the one-minute video—which Ramaswamy’s team said it would that it will spend $4 million airing it statewide—Donna Arthur calls her daughter a "liar" with a "serious problem.” The context surrounding the pair’s relationship quickly surfaced, however. Acton has publicly accused her stepfather—Cledith Arthur, her mother’s now-deceased husband—of raping her as a child, for which he was arrested and charged. Her mother lost custody of the children as a result of this, stayed with the accused until his death, and has since been estranged from Acton.
This resulted in widespread and bipartisan criticism of Ramaswamy, with a number of Republicans expressing their discomfort. The campaign’s response—that regardless of Acton and her mother’s past, the Democrat remains “a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth”—invited nearly as much backlash as the ad itself. Acton's odds on prediction markets have climbed around 10 percent since the ad first surfaced.
A one-minute spot supporting Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed saw the Michigan Democrat come under fire for a claim that U.S. aid to Israel is a central reason behind America’s cost of living crisis. The ad—which came from an outside PAC and not El-Sayed’s campaign—features a couple shopping in a grocery store. The man is told to put a carton of eggs back on the shelf, asking whether his kids “don’t like eggs anymore?” “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians,” the woman responds, before adding that “apparently it’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza.” The ad was not broadcast but was shared widely on social media by the political commentator Cenk Uygur, and repurposes material from his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024.
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