MediaTalk | Season 4 | Ep. 40 - Broadcast, Digital, and CTV: The Battle for Political Ad Revenue in the 2026 US Midterms

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Mike Reynolds: Hi, I'm Mike Reynolds, a senior reporter covering the media industry for S&P Global Market Intelligence tech, media, and telecom news team. Welcome to "MediaTalk," a podcast hosted by S&P Global, where the news and research staff explore issues in the ever-changing media landscape.

Today, our focus is on the midterm election cycle, which culminates on November 3rd with the American public voting on House, Senate, gubernatorial, and downstate candidates, as well as a host of ballot issues. S&P Global held a webinar, "CTV Broadcast and the Battle for Political Dollars: Kagan Research Forecast the 2026 Midterms," on Oct. 6.

Yours truly was the moderator for that, and "MediaTalk" wants to give you a taste of the hour-long event. The webinar featured Justin Nielson, Research Director, S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan, who keeps tabs on many things including broadcast and its various revenue sources. Peter Leitzinger, senior research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan, keeps abreast of things in the broadcast realm, including political advertising over the years with presidential and now the latest midterm cycle.

Steve Passwaiter, president of Silver Oak Political, is a veteran political analyst and currently the president of Silver Oak Political, a Washington, D.C. political advisory firm that assists organizations interested in introducing services or improving their position in the political ad sector. And Samantha Osborne. Sam is vice president of political sales at Nexstar Media Group, the nation's largest TV station owner. Sam heads Nexstar's national political sales division, creating and developing go-to-market political ad strategies across all of Nexstar's platforms, looking to generate significant revenue growth in linear, digital, and connected TV. As was the case on October 6th, we're going to start with Justin Nielson, whose presentation included an overview of broadcast TV revenues, including political advertising's contribution to that base.

Justin Nielson: Overall, US TV station industry revenues in 2026, we're forecasting it to rise 9% to about $48.6 billion.

Obviously lifted by the midterms, World Cup, Winter Olympics. Of that, $21.5 billion in spot ad revenue, which includes about $4 billion in political. So we definitely could look at some upside to that number. About $3.5 billion in digital, and about $15.6 billion in gross retrans and virtual subcarriage revenue, which has been the largest growing segment over the past decade, but has started to slow a little bit.

Then looking forward to '27, we expect a drop of about 6%, down to about $38 billion. Still above 2025 as gross retrans and virtual subcarriage fee revenue are consistent. But still, growing slower than in the past, about 1%, to $15.7 billion. And then digital adds about 3% of that total as well, up year over year.

And then looking forward to the big 2028 presidential year, we're thinking almost 10% growth from '27 to about $41.8 billion, which would be a new record for the TV station industry. With spot ads up 18% to $22 billion, and then $4.5 billion in political which would be up almost 20% from the last presidential cycle.

And then, rounding that out with about $3.7 billion in digital and retrans of about $16 billion.

Mike Reynolds: Next up was Peter Leitzinger who shared Kagan's political projections and then took a look at what station groups hold the most full power stations and therefore should be able to gain the most political ad dollars this cycle.

Peter Leitzinger: Hi, I'm just going to give a quick snapshot of the current state of political ad revenue for broadcast TV in 2026 and moving forward. Our projections have local TV political ad revenue reaching $4.02 billion in 2026 and growing to $5 billion in 2032 election year. The 2026 projected total represents an increase of about 15% from the total revenue reached in the last non-presidential election year in 2022.

In our estimation, total political ad revenue represents about an average of 16% of total broadcast revenue in 2026, and we see the percentage growing to be more than about 18% of total revenue by 2032. So the momentum of political ad revenue segment, we see being very stable with growth well into the next 10 years.

So political ad revenue is most concentrated in areas where races are tight or competitive and the voters are split on candidates, Senate and House and gubernatorial races. They're the major focus for political ads coming from the candidates and their respective PACs, and those groups make large ad buys based on their candidates' issues, events, especially in the months and days leading up to election day.

So the TV station owners that own full power TV stations and TV markets that are home to those competitive races are likely to benefit the most. This year, we see Sinclair in a great position with over twenty-five TV stations in those competitive areas, as well as Gray Media with twenty-three stations.

However, the combined company of Nexstar and Tegna post-merger now has an estimated thirty-five full power TV stations in competitive markets, making it the largest of the TV station groups in those markets.

Mike Reynolds: Steve Passwaiter followed with a discussion on how much has been spent through the end of September according to Ad Impact estimates.

Steve Passwaiter: I thought Peter laid all of this out rather nicely, but I'll just kind of try to add a little bit onto the framework that he's established here. And I'd like to thank my friends at Ad Impact who were kind enough to give me the numbers here to be able to share with all of you and some of the trends that are happening in this particular cycle.

