US Midterms on Track for Record Spending, Projected at Nearly $12bn
The 2026 US midterm campaign is set to be the most expensive on record, with total spending projected to reach nearly $12bn (£9bn), according to the BBC. Midterms are the congressional elections held in the middle of a presidential term, and they decide control of Congress for the years that follow.
OpenSecrets, a research group that runs a hub tracking the cost of federal elections, projected total spending at $11.9bn. That projection is based on trends from past election cycles and is about 30% higher than what was spent in the 2022 midterms.
Actual spending is already well advanced. As of mid-October, more than $9.5bn had been spent in the cycle, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission, the agency that receives campaign finance reports. Political action committees, or PACs, which are groups that raise and spend money to support candidates, and Super PACs, a related category, accounted for about $5.5bn of that total, more than half.
Individual donors have also played a large part. Elon Musk was the largest individual donor of the cycle, giving almost half a billion dollars to back Republican candidates as of October. The Brennan Center for Justice found that the 40 largest donors had given $2.4bn up to 14 October, a record high for that point in a midterm cycle.
Money is also flowing to specific races and causes. America PAC has invested more than $45m in the Texas Senate race. Ripple and Coinbase together gave $63m to Super PACs promoting the interests of the crypto industry.
Looking ahead, OpenSecrets projected $3.9bn in spending by outside groups and $1.5bn in dark money, political spending whose donors are not publicly identified. A separate estimate from AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising, put ad spending at $11.6bn, according to CBC News.
Earlier figures from the Federal Election Commission cover the first 18 months of the 2025-2026 cycle. In that period, congressional candidates collected $2.8bn and spent $2bn, while political parties received $1.4bn and spent $1bn, according to the FEC.
Voting takes place on 3 November.
