Wesleyan’s October tally puts AI midterm-ad spending above $187 million

AI-generated advertising drew more than $187 million in campaign spending during the 2026 election cycle, according to an October Wesleyan Media Project report covered by Gizmodo on November 4. Researchers identified 289 ads, with Republican candidates or allies behind most of them—and warned that undisclosed or hard-to-detect AI use left spending underestimated.

The report puts the 2026 spending estimate alongside less than $50,000 spent on AI-generated ads during the 2024 election season. That comparison concerns campaign spending on advertising, rather than a count of how many campaigns bought AI tools. The separate ad tally records the material researchers identified as AI-generated.

The partisan breakdown describes the share of identified ads, not each party’s share of the spending total. Republican candidates and their allies accounted for 82% of those ads. Democratic campaigns accounted for 13%, while the remaining 5% came from other parties.

82%Republican candidates or allies

Share of the 289 identified AI-generated ads attributed to Republican candidates or their allies.

13%Democratic campaigns

Share of identified ads attributed to Democratic campaigns.

5%Other parties

The remaining share of identified ads came from other parties.

Wesleyan cautioned that its spending estimate was “almost surely lower than the actual level of spending,” citing two obstacles: many ads did not carry disclaimers, and some uses of AI were difficult to recognize with the human eye alone. A visible label could identify AI involvement; without one, appearance did not always settle the question.

That warning concerns what researchers could detect, not simply the amount advertisers spent on an already identified ad. It leaves the tally with an important boundary: the party percentages describe the ads the project found. They should not be read as a complete breakdown of every campaign’s use of AI.