As you've heard, 2026 is biggest on record, and even though we don't have a presidential race, which is somewhat astonishing. You can see through Sept. 30, that $7 billion-plus number — that's the amount of money that's been spent. It's a lot more than what was spent in 2020, a lot more in 2022 and even 2024.

If we look at the projections that have been out there and whether you're looking at Ad Impact's numbers or S&P Kagan or Kinetic Political Insights, everybody, at the top end is somewhere between $11.5 billion and $12 billion.

And if we look at that, that means in the next, since this number came out, there's around $4 billion that is going to have to run. Boy, oh boy, that's a lot of inventory to suck up in October. It will be a flood of money coming in on top of what's already been booked.

Mike Reynolds: Steve backed that up with breakdowns on the platform spending with a record $1.78 billion on CTV, almost $1.3 billion on digital, mostly from Meta and Google, $990 million on cable and satellite, and $150 million on radio.

Steve Passwaiter: Round two. Now let's talk about where the money is actually going by media platform. And again, not terribly surprising, broadcast is leading. The real story here is connected television. And again, I don't think this should shock anybody, right? Connected television at $1.78 billion, will certainly go over $2 billion, could do $2.3, $2.4 this year. That's what we would expect, right? The ability to target, the fact that some of these companies now are, with early voting, are actually taking those voters out.

So advertisers who are using CTV are not sending messages to people that have already voted. Very smart, but a real advantage for people on the connected television side. Google and Meta are doing their thing, cable, satellite, and radio. I wish I had better news for my radio friends. Unfortunately, the number's the number.

If we look at total spending, we'll take all of this into account, Republicans are actually spending more money than Democrats. That's the first time that's happened in quite a while. I jokingly put here, power is great for the checking account, but it's true. Those in power generally tend to have a lot of it.

And not surprisingly, the issue groups are spending 60% of the money to date in this cycle.

Yeah. Sam, I have a question that I think you're uniquely positioned to answer here. We have one audience member, Ryan, asking, "How is linear TV able to maintain such an outsized share of political advertising spend, despite its rapidly declining share of all other ad spend?" I should have given you a catcher's mitt, because this one's right up your alley.

Samantha Osborne: I think that there's a few reasons that broadcast is consistently the most effective platform for campaigns looking to reach voters. Really, it's quick to get frequency and just reach, right? That's the biggest, like, upside of broadcast. If you need to start advertising in a very short period of time, and you need to have a high frequency, broadcast is the place to go.

It's also... It's transparent, and like I said, I think there's actually value to that from a competitive standpoint. Everything — you can see what's in the market. You can see what your opponents are doing, what the super PACs are doing. I think strategically, broadcast is a foundation for nimbleness when you're planning your campaign dollars in terms of media.

Yeah, people are watching less broadcast TV, but there's still the 30-second spot. The 30-second ad is very valuable. If you really look at connected TV, it's broadcast, right? You're still watching a program. You're going to sit there and watch the two-minute ad breaks.

Broadcast still has an oversized share of that, and I just think that, are we competing with more media companies? Yes. And that's what we the broadcasters need to start thinking about, is we're competing not just with the other station group. We're competing with Facebook. We are competing with Google. And we need to retrain our sales strategies that way. But that's just kind of evolving with the media landscape, and I think that any company that is not doing that will find themselves behind. But, I think that just accepting the reality of just — we have more competitors. There's more people competing for the media dollars.

Mike Reynolds: I asked Sam about CTV. The platform continues to gain advertising share in political circles, and if CTV is playing an increased role for Nexstar during this cycle.

Samantha Osborne: Yeah, so we've been launching more and more apps and trying to grow our CTV audiences, and there is demand there of course. I think, if you think about the content of our, what's over the air, the same content that's on our streaming platform.

So yeah, it's there. It's just one of these things is how big, how fast can we grow our CTV audience, balancing that with our broadcast audience. It's a heavy point of emphasis for us as a company to just continue to invest in those audiences just like others. But we also have our network audiences too, that we can sell based on geotargeting too, so you can buy CW, you can buy NewsNation, The Hill as well. Yeah, we are seeing demand there.

Mike Reynolds: Peter discussed some of the key ballot issues that voters will decide on November 3rd.

Peter Leitzinger: I think there's a lot of them, but immigration rights, affordability housing policies, those are some big ones.

I know Steve touched on those. I think an interesting one is the citizenship requirements for voting. That's one of the bigger issues. There's six measures in six states: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia. They're all on the ballots there. I think it's a polarizing issue.

