Football drives GOP's TV ad blitz for the midterms
Republicans scrambling for midterm momentum are making a massive bet on football, pouring millions into advertising during the country's biggest NFL and college games.
Why it matters: Across the country, Republicans are trying to hold onto male voters — football's core audience and a critical part of President Trump's 2024 coalition.
After winning 55% of the male vote in 2024, Trump has seen his standing with men deteriorate.
A new Fox News poll puts his approval among them at 42%, down 9 points from a year ago.
The signs of slippage are particularly clear among young men.
A spring Harvard Youth Poll found men ages 18–29 favored a Democratic congressional candidate by 8 points, after reporting an even split between Trump and Harris in 2024.
By the numbers: Part of Republicans' plan to try to change the midterm vibe is to capitalize on their financial advantage by dominating the football airwaves.
They ran 5,546 TV spots during the NFL and college games and pre-and-postgame programming where they advertised most heavily last weekend, compared with 471 for Democrats — nearly 12 times as many, according to ad-tracking data obtained by Axios.
Republicans' biggest presence was during the blockbuster Texas-Ohio State matchup, which featured teams from two states with competitive Senate races.
The pro-GOP Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) super PAC spent $2 million, airing ads in every quarter before 14 million viewers on ABC.
The national coverage meant viewers nationwide saw Senate ads that were targeted to Texas or Ohio.
Zoom in: Nowhere is the GOP's football strategy more apparent than in Michigan, where the Senate race could determine control of that chamber.
SLF struck a deal with a vendor that manages sports programming in Michigan bars, putting its ads on more than 1,000 TVs at 150 bars across the state.
Republicans launched the effort after Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed made critical remarks about football, which became the focus of the ads.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.axios.com — the content belongs to Axios.
