ANALYSIS — The 2026 election cycle has reached an important stage: the biennial fight about TV ad buys.
But while campaigns sometimes play games with internal polls or digital ads to manipulate the narrative about their races, there’s usually less gamesmanship when it comes to ad reservations because there can be longer-term consequences that outweigh any short-term benefit.
On Thursday, House Majority PAC, the go-to Democratic outside group focused on that chamber, released its initial ad reservations for the fall sprint. HMP, as the group is commonly referred to in Washington, announced $272 million in TV and digital ad buys spread across 68 media markets. According to the news release, those reservations were divided between $80 million for digital and nearly $200 million for TV.
