What $11.6 Billion Buys and What It Will Never Build

AdImpact projects $11.6 billion in political advertising for the 2026 election cycle. That is more than the 2024 presidential cycle, which was itself the most expensive in history. Broadcast television takes $5.6 billion of it. Connected TV takes $2.7 billion more.
The entire low-income housing tax credit equity market — every dollar of private capital that closed on affordable housing in this country in 2024 — was $28.9 billion.
One cycle of campaign commercials runs about forty cents for every dollar of equity that built or preserved affordable housing nationwide in a year.
I want to be precise about what that comparison does and does not prove, because the sloppy version of this argument gets dismissed in about nine seconds.
Campaign money is donated, not invested. Nobody was ever going to close a fifteen-year LIHTC partnership with a PAC contribution. There is no mechanism by which a dollar that went to a Senate race in Ohio instead goes into a bond deal in Cleveland, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The comparison matters for a different reason. It tells you what this country is capable of mobilizing when it decides something is urgent, and it tells you exactly how urgent housing is by that standard.

Ohio’s Senate race is projected at $749 million in advertising.
Ohio has roughly 11.9 million residents. At the 2026 housing credit multiplier of $3.05 per capita — which already includes the increase Congress passed last year — the state has about $36 million in annual 9% credit authority. Stretched over the ten-year credit period and priced where the market is today, that allocation raises somewhere near $300 million in equity.
So the advertising in one Senate race, in one state, in one cycle, is worth about two and a half times the private capital that Ohio’s entire competitive housing credit program will raise this year.
Run that in Georgia. Run it in Texas. Run it in California, where the governor’s race alone is projected at $351 million.
The ads will air between now and November. The housing lasts thirty years.

Here is the part that deserves more attention than it gets.
Almost none of that $11.6 billion stays in the communities the ads are about. It moves from donors to campaigns and committees, from committees to a small number of media buying firms, and from those firms to station groups and platforms. The buyers take a percentage of everything they place. The consultants take fees on top of the percentage. The lawyers take their hours. What reaches a neighborhood is thirty seconds of video about that neighborhood’s problems.
The station groups collecting the checks have spent the last several years cutting newsroom staff and replacing on-air and production work with automated systems. Local coverage of city councils, zoning boards and housing authorities — the coverage that actually determines whether anything gets built — has been shrinking the entire time. Election years do not reverse that. They just make it a very good year to own the transmitter.
And a meaningful share of those ads will be about the cost of housing. Both parties have discovered that affordability is the most reliable issue in American politics right now. Candidates on both sides will spend hundreds of millions of dollars telling voters that rent is too high, and the production of those ads will employ more people than most of their housing plans will.
I am not arguing that campaigns should not advertise, or that political speech should be capped. I am pointing at the gap between what we spend talking about a problem and what we spend solving it, and noting that the people who profit from the talking have no stake whatsoever in the solving.

Now the uncomfortable part, and it is aimed at us.
Of the $28.9 billion of housing credit equity that closed in 2024, roughly 80% came from banks. The Community Reinvestment Act is the reason. CRA is not a tax benefit or a yield story. It is a regulatory obligation, and it is the load-bearing wall of affordable housing finance in the United States.

Take CRA away and our capital market is a fifth of its size.

Every company buying commercial time this fall — every station group, every platform, every consumer brand running issue ads alongside them — has no CRA obligation, no housing mandate, and no economic reason to price a tax credit deal. That does not make them villains. They are following their incentives precisely the way the rest of us follow ours.
So the honest question is not why media companies don’t buy housing credits. It is why we built a market in which almost nobody outside a regulated bank ever has a reason to.
We have spent a generation defending the credit in Washington and almost no energy making it attractive to a buyer who is not required to be in the room. When pricing made sense, corporate investors showed up. When it stopped, most of them left, and we called it a market condition rather than a design flaw.

Four things, none of them novel, all of them harder than running an ad:

The campaigns will spend $11.6 billion this cycle. A good portion of it will be spent telling Americans that housing costs too much. When the ads come down in November, the housing that exists in this country will be the housing that existed in October, minus whatever units were lost to distress in the meantime.
Meanwhile, our own capital stack is one regulation deep, and we mostly do not talk about it.
If CRA were modified tomorrow, how much of your equity pipeline survives?