The political fundraising emails and text messages that many of us relentlessly receive on a daily basis tend to tell big, dramatic stories. A quick scroll on my phone at this very moment reveals a seven-paragraph message about January 6th and harrowing MAGA hatred nominally from a former capitol police officer running for the House in Maryland, five paragraphs from a House candidate in Colorado about the unrepentant evils of Lauren Boebert, and nine paragraphs supposedly written by senate candidate Colin Allred about the devastating fundraising prowess of his incumbent Republican party opponent, Ted Cruz. 

The above is only a small sampling: Dozens of panicked candidate solicitations have arrived in my digital inbox over the last 48 hours; more are arriving as we speak. And all because I donated to a single Democratic party Senate candidate during the 2022 cycle who didn’t even win his primary. We’re talking big business here. 

There’s much to be said about the formulaic ubiquity of digital fundraising appeals in American politics. A historic $8.9 billion was spent during the 2022 midterm election cycle, and OpenSecrets found that individual donors giving less than $200 contributed 18%, about $1.5 billion of the total. A separate OpenSecrets report determined that this astronomical total was due in no small part to candidate and party text/email campaigns. Fifteen billion political fundraising texts were received on American phones in 2022, up from 6 billion during the 2020 presidential cycle. 

Left Unsaid: Where Campaign Contributions Actually Go

For all of the aggrandizing and weightiness of the countless text messages and emails, it is worth noting that they almost never mention what exactly is going to be done with the money so desperately requested. Much is said about the “grassroots” and movement-building or about the dire urgency of defeating a given general election opponent, but the hows of the matter are conspicuously absent, if not presented as functionally irrelevant. 

In line with the rhetoric around movement-building, not to mention the “Save Democracy” messaging espoused by the national Democratic Party, one might expect that a given campaign would funnel some meaningful portion of cash on hand toward voter registration and outreach as well as community engagement in their given district. And some do. But the reality in the case of many Democratic Party congressional candidates is that an astronomical amount of money raised is spent on advertising and image consulting, sometimes conducted by firms hundreds of miles from their district. According to OpenSecrets, some $4 billion, or nearly half of all spending in the 2022 cycle, was spent on media. Another $1.1 billion was spent on political fundraising, with much of that going to buy digital ads. 

Congressional Campaigns Spend Most of Their Money on Advertising

For many Democratic congressional candidates, the ratio of spending on ads was much higher. OpenSecrets noted as one glaring example that in 2022, Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) “spent more than 80% of her campaign’s cash on media.” That money, they said, “went overwhelmingly to broadcast ads” as well as web ads. Spanberger’s race for re-election in Virginia’s 7th was among the very closest in the country and her campaign was able to raise over $9 million for the effort. Five million of those dollars would by election day be transferred to a media firm called BlueWest out of Denver, Colorado. Another $1.5 million went to a digital agency called Blueprint Interactive in Washington, D.C. 

One only has to pick any of 2022’s closest congressional races at random to discover that many other Democratic Party congressional candidates spent the millions of dollars they had on hand similarly to Spanberger. To provide just a few examples: Centrist Democrat Jared Golden in Maine’s District 2 spent nearly four of his campaign’s $6 million paying an advertising firm called Beacon Media in Washington, D.C.; defeated congressman Tom Malinowski of New Jersey spent just under $7 million of his campaign’s $8.8 million on advertising; Susie Lee of Nevada spent 75% of the $6.25 million she raised on media and advertising. 

Political Ads Can Help Democrats Win. But What About Civic Engagement?

The extent to which TV advertising may help to create a more vibrant democracy can be debated. Academic research suggests that such ads can have a powerful effect on voting behavior, especially in down-ballot races. And to the extent that effective political advertising is deployed on behalf of Democratic candidates up against an increasingly authoritarian GOP, it’s hard to argue with this campaign tactic. 

The problem lies more in the gross underinvestment by Democratic candidates and party committees in efforts to engage voters in deeper and more meaningful ways. The ungodly sums of money spent on political ads are, in the end, mainly designed to move very small pockets of oscillating likely voters. What Democrats aren’t doing is investing systematically in expanding the electorate to bring more people off the sidelines of civic life and connect with the ever-larger swath of Americans who want nothing to do with either political party. It’s hard to see how Democrats create a strong and enduring governing majority without making such investments.