Ad wars heat up in Ohio's US Senate race. The price tag is high
Get ready for an onslaught of ads to interrupt Ohio State and Bengals games.
Campaigns and outside groups have spent or reserved more than $241 million in TV, radio and mailed ads for Ohio's U.S. Senate
race, according to Medium Buying, a Columbus-based ad tracking firm. That number climbs to nearly $300 million when digital advertising is included, according to AdImpact.
And those amounts will only grow from here.
Republican Sen. Jon Husted will face former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in a closely-watched race that could shape Senate control for the rest of President Donald Trump's term. The Cook Political Report and other political forecasters rated the contest a toss-up, despite Ohio's trend toward Republicans in recent years.
High stakes and tight polls are a recipe for money to start flowing. Consider 2024, when Brown's race against Sen. Bernie Moreno racked up $483.4 million and broke the spending record for non-presidential contests, according to AdImpact.
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Money is also pouring into the heated race for governor between Republican businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and Amy Acton, a Democrat who led the Ohio Department of Health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"When you take on Wall Street and you take on the drug companies and you fight big oil, they're going to spend millions and millions," Brown told reporters in August. "They don't want me there. That's why the voters vote for me, because they understand the people that have rigged the system are trying to beat me."
Who's spending money on Ohio Senate race?
Medium Buying classified most of the Senate spending as pro-Husted or Brown, rather than against either candidate. But Ohioans wouldn't know that from some of the ads.
Multiple spots from Brown and his allies blast Husted's support for House Bill 6, a since-repealed nuclear bailout law at the center of Ohio's biggest public corruption scandal. Husted received campaign donations from FirstEnergy, the utility at the center of the scandal that sent former House Speaker Larry Householder to prison, but he has never been charged with a crime.
Brown is also going after Husted on data centers, which have exploded in Ohio and become unpopular with residents. The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a memo to AI companies in August describing data centers as "the anchor hanging around Husted's neck."
“Sherrod Brown spent 32 years in Washington failing hardworking Ohio families,” Husted spokesperson Amy Natoce said. “He doesn’t have a single positive accomplishment to speak of, so he’s spending tens of millions of dollars lying about Sen. Husted’s record. Ohioans already saw through Sherrod Brown’s lies and fired him once, and I’m confident they’ll do it again in November.”
Those aren't the only negative ads out there. An Elon Musk-backed super PAC revived attacks against Brown on transgender athletes, an issue that dominated the 2024 airwaves. Other ads have hammered Brown on immigration, including one that received blowback for highlighting the death of an Ohio family.
For Republicans, ads focused on immigration, crime and culture wars aim to change the narrative from affordability woes that are top of mind for most voters, said Travis Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads.
"The polling at this point is suggesting that Republicans aren’t all that excited to get out to vote," Ridout said. "Touching on some of those issues that maybe cause anxiety, maybe make people mad, that's a way to get people to pay attention and make them more likely to participate."
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Some of these ads come from the Brown and Husted campaigns. Others are funded by outside groups with a vested interest in the outcome of Ohio's race. That includes President Donald Trump, whose political operation launched a new super PAC that plans to spend $11.1 million in the Buckeye State, the New York Times reported.
The spending has outpaced key Senate races in other states, according to AdImpact. That's because Ohio has several media markets and requires political groups to spend a lot of money "to really do the job," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia.
But Ohio is also among several red states, along with Alaska, Texas and Iowa, that Democrats hope to flip in their quest to regain control of the Senate.
"As the cycle has developed and the political environment has stagnated or gotten worse for Republicans, it’s become more plausible that Democrats could win the Senate," Kondik said. "Ohio is a big part of that, potentially."
State government reporter Haley BeMiller can be reached at hbemiller@usatodayco.com or @haleybemiller on X.
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