In year of polls, US spent $1.6bn on TV ads

Come 8th of November this year and the people of US will be voting to decide whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins, right?

Not quite. While the US presidential election battle is grabbing the world's attention, there are a host of other campaigns taking place simultaneously — from senators and representatives for the US Congress to state governors and legislature representatives, down to attorney generals, mayors, and local government functionaries and even “ballot measures,“ which are sort of referendums on issues.

Besides the above-mentioned posts, there are many state-level executive positions that needs to be filled. These include superintendent of schools, insurance, agriculture, labour and public service commissioners, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer, controller and auditor.

That's not all. In 35 states, 145 statewide ballot measures are to be put to vote. These are state policy measures that need to be approved by people through ballot. These include 73 measures that were put on the ballot by citizens through signature petitions and are related to marijuana, gun control, universal healthcare, minimum wage and other controversial topics, like an initiative in California designed to require condoms to be used in pornographic films.

But here's the thing: over a billion dollars have been spent till now on TV ads for all these elections combined together.According to analysis done by the Wesleyan Media Project, over 1.4 million TV ads have fried people's heads on all these elections. In addition they have also viewed over 2 million ads espousing bothe the presidential nominees.

An interesting feature of these lesser elections is that “dark money“ seems to be flooding into them. Nearly half of the money spent on Senate campaigns is from outside groups, many of whom do not disclose their sources. About 26% of funding for ads related to governor's races is from such groups. For the presidential campaign, this component of outside funding is about 30%.