Ohioans who are tired of the Jon Husted–Sherrod Brown commercials are not going to get a break before Nov. 3. The spending trackers say this is already the most expensive Senate advertising fight of the 2026 midterms, and the people who buy the time say the number is still climbing.
As of mid-September, the ad-tracking firm AdImpact put advertising in the race at about $298 million, more than any other Senate contest this cycle. Medium Buying, a Columbus firm that tracks reservations, counted more than $241 million spent or reserved on television, radio and mail, and nearly $300 million once digital was included. A separate read of the AdImpact data put the total nearer $200 million and said the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, was the largest single advertiser at $114 million. The figures do not match to the dollar because the firms count different screens and different days. They match on the shape: this race is the money race.
A rumor that another $150 million is still unspent does not appear in those tallies. What the reservation counts do say is that the totals will only grow from here. In 2024, Brown’s race against Bernie Moreno reached $483.4 million in AdImpact’s count and set the record for a non-presidential contest. This one is already in that neighborhood with weeks left.
The ads have also turned into the joke. Two that traveled farthest are worth naming, because people are sharing them as comedy as much as as argument.
One is Brown’s own. Released Sept. 29, it opens on an Ohio voter telling the camera to “listen to this shit,” then plays Sen. Husted from a March remark that people living in poverty are “not very experienced at navigating the real world,” including a story about a young woman on food stamps who he said did not understand money at a grocery store. The spot ends on another voter’s “fuck that,” then Brown’s approval line. It picked up hundreds of thousands of views in hours. Brown’s campaign spent about $200,000 on a different spot the same month, the one that has Johnstown, Granville and Richwood voters asking why the other side is still talking about transgender medical care when Ohio already bars those surgeries on minors, before pivoting to health care and grocery prices.
The other is the opposite kind of parody. In April, Ohio Flyer PAC — a super PAC tied in federal filings to Husted’s joint fundraising orbit — put $446,000 into a digital ad that drops an AI version of Brown’s face onto an actor at a birthday party. The tell, once you look, is the kind of thing people freeze-frame: a tie in two patterns, a lapel pin that melts, a “Happy Birthday” banner that loses every letter but H. Brown’s campaign called it a fake image. It was among the first Ohio political ads to use that kind of face swap, and it has been passed around since as an example of how strange the buys have gotten.
More spots are the safe bet. Outside groups were still placing seven-figure weeks in September, including $6.7 million from No Going Back PAC over two days and an $11.4 million buy from the crypto-aligned Defend American Jobs PAC against Brown. Nothing in the reservation data suggests the buyers are done.
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