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How a campaign should divide its advertising budget across mail, streaming TV, display and doors — with sample splits and the math behind them.
Every campaign manager I talk to is looking for the answer to this question: “How much money should I spend on streaming versus broadcast?” No one is asking “should we do TV?” — although some are curious if they can afford TV or whether they should spend so many precious campaign dollars on one line item.
Most of you have a number — $20,000, $80,000, $300,000 — and a fixed number of weeks (days!) to spend it without wasting a dollar on someone who can't vote for your candidate.
There’s no cookie-cutter way to answer this, but let me attempt a shortish answer. A political campaign marketing budget should be prioritized based on impact per dollar, with the assumption that some of the least costly items are higher impact but also harder to organize (think DTD).
So let’s assume you’ve got your doors covered, and you’re doing the basics — you’re doing mail, and you’re posting on the socials and spending a little to boost those posts where some of your older audiences are hanging out (those are high-prop voters, after all), or where your most energized younger audiences are found (they’re loud and proud and spreading the word). But after that, it's all about maximizing your ad dollars.
The rule of thumb has always been, the bigger the screen the more impact your message is going to have — and that’s still true today. But now you have to decide how to best split those dollars on the big screen, and where leftover dollars should cascade after that.
This is why we created AdLever (cue the upbeat music, Ta-Da!), because the streaming TV and display lines of that budget start at $26 a day and go only to the households on your file. Ya, that’s a shameless plug… well, not too shameless because this IS my blog space.
After those basics I mentioned above, you’ll likely have some mail in your plan. People say (note I said “people” and not “experts”) that you need like 7 pieces of mail — they say this because they’re doing backwards math from EDAY and they are correctly assuming that you need at least 12+ impressions of some kind and this is an effective way to get there. After all, it's targeted, it's visual, it's tactile, and it has the benefit of not being tracked by the nerds who track such things.
All fine and well. But after that the big guns are TV and Programmatic (especially streaming). And because you want to spend as much of the campaign budget on powerful, targeted messaging as possible. If you miss the former, you might as well just do autocalls; if you miss the latter, you’re in yard sign land. The convergence of both powerful message delivery and deft targeting is what makes streaming so attractive, and why AdLever in particular is likely to be a very good choice for your campaign.
Conventional wisdom (is that a fair word to apply here? I think not…) has been that 30% of your old TV budget should be “digital.” But what I’ve seen is that in a world where 50% or more of your market may be cord cutters, broadcast buys will still garner 80% of that budget or more. Some national committee (I won’t name the guilty Parties, see what I did there?) staffers have committed the cardinal sin of just letting the old TV dinos ALSO place the “digital” buy — why? Because it’s easier, of course. In the face of all this, what are we to think? What’s the right amount to spend?
The best way I can tell you to cut this Gordian Knot is to think about frequency and go backward. Can you get enough surefire reps on the right audience to make a difference? If you can buy 1–2 impressions per week (or more) on a super targeted list of voters via streaming, why wouldn’t you? If you could get 4x that on pre-roll/OLV, why NOT do that? For state leg candidates on down, this is a no-brainer. If you’re a Congressional Manager, yes please. If you’re managing a statewide down-ballot, you might be in the seat where tough decisions about targeted dollars are legit — you’re going to be lucky to get $1m spent on your TV buy statewide and I don’t envy you, I really don’t, because I know how hard that position is.
But even a statewide down-ballot can create targeting lists of influencers and super voters for mailing and digital via AdLever. Tough Love Moment: The only reason you wouldn’t do this is, well, you’re lazy. Or you’re counting on your GC to do this, which is the same thing.
Hopefully this is resonating, or at least engaging enough that you’ll see what all the hype is about over at AdLever. If so, go create an account, upload your voter file, get the creative generated and you’re ready to move the needle.
I have a few more thoughts but, hey, shouldn’t you be helping a volunteer with a phone script right now??? Oh, you pawned that on the field director? Cool. Then here are a few more thoughts and the maths if you’re bored and doomscrolling anyway…
As you doubtless know, 2026 is on track to be the most expensive midterm on record — AdImpact projects $11.6 billion in political advertising this cycle, with about $2.7 billion of it on streaming TV, the fastest-growing piece of the pie (AdImpact, June 2026).
