The United States has never seen
political spending like the Georgia runoff election.
Just since Election Day, candidates and outside groups
have spent $480 million on advertising.
That's more than the Trump campaign spent
on his entire 2016 presidential run.
The Senate majority's hanging in the balance,
and every outside group worth its salt
is going to want to get it on that action
and try to make a dent with ad spending.
Campaign spending in the US
has skyrocketed during the last decade.
And it continued to break records in 2020,
with nine of the 10 most expensive Senate races of all time.
But how did political campaigns get so expensive?
And where is all the money going?
A tight election in November forced a runoff
for both of Georgia's Senate seats.
David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler
are the Republican incumbents in a race against Democrats
Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock
that has come to have major national implications.
If both Democrats win, it will flip the Senate to blue
and give Democrats control of the executive
and legislative branches of government.
The stakes are so high that former president Barack Obama
even appeared in an ad for Jon Ossoff.
He learned about public service
from one of my lifelong heroes, John Lewis.
This is a former president who is appearing
in an advertisement for a down-ballot candidate.
And you just don't see that very often.
We will elect Jon Ossoff
for the United States Senate.
The $480 million spent on ad placements
since Election Day doesn't even factor in the other costs
that go into a political campaign.
And you've got polling. You've got lawyers fees.
You've got compliance.
There's all sorts of different things that go into this.
And then an ad itself has a lot of professionals
that work on it as well.
These numbers dwarf what's spent
on politics in other democracies.
Political parties in Canada were capped
at spending $29 million last year.
The main point of departure
with campaign spending ballooning
would be the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled
that political spending was protected
as a form of free speech.
That meant corporations and other outside groups
could now spend as much money as they wanted,
as long as they didn't coordinate with campaigns.
In Georgia, only about half of the spending on ads
is coming from the candidates themselves.
The rest of the money is pouring in
from groups across the country.
Everybody who is interested in the control
of the US government is going to be,
and is a position to do so,
is going to be putting their money and their effort
into Georgia, because it all comes down to this.
Even with the rise in digital media,
TV is still the best way to reach voters.
And in 2020, Facebook and Google banned political ads
on their platforms from Election Day through mid-December.
That made TV even more crucial in the Georgia runoffs.
Raphael Warnock
will give the radicals total control.
In the 2020 elections, TV had more influence
on voters than all other media combined.
That includes radio, social media,
mail, and 20 other categories.
If you think of the last TV ad you saw that you liked,
now tell me the last banner ad online that you saw, right?
I mean, there's just less of an impact.
It takes a hell of a lot more on digital
to get the same impact as a TV 30.
David Perdue, looking out for himself, not you.
In the month of November after Election Day,
Democrats aired 42,000 ads in Georgia,
and Republicans trailed right behind them.
Will Ritter's advertising firm
works with Republican campaigns and outside groups
in races like this one.
I would like everyone in a designated area
to see an ad eight to 10 times before I'm comfortable
that our message has truly burned in
to the majority of the viewing population.
On some days in December,
nearly two-thirds of the ads aired in Georgia
during the 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. news hour were political.
How do you stand out
if you're the third in a five-ad set?
There aren't just more ads each year.
It's gotten more and more expensive to air those ads.
That's because there's a finite amount of TV ad space
that just doesn't match the enormous demand
from campaigns and outside groups.
Candidates are guaranteed a rate for the ads they place,
but outside groups are not.
So with more demand from special interest groups,
prices go up.
In the state capital,
a candidate pays $1,800 for a 30-second ad.
But for that same spot,
an issue group would pay almost $3,400.
Other parts of the state have seen
even more pronounced differences
between candidate prices and issue groups.
And those prices have only increased
throughout the campaign.
An ad that would have cost an outside group
under $350 to air in Savannah in August
was up to nearly $2,500 by early December.
Those price tags are remarkable
when you consider the cost in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson
ran one of the first political attack ads.
10, 9, 8,
7, 6,
5, 4,
3, 2,
1, zero.
It aired one time
during NBC's "Monday Night at the Movies"
at 9:50 p.m. and cost roughly $24,000,
the equivalent of about $200,000 today.
This 60-second ad reached about 50 million viewers.
Vote for President Johnson on November 3.
The stakes are too high for you to stay home.
That means Johnson paid about $4
per every 1,000 people he reached.
An ad half that length in Atlanta today
costs a candidate $30 to $45
to reach the same number of people.
There's so many more ads
that we've got to really up the production value,
so that costs money,
but it is in no way comparable to the increase
in how much spending there has been
and how expensive it is to place ads.
Negative ads aren't new,
but tens of thousands of them
costing more than half a billion dollars?
That may just be the new normal
for what it costs to control the government.