With less than two weeks until the election, political TV ads in the 2nd Congressional District are breaking records. In fact, there are more ads being aired in the race than in any other congressional district in the country.
The Wesleyan University Media project tracks the actual number of TV ads by district, and from Sept. 16 to Oct. 13, there were 9,327 ads designed to influence the 2nd Congressional District race. That’s about twice the number aired in most of the hotly contested races.
Colby College government professor Tony Corrado says the fact that most of the money for those ads is coming from groups outside the state says a couple of things about the contest.
“That reflects not only a sense that this race is tightening, but it also reflects that the 2nd Congressional District is at play in the presidential election,” he says.
And Corrado says that a good turnout for Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin or Democrat Emily Cain will also help their respective party’s presidential nominees, which makes those independent expenditures in the race that much more effective.
As of Sept. 30, Poliquin’s campaign had raised about $3.3 million to Cain’s $2.8 million. But independent spending has gone over $6.2 million, mostly for negative ads that have been running back-to-back.
“The diversity of organizations is amazing, the amount of effort for the congressional campaigns, Democratic and Republican have been doing, really stunning,” says University of Maine at Farmington political science professor Jim Melcher.
Melcher says the growing number and frequency of ads will start to turn some voters off, and the pace traditionally increases in the last 10 days before the election. And it’s not just TV and radio ads that are bombarding voters — Corrado says they are also seeing their mailboxes stuffed with leaflets and other, often very negative campaign material.
He says another major avenue for political ads, which is not as easily tracked, is through social media.
“It seems that it is almost impossible to open up one’s browser and just look at some pages or news articles and not see an ad pop up for Cain or Poliquin,” Corrado says.
Mailing and social media expenditures will eventually show up in both candidates’ and independent expenditure reports, but often it is after the election before the full picture of how voters were influenced by them is really known.
