The biggest spending window in American political history opens.
AdImpact projects 2026 political ad spending will reach $11.6 billion. That is not just a midterm record. It is more than the 2024 presidential cycle. And the calendar is brutally concentrated: historically, 58 to 67 percent of all cycle ad spending lands between August and November, with October alone accounting for as much as a third of the entire cycle.
Ninety days. Election Day is November 3.
Which means the audience decisions campaigns make right now, this week, determine whether billions of dollars reach actual voters or vapor.
Attention just changed hands, and it changed screens
The American electorate is not watching television the way it did four years ago. Streaming now accounts for nearly half of all television consumption-a shift that accelerated through the pandemic and has held steady. Cord-cutting continues to climb. Smart TVs and mobile devices are where 62% of voters now spend their media time, not broadcast or cable.
Political money is following that audience. Connected TV is projected to hit approximately $2.7 billion during this cycle, and Kinetiq Political Insights projects CTV will cross 25% of total political ad spending for the first time -more than double its share since 2022. That is a quarter of an $11.6 billion cycle headed to the one screen where most campaigns still cannot verify who is actually watching.
Reach isn't the problem. Verified reach is.
Massive reach is available-CTV platforms have it. The problem is the same one political advertising has always faced, just magnified on a new screen: most campaigns cannot prove who was actually reached.
On CTV, there are no cookies. A household watching a streaming app could be a registered voter in your district, out-of-state visitors, or a cord-cutting renter who has never voted. To a CTV platform, they all count as impressions. To a campaign, most of them are wasted spend.
Political advertising does not get to be approximate. Every dollar between now and November 3 has to land on a registered voter, in the right district, reachable on the screens they actually use.
With 90 days left and every campaign chasing the same voters at the same time on the same streaming platforms at rising CPMs, the campaigns that win are not the ones that shout loudest in October. They are the ones that already know exactly who their voters are, which screens they are on, and who they have not reached yet.
That is an identity problem
And it is exactly what Semcasting was built to solve:
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85%+ cross-platform voter match rates. Registered voters resolved to home IPs, mobile devices, CTV households, and hashed emails, so the voter is the anchor, not the device or the cookie.
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CTV household targeting for cord-cutters. Reaching the growing share of the electorate that is only addressable through streaming, addressable TV, and digital audio. If a quarter of political spend is going to CTV this cycle, campaigns need to know the household behind the screen is a voter in their district.
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District-level precision. State, congressional district, state legislative district, and precinct-level targeting, because reach outside your geography is just a donation to the media platform.
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Next-day reporting on who was reached and who remains. GOTV budgets should chase the voters you have not gotten to, not the ones you have already saturated.
The final stretch decides everything
Most competitive races this November will be decided in the final weeks, when persuadable and low-propensity voters finally tune in and every campaign is fighting for the same inventory at inflated CPMs. The voters who make the difference are the ones campaigns have not reached yet.
The campaigns that win in the final stretch are the ones that do the identity work now, while the window is still open. Build the voter audience, verify it, activate it across every screen, and measure it daily, so when October arrives you are optimizing instead of guessing.
Ninety days left. The campaigns that already know their voters, and can prove they reached them, are the ones who will be celebrating in November.
Ready to see your district's reachable electorate? Audience Designer (ADS) is Semcasting's self-serve platform for building voter audiences by district, party affiliation, turnout history, and issue alignment. Match your voter file at 85%+ across CTV, mobile, home IP, and hashed email, push audiences to the platform of your choice, and get next-day reporting on who was reached and who remains.