The money has moved. With AdLever, a campaign of any size can move with it. AdLever is as clever and powerful as our corny slogans indicate. But seriously…
To be fair — that used to be a good question. AI made me write that headline, and I thought I’d keep it to get another laugh. However, this was a real question as recently as last cycle. Thankfully, streaming has been democratized, but BUYING the streaming has not — until now. The new reality is that you CAN have your cake and eat it too.
If you’re reading this then you already know budget arguments in a campaign office are really arguments about personalities masquerading as arguments about “channels.” We all know there are loyal foxhole friends, and then there are the personalities and hangers-on… like that mail guy your candidate forced you to hire and is now relegated to doing palm cards. But you know the drill: Mail people want mail. The consultant who came up in broadcast wants to broadcast. The 24-year-old digital director wants everything on social media.
However, here’s a better idea IMHO: Start with the file.
Your voter file — the universe you pulled from VAN, L2, Aristotle, or the county — is the budget. And here I am assuming you have created a good target list… I might be assuming a lot knowing some of you!
Every household on it is a household you are willing to spend money on, right? Every household not on it is waste. So the first budget decision is not what percentage goes to TV; it is how many households are in your ID, persuasion, and turnout universes. Once you know that, each channel is just a price for reaching those households, and the split falls out of the math. That is exactly how AdLever works: the file is the audience.
No file yet? Well, first of all, it's like 4 weeks until election day, shame on you! But secondly, we got your back. You can build the universe inside AdLever by district, municipality, school district, precinct, voter propensity and party registration. Or you can man up and demand the file from your mail guy so you don’t have to pay for it twice (at least that’s what I would do, not that I mind selling you some solid data).
On AdLever, streaming TV, online video and display ads are all bought against the same file, household by household, with no spend on homes outside your list. The logic then runs that once that is true, the channel question is really a frequency question: how many times, on how many screens, do you want each household to see your name before ballots drop?
Before any channel goes in the budget, you might run this sort of test: of the households this buy reaches, how many can vote for me?
Take a mid-sized market. Columbus, Ohio covers just over a million TV households (Nielsen, 2024–25). A state house district in that market might hold 30,000 of them. A school board race might hold 6,000. Buy a broadcast spot and you have paid to reach 1,018,390 homes so that 6,000 of them might see it. That is not a media strategy. That is a donation to the station (they are nice folks, but not THAT nice).
Now run the same test on a streaming buy against your file. Upload the universe, AdLever matches it to verified households at a rate above 90% on average, and the ads run only on the screens inside those homes. Every household you pay for is a household on your list.
The waste test is why broadcast belongs in a countywide or congressional budget and almost never in a local one — not because broadcast doesn't work, but because you are paying for an audience you can't use. A streaming buy on AdLever passes the waste test at any district size.
These are just a few starting points, not rules. Districts vary enormously by state, and your file tells you the real numbers. But if you handed me these three budgets today, this is roughly where I would put the money, with the streaming TV and display lines running on AdLever against the file.
As the budget grows, mail's share goes down, not because mail stops working, but because the same file can now carry a real TV frequency and the two reinforce each other.
Notice what never changes: streaming TV and display are always bought against the file, and that is what AdLever does. A $25,000 city council campaign and a $500,000 county race are doing the same thing — reaching the households that can vote for them, on every screen in the house — at different scales. AdLever has democratized the living room — which is great for campaigns, though I wouldn’t advocate it for movie night (too many arguments). The school board candidate is on the same TV as the U.S. Senate candidate; they’re just paying for 4,000 homes instead of 4 million. If you’re a local candidate wondering whether you can afford streaming TV, check out this article our team put together with the requisite maths: The full math is in Can a local campaign afford streaming TV ads?
I might as well share some dirty laundry here, right? Okay, no names, but how about some experience. Here are a few mistakes we see every cycle.
Buying the market instead of the district. Covered above ad nauseam. It is still the most expensive mistake in local politics. My message to you: AdLever campaigns are bought by the household, so a local campaign pays only for the homes that can vote for it.
Treating streaming as an add-on. So sad. So ugly. Such a waste. Campaigns put 5% into "digital" as a box to check, then wonder why nobody noticed. They wonder because they might be ill equipped to run a campaign and no one convinced them otherwise. If the household is worth a mail piece, it is worth seeing your face on their TV. With AdLever starting at $26 a day, there is no excuse for leaving it out. Fund it like you mean it.
