Hundreds of millions of dollars continue to pour in for the four candidates in the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff election. Georgians see the ads everywhere on TV, social media and billboards. Will the political ads actually make a difference on Jan. 5?
With a little more than a week to go until the crucial Senate runoff races, many voters like Christian Keith Martin are counting down the days until it’s all over.
“It’s getting to the point where it makes you want to vote so that they can leave you alone,” Martin said.
All four Senate candidates are using record amounts of campaign dollars to reach every Georgia voter possible. Ad spending in both runoff races is now at more than $468 million, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
Figures from the latest Federal Election Commission show that between Oct. 15 and Dec. 16th, Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock each raised more than $100 million dollars in the past two months.
Republican incumbents Sen. David Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler each raised more than $60 million dollars during the same time period.
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Outside groups are also playing a major role in raising money for all four candidates. According to the most recent FEC filings, outside groups have spent nearly $200 million dollars on the runoff races since Nov. 3. Republican groups are outspending Democrats by about $70 million.
“It affects the nation and everybody’s eye is on it,” said Todd Belt, a political management professor at George Washington University.
Belt said the outside dollars are typical in a Senate race, but the amount of money in both runoffs is not.
“These are people who have long lists of donors that are, you know, far-flung across the United States. And so they’re really going to be putting the screws to people to be ponying up for this one,” he said.
Channel 2 political analyst Bill Crane said the ads and phone calls are about turnout, not changing minds.
“They certainly convince people there’s an election. I would point out and weigh in that a certain point there’s saturation, you start moving people and you actually start suppressing turnout, because people get sick of it,” Crane said.
Crane’s comments come after a recently published study by Yale University showed that regardless of content, context or audience, those pricey commercials do little to persuade voters.
But with both congressional races tight, it’s an all out sprint to the finish line.
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