Early signs for 2026 political vendors
Who’s earning the big bucks already? Mostly media buyers.
This is not a post about the DNC. Yes, I’ve read the terrible document. Ken Martin should step down. The DNC autopsy aside, I’m interested in a layer down from the behavior of big name brand committees. Who is directing all that spending? Who is actually out here making the ads, running the programs, managing the technology?
There’s a huge pile of firms, vendors, and individuals who work for campaigns and committees. Their business models vary, between a complete focus on politics to mostly corporate work (it pays the bills in off years!) with a little political work on the side. They are getting a lot of $ for politics, but relatively little in the scheme of corporate work. You probably haven’t heard of them, unless you work there or you’re mad at them. Let’s take a look. This is 2026 spending, from the bulk filing, to campaigns and committees. Not PACs, and nothing secondary (i.e. I can’t tell where these firms are spending their money after they get it).
A note, as usual: The amounts of reported payments to vendors can vary depending on their practices. Pass-through costs are not broken out, so things like media buyers have much higher amounts of $$ going to them than your average consultant. You can also do clever tricks with shifting money around to hide payments to a given vendor (although like, why). Also as usual, I have no particular insider knowledge- sorry if I get the purpose of your company wrong. If you DM me a reasonable edit, I will fix it.
The Top Firms
A table!1
Ads and digital
The top $-getters are ALWAYS ad buyers. They are directing spending from the campaigns, so a chunk of that $ isn’t really staying with them, which inflates their numbers. However, they do generally take a percent of spend (up to ~20%, it depends) which is really damn nice work if you can get it. I feel good assuming these folks are making some solid profits.
We start with Aisle 518 Strategies, run by Tim Tagaris and coming out of the Sanders small dollar digital fundraising operation. They look to be doing digital fundraising/advertising/consulting for many of the big raisers- Ossoff, Talarico, Kelly, Peltola, Vindman, Slotkin, the list continues. There’s one funny collision where they are getting paid by Zach Wahls and the (recently Turek-supporting) VoteVets. You can probably take this expansive list as evidence of how much the vendor ecosystem is shared across candidates who can take dramatically different (and oppositional) postures.
Thematic Campaigns looks to be a more TV buy oriented firm, with lots of Obama name-drops on their website. Adelstein and Associates is similar, more old school, with a set of PAC clients on their website who won’t be showing up in this data. That is where the truly huge $ is. It is worth noting that their big spender is Raja Krishnamoorthi, and that they didn’t make anything like this amount last cycle. Maybe they’re on their way up, or maybe they’re just diversifying.
Lower down the list, you get more of a grab bag. There’s a bunch of ads-and-fundraising: MissionWired (who I think I may be missing payments to due to name normalization issues), Middle Seat, Liftoff, Adwell. Plus, one largeish direct mail firm, RWT, with smallish amounts of spend by a ton of candidates on top of $4.6 million from the DCCC.
Boring
There’s a handful of boring entries, credit cards, payroll, etc. I am slightly amused by Gusto taking in a huge number of clients just to make up what Rippling is getting from the DNC alone (their main customer on this list), but since they both have a (presumably) far larger non-political client base, I bet this is all small-potatoes money to them.
The ActBlue amount here is *only* fees (pass through donations are counted differently), which is kind of a shocking level of income on fees alone. Of course, they’re handling donations for basically every Democratic campaign, so it adds up.
Lone Republicans
Our first Republican firm is Targeted Victory. They’re a big fundraiser and digital agency, working for a laundry list of Republican candidates. It’s all very dull (to me, at least), except for the scale comparison this presents with the multiple D firms we just talked through. The Republican ecosystem is more centralized, and (as far as I can tell) relies much more heavily on pass-throughs. On a Democratic filing, you can see a pile of firms working direct for the campaign. Republican filings are more likely to have a central consultant, presumably farming out work, or to omit this “normal” spending entirely, and have it covered by other actors in the system. Which is to say: that spending exists, but it’s in PACs.
There’s also WinRed, the ActBlue equivalent (really creative naming....), making a decent amount of fees.
They’re followed by a couple media buyers, one of whom (SRCP) has a website with an incredibly clear vibe [derogatory, screenshot below]. They both have eye-wateringly larger amounts of money earned last cycle (278 million for the bad-vibes SRCP), so I’m guessing this low-$ state is due to it being early.
More
I will not bore you to tears going through the rest of this list. You can read. If you want a larger list, here’s a dreadful chart that you can download the data from, yay! Or if you’re more willing to do work, grab the F3 bulk filing and aggregate.
It’s all ads
My interest in looking at vendors is to start getting a sense of who the players are, and watching how they change over the cycle. Right now, we’re looking at mostly primary campaigns and the start of general election work, in a midterm year. It is not yet the time of big money. I think the most interesting next steps would be to catalog what vendors a campaign was using and look for any shifts over time that might tell you someone got dropped or brought on.
The topline notable thing is just how far down you have to scroll before it stops being all media buying, fundraising, and pass through costs that scale to fundraising (like ActBlue fees). A *stunning* amount of money in politics is more like money running through politics. It comes in and goes right back out to pay for the cost of raising itself. It’s a bit of a depressing treadmill? I’ve written about my skepticism of small dollar donations before, and the picture continues to be grim.
The other thing I’m struck by how *little* money this all is in the scheme of things. This came up on twitter the other day, but like, that 20 million dollars going to Aisle 518 is a lot for a person, but also the cost to build a medium-ish hotel. Yes, you can argue that building a hotel makes a physical thing appear and is less of a waste, but surely you’ve gotta value access to the levers of power in the US pretty highly.
Anyways
If the DNC would like to stop doing things while I am trying to write a normal, dull post about some data, that would be wonderful. I don’t think I have anything novel to say, other than “oh my god, literally any of the dozens of wonderful analysts I know could have done this ten times better”. Get it together.
Yes, I DID get a little stressed about this table being on laziness-par with the DNC report, why do you ask