Different lists for different channels. The mail vendor has one file, the digital vendor builds another from interest categories, and neither matches the walk list. This is silly. Use your carefully crafted ONE file for every channel. You’ve heard of message discipline, right? Well, this is targeting discipline. Upload the mail file to AdLever and the household that gets the mail piece is the household that sees the spot that night.
Leaving verification until the last month. The streaming services require political advertisers to be verified before anything runs, and it can take days to weeks. Start it before anything else, not the week you want to be on the air. Which services accept political ads, and what each one requires, is covered in the guide to digital advertising for political campaigns.
Cutting field to fund media. Never. The media makes the door knock land; it does not replace it.
A political campaign marketing budget is not always a channel argument. It is a list of target households and a decision about how many times, on how many screens, each one hears from your campaign before they vote. Mail and doors reach the file. AdLever puts the candidate on the TV in those same homes from $26 a day, and its display campaigns keep the name in front of voters in between. There's probably room for separate discussions on the value of pre-roll/OLV but we’ll save that for another time; needless to say, it's a very helpful tool to have in the mix. Broadcast comes in only when the district is big enough to pay for the whole market without waste.
Build the file, run the waste test on every line, hold money for turnout, and stop paying to reach people who can't vote for you. AdLever makes the streaming and display lines of that budget simple: one file, one platform, and an estimate before you spend a dollar. Launch a campaign or discuss your campaign here!
Start from the voter file, not the channel. Or simply re-read everything I wrote earlier. Jeez, you’re making me type it out again! Okay, fine. Just like you’d work from Election Day backwards for your entire plan, do the same here by working backwards from tactics that are the most targeted and least wasteful. Start with mail and field, and utilize the same lists for streaming TV, OLV, and display. Multi-channel discipline will help increase name recognition. Add broadcast only when the district is large enough to justify paying for the entire media market. For a local race, a common starting point could look like roughly 35–50% mail, 30–40% streaming TV, 10–15% display and no broadcast, with field budgeted separately. On AdLever, the streaming TV and display lines run against that same file from $26 a day.
Streaming TV campaigns on AdLever start at $26 a day for a minimum audience of 1,000 households. Cost rises with the number of households and the frequency you choose, and the estimate is shown before launch, so a campaign can size the line to its file.
Usually not. Unless you have unlimited resources. If you’re asking this question now, you need to scroll up and re-read my painstakingly crafted article! Broadcast is sold by the media market, so a school board or city council campaign pays to reach every household in the market when only a few thousand can vote for your race. Broadcast makes sense when the district covers most of the market — countywide or congressional contests, for example. Streaming TV on AdLever is bought by the household instead, so a local campaign pays only for homes in its district.
Your spam folder exists in order to preserve friendships until after the election. “Shoot, I must have missed that. When did you send that?”
Serious answer though: if you are planning on purchasing cable from your friend, or some such less-than-targeted product, just keep in mind how much of your dollars are going to be utilized here and associate that with the cost of production, which is going to be less than the $8,000++ you’ll spend on their DMA targeting.
Ah, the age-old query. You know, back in the day, I had to go to a campaign school to learn these things, but these days you can just read articles like this and save all that money on airfare.
The rule of thumb is you want to work Election Day backwards, keeping in mind when early voting starts, and that you’ll want to be in front of your target audiences at least a few weeks before then.
Front-load name recognition early if you have the coin, then run persuasion in the weeks leading up to early voting. Then you’ll want to have enough money set aside for the turnout operation. Some campaigns will literally double their display frequencies and mail drops in the final two weeks of a campaign. If you can afford to do that, make a plan to increase frequencies on that calendar if possible. Remember that the final weeks are the most crowded and expensive inventory of the cycle. A saved audience in AdLever can be switched to turnout creative when early voting opens. What you’ll want to do before GOTV begins is to take the early voting list (people who have already cast a ballot) and bump it up against your target list. Then you won’t waste money on people who’ve already voted.
Yes. Obviously. Right? Not obvious? Okay, you’ve just skipped to the end. I caught you! Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Go back to the top and read the whole article! Well, you’re here now so… just remember it's not like some people like mail more than they like digital. Most are channel agnostic. This conversation never happened: “Dan, I’m just not going to vote for that Smith guy, he never sent me mail and all I get are these streaming ads. Doesn’t he know I like to take that mail with me into the ballot box?!”
Build an audience from your own contacts or verified household data, and reach those households on the devices they actually use.