Maximize the impact of your 2026 midterm campaigns
The 2026 midterm elections are projected to be the most expensive in history, with political ad spend expected to reach $10.8 billion. As campaigns compete across federal, state, and local races, the challenge this cycle is ensuring every impression reaches voters at scale with greater precision and control.
Today’s media landscape is more fragmented, more dynamic, and more competitive than ever. Voters are engaging across devices, platforms, and environments, while campaign priorities and budgets can shift rapidly in response to the news cycle. In this environment, success depends on making smarter decisions closer to the impression—prioritizing quality, transparency, and performance across every channel.
Every minute matters as election day nears. Learn how you can seize the right opportunities and drive better outcomes with smarter decisioning.
Source: AdImpact, 2025-2026 Political Projections Report, 2025
In a fast-moving political cycle, every impression matters. Budgets shift quickly, messaging evolves daily, and competition intensifies as election day approaches. Sell-side decisioning helps you drive stronger outcomes by applying intelligence closer to the impression—optimizing supply paths, reducing inefficiencies, and prioritizing high-quality inventory.
Instead of relying solely on downstream optimization, you can apply data and models to make more informed decisions across the entirety of the open internet, helping you reach voters more effectively. Working more directly with supply-side partners also helps you gain greater transparency and control over how your media investments perform. That means more efficient spend, reduced waste, and stronger outcomes in the moments that matter most.
Consumers engage with media across a range of devices every day. To reach voters effectively, it’s imperative to run an omnichannel campaign that extends across mobile apps, streaming TV, and the open web.
Streaming TV plays a critical role within this mix. Streaming TV spending is projected to reach $2.5 billion in the 2026 cycle, making it the fastest-growing media channel. It combines the impact of traditional television with the precision and flexibility of digital, allowing you to reach voters in premium, full-screen environments while applying data-driven targeting and real-time optimization.
But streaming TV is most effective when it is part of a broader, coordinated approach. Activating across high-quality supply at scale ensures consistent reach, control over where messages appear, and stronger performance across every screen.
Programmatic enables you to aggregate supply across a wide array of media owners and distribution points, then target by behavior, interests, geography, party affiliation, and more to reach the right audiences at scale. Sell-side decisioning enhances this by applying targeting closer to the impression, across all available supply. Instead of limiting reach based on upstream constraints like QPS limits, you can evaluate and activate against a broader set of high-quality inventory in real time, ensuring more efficient precision.
While every media owner will have a preferred creative approval workflow, ensuring your creatives adhere to standard guidelines will shorten the time it takes for your campaigns to go live. Generally, political ads should be neutral or reasonably inclined towards a specific party, organization, or movement, and must include a “paid for by” disclosure statement. Avoid smear campaigns, misinformation, fake or misleading news, political biases, and generally inappropriate or offensive content.
The political landscape is dynamic and fast-paced. Identifying the right partners, building custom programmatic deals, and testing everything in advance will give you a leg up when it matters most later in the election cycle. Having deals already in place means you can integrate new creative into those deals and launch immediately—and find scale—when a new issue arises or you have more budget available.
As marketers finalize campaign plans for the 2026 midterm elections, the importance of embracing streaming TV, utilizing data-driven strategies, and ensuring quality and transparency cannot be overstated.
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Since streaming TV audiences are completely accessible through programmatic platforms, marketers can benefit from digital’s precise addressability, measurement, and optimization capabilities to effectively engage voters.
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The next phase of programmatic isn’t about adding more tools or introducing more complexity. It’s about something more fundamental: moving intelligence closer to the impression.
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Improve campaign performance with advanced targeting
Reaching the right voters requires access to high-quality, actionable data. The Index Exchange Data Vendor Ecosystem brings leading providers like Comscore, Experian, Dstillery, Samba, Plural, Stirista, Lotame, and more directly into the supply side.
This makes it easier to quickly apply and scale audience segments across a broad range of inventory, improving flexibility and simplifying campaign execution across multiple markets and messaging strategies.
Example segments available include:
• Political donors and contributors
• Party affiliation
• Social and political views
• Issue-based and interest-driven audiences
• Regional and geographically targeted voters
• Engagement with key political figures
• Political TV and content consumption behaviors
You can also reach audiences using geographic, channel, and network-level signals to ensure messaging engages the most relevant voters.
Ready to get started?
Success in the 2026 midterms requires control, transparency, and smarter decisioning across the programmatic supply chain. Get in touch to learn how Index Exchange can help you maximize performance with high-quality inventory, advanced intelligence, and tools built for speed and scale.