Why political campaigns are abandoning broadcast for CTV in 2026.

The case for broadcast TV used to be simple: it was the only way to put a candidate's face in front of a million households at once. In 2026, that's no longer true. It's not even close to true. Yet a remarkable number of campaigns still build their media plans as if it were — pouring 50–70% of paid spend into a channel that reaches a shrinking, older, and increasingly non-persuadable audience.

The shift to connected TV isn't a marketing fad. It's the consequence of where viewers actually are now, and where the math of campaign efficiency now lives.

The GRP problem nobody wants to name

Broadcast media is sold in gross rating points — a metric that treats every household in a DMA as identical and assumes you want to hit all of them. For a Coca-Cola brand campaign, that assumption is fine. For a political campaign, it's a fundamental mismatch.

In any given race, roughly 40% of the electorate is going to vote for your candidate no matter what you do, and another 40% is going to vote against — also no matter what you do. The persuasion job lives in the middle 20%. A broadcast buy doesn't know the difference. You pay for the entire 100%, and four out of every five impressions you serve are wasted on minds that are already made up.

CTV doesn't just replace broadcast — it inverts the model

Connected TV inventory can be bought at the household level. The same 30-second creative that would have aired during the 6 o'clock news now serves only to the persuadable households inside the DMA — built from the voter file, matched to verified consumer identities, and capped at the frequency that actually moves a vote rather than the frequency the network needed to sell.

The mechanical change is small. The economic change is enormous. A campaign running the same creative budget can now buy 3–5x more reach against the audience that actually decides the race — because they're no longer paying to reach the 80% they don't need.

You're not paying less. You're paying the same money to reach a much smaller, much more important audience — many more times.

The audience moved years ago. Budgets are catching up.

Cord-cutting passed the 50% mark in U.S. households in 2023. Among voters under 50 — disproportionately the persuadable middle — broadcast reach has collapsed. The 6 o'clock news doesn't reach swing voters anymore because swing voters aren't watching the 6 o'clock news. They're watching streaming.

That doesn't mean broadcast is dead. It means broadcast now serves a specific, narrow purpose: turnout among older, high-propensity base voters in the final 72 hours. Used that way, it still works. Used as the spine of an entire media plan, it's a budget line that no longer earns its place.

What the smart campaigns are doing

The campaigns winning races right now are running CTV-first plans with broadcast as a supplement, not the other way around. They're building tighter persuasion universes from the voter file. They're varying creative by audience segment instead of running one spot to everyone. And they're measuring weekly — sometimes daily — rather than waiting for a post-mortem.

The campaigns still defending broadcast as the default are usually doing it for one of two reasons: a media buyer whose commission depends on the spend, or a candidate who watches the news at 6 and assumes their voters do too. Neither is a reason to lose a winnable race.