Key Takeaways
• House and Senate candidates in the 2026 midterm elections have spent more than $20 million on promotional products and signage.
• Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico leads all congressional candidates in estimated promo spending at $2.6 million.
• The biggest spenders aren’t necessarily facing competitive races.
The 2026 midterm elections have been on voters’ – and politicians’ – minds for months, as the Republican Party seeks to maintain control of the House and Senate, and the Democrats fight to flip one or both chambers.
By most reports this is the most expensive midterm year on record, with the Federal Election Commission listing over $1.2 billion in direct spending on Senate campaigns and over $2 billion spent on House races. That’s on top of the billions that political action committees and other outside groups also pour into media buys, advertising and other support for these races; one estimate places ad spending at upward of $10 billion in total.
In comparison, promo spend is still a drop in the bucket, but that doesn’t mean the election isn’t having an impact on the promo industry, or that candidates aren’t prioritizing it as an effective means of reaching voters.
According to an exclusive Counselor analysis of FEC campaign filings, candidates running for the House and Senate spent upward of $17.7 million on promotional products and signage as of June 30, 2026. Add another $3.1 million in Q3 from the top 15 promo spenders in each chamber, and the impact of these federal races on promo well surpasses $20 million. (The FEC hasn’t fully processed data from Q3 as of this writing.)
As politics in the U.S. has grown more polarizing, campaign merchandise is just one vehicle for voters to put the issues they’re passionate about on display. Promo like yard signs – which were Counselor’s 2024 Product of the Year – have been shown to have a small but measurable impact on voters and election results, particularly for local races. And merchandise spending is not exclusively tied to the competitiveness of a race or how much a candidate spends overall on their campaign.
“We’re having our best year ever,” says Steve Grubbs, founder of Iowa-based distributor VictoryStore.com (asi/352041). “Due to the heightened level of confrontation and conflict in politics, more people are getting involved, more candidates are running and people are spending more on campaigns.”
Methodology
Counselor analyzed full FEC filing data for all House and Senate candidates through June 30, 2026. Using those initial findings, additional data for July 1 through Sept. 30, 2026, was downloaded for the top 15 promo spenders in both the House and the Senate. Note that there’s no uniform categorization or FEC filing designation for merchandise transactions.
Senate Top Spenders
Among the 10 Senate candidates who spent the most on promo, seven were Democrats compared to just three Republicans.
Take for example Texas State Rep. James Talarico, who won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Texas after a competitive primary with Rep. Jasmine Crockett. In his quest to defeat his Republican opponent Ken Paxton and flip one of Texas’ Senate seats, he’s become one of the top-spending candidates in this election cycle, as part of one of the most expensive congressional races ever.
Out of the roughly $114 million Talarico’s campaign has spent as of the end of Q3, at least $2.6 million was spent on campaign promo, largely through Bumperactive (asi/150095). It’s the most midterm campaign promo spending of any single candidate, representing about 2.3% of his overall campaign spending.
Read this full feature, complete with financial data, on Counselor.