I think it'll be heavily targeted by ads. And I think the outcomes there have a big effect on future elections and how states handle that.

Mike Reynolds: Data centers are also a big voter topic. "MediaTalk" recently examined issues around power and energy concerns, as well as revenues driven by tax incentives, which are now being repealed or rolled back by many states and municipalities as citizens are increasingly saying, "Not in my backyard," to prevent local data center development. Justin weighed in, then Steve suggested data center developers might be wise to look back to practices from business models past, and then Sam provided a lay of the land for messaging across Nexstar's platform for data centers and the related topic of artificial intelligence.

Justin Nielson: Yeah, absolutely. And it's definitely being pushed from the Democratic side, they have really targeted kind of the affordability, the data center, energy, utilities increase component to it, as well as any of the kind of environmental impact that could be part of a huge data center, a gigawatt data center next to a neighborhood.

So yes, it has been a polarizing issue, especially here in California where I am. It has been part of their targeting in terms of not only on the proposition side, but also on each one of the individual congressional districts as well, where they have aspirations to flip seats.

Mike Reynolds: Okay. Steve, when we were talking the other day you had suggested perhaps that some of the folks in the data center development world should go back to some of the business moguls from a century or more ago and maybe take their lead a little bit.

Steve Passwaiter: Yeah, I guess I've been watching too much of the History Channel, okay... in the household. But, it reminds me of some of the moves that were made by, you know, the Andrew Carnegies and the John D. Rockefellers of the world. Clearly, I don't think the NIMBYs back in the 19th century were probably too enthused to see a steel mill go up in their backyard or an oil field crop up somewhere in Western Pennsylvania.

But these guys went to the communities and made them a deal. Carnegie built all those libraries all around the country, many of whom still exist and still running to this day. And it almost seems to me like some of these guys are going to have to start going to the communities and playing ball, whether it's building a new school or doing something that truly benefits the community, gives them something they really need.

They may have to try putting a little sugar into the mix before they think about building something.

Mike Reynolds: Sam, I think you're maybe uniquely positioned here given the breadth of Nexstar. Again, is AI and data center development, is there a lot of messaging around the buys that candidates and campaigns have made for your stations?

Samantha Osborne: It's a big topic in the spots, for sure. We've seen that. We've seen AI be used in the content of the spots. That's something we were prepared for. Most states are now requiring disclaimers to disclose the use of AI when they... in a political ad, so that's something we've had to adjust to.

Sometimes, like we had to tell our agencies, "Hey, the state has a rule here, so if you want to air on our station, we need you to just insert a disclaimer." Fortunately, everybody's been playing ball with that. But yeah, AI is a big, it's a big topic.

And it's in multiple states that you can see the candidate or their super PAC, they're using the issue as a topic of conversation.

Mike Reynolds: As the midterms head into the stretch drive, I asked Peter and Justin about where they expected to see an influx of spending over the final weeks.

Peter Leitzinger: I think the open governor races in Minnesota, also Wisconsin and Michigan — I think Steve touched on some of those. Those I think are going to draw a ton of ad dollars, and California obviously they command some of the highest premiums in the country. Texas and Maine are also some with very competitive Senate races, and Georgia and Michigan are also going to be filled with ads on the airwaves there.

Mike Reynolds: Check. Yeah. Justin, maybe some purple w- is shining the brightest.

Justin Nielson: Yeah, Arizona. So Arizona has become a purple state. It has leaned more Republican in the presidential election cycle, but you've got potentially a new Democratic presidential candidate, Mark Kelly, there could be a lot spent in that state.

Also, you look at some of these other western states where you may have pretty safe races, but there could be aspirations for that next kind of campaign, either moving to a Senate or a presidential campaign. So you may see some early kind of advertising for that next election cycle.

Mike Reynolds: That concludes this episode of "MediaTalk." During the webinar, "CTV Broadcasting: The Battle for Political Dollars," Kagan Research forecasted 2026 midterms. We also focused more closely on what races where political ad dollars are being spent. Differing views from Steve and Sam over an audience question around campaign finance reform, closer looks at some of the key races and attendant spending as control of both houses of Congress are at stake, and then there was discussion around the 2028 presidential cycle, which perhaps could attract as much as $15 billion in political spending.

If you didn't listen to the "CTV Broadcasting: Battle for Political Dollars" webinar, we hope we have enticed you to check out the replay. As was the case during the event, I again want to thank Nexstar's Sam Osborne, Silver Oak's Steve Passwaiter, and Kagan's Peter Leitzinger and Justin Nielson for sharing their thoughts and insights on the 2026 midterm cycle.

And this is Mike Reynolds. Thanks to all of you for listening to "MediaTalk." We'll catch up soon with the next installment.