A huge thank you to Magnite for having us participate in the buyers panel at their Midterm kickoff event. We got deep into the mechanics of political advertising, but the first question was about how campaigns should think about voter contact in 2026 and beyond?
Most campaigns are losing before they spend a dollar. They still think about voter contact in silos.
Voters do not experience campaigns through channels. Campaigns are competing for seconds of attention across 6+ hours of daily media consumption.
The campaigns that win over the next decade will stop thinking in terms of “TV budget,” “mail budget,” or “field budget.” They will think in terms of total voter contact and use centralized data to coordinate across every channel.
Our sister company, Battleground Impact, is out with a new report breaking down the size of the voter contact market and its growth.
How big is the voter contact market today?
$13.9B in the 2026 Midterm.
How big will the voter contact market be in 2032?
We modeled out our expected growth over the next 8 years.
We expect the market will hit $21.1B in 2032, a 52% increase over 2026.
Text messaging, relational organizing, paid canvassing, and Digital GOTV are projected to grow 131% between 2026 and 2032.
What does the future of voter contact look like?
Over the next several weeks, we’ll dive into some of the components of voter contact and where the market is growing.
Polling and modeling firms are the under-appreciated heroes of voter contact. They identify and build models of the voters most likely to impact elections.
Every component of the campaign relies on those audiences.
Today, each vendor takes the model and goes off to execute. They send mail pieces, place digital ads, send texts, etc. with very little communication with the other vendors.
This is inefficient.
Winning campaigns will coordinate voter contact around consumption data and measure impact across the entire campaign instead of channel by channel.
What does a coordinated voter contact strategy look like?
An audience is built. Consumption data is appended to understand how those voters spend time across media.
Then vendors coordinate around that data.
TV buyers focus on light TV viewers (Heavy users will be reached regardless)
Streaming and digital buyers focus on one-to-one targeting and incremental reach.
Texting and mail increase frequency against low-consumption voters.
Paid canvassing reinforces digital messaging at the door and follows up with texts
Telemarketing firms call homes unreached at the door.
Radio and audio reinforce messaging in a different format.
Relational organizing aligns supporters around common messaging.
Over time, campaigns will stop optimizing channels independently and start orchestrating voter contact holistically.
What does this mean for political advertisers?
Understand your audiences. It is the buyer’s responsibility to understand how voters consume media and build strategies around actual behavior.
Break down silos. If your vendors are not meeting regularly to discuss strategy, you are wasting resources and leaving ideas on the table.
Learn about voter contact. The future of political advertising belongs to campaigns that understand how all voter contact methods work together.