Majority of Ads and Spending Are Pro-Republican
(MIDDLETOWN, CT) September 4, 2026 – The Wesleyan Media Project continues to update its list of political ads generated or enhanced through the use of AI tools. We have now identified a minimum of 164 political ads generated or enhanced through the use of AI. The spending for the ads we have identified (which again is undercount of AI prevalence) is just under $80 million.
To identify these ads, the WMP followed mentions of AI-generated ads in news media, searched for ads with an AI disclaimer and kept a close watch in our own tracking for AI visuals in ads in addition to deepfakes, where video depicts someone as doing or saying something they did not do. Our initial report on this coding in May located 33 ads totaling about $20 million in spending.
These totals looked at advertisements aired on broadcast television, CTV and digital venues, but we know also that it represents an undercount given that for many ads it is hard to know definitively if an ad used AI tools, especially since there are no federal mandates that political ads contain a disclaimer when AI tools are used.
In this list, 80 percent of the identified ads (and 83 percent of the spending) were from sponsors who were either Republican candidates or pro-Republican groups. Eleven percent of the ads (and 14 percent of the spending) were from pro-Democratic sponsors. The remaining percent of ads are a combination of true issue ads, ads for independent candidates, etc. This imbalance in spending is a bit more significant than what we identified in our coding from May.
Sixty-nine percent of the ads and 78 percent of the spending did not have a disclaimer that disclosed the use of AI tools.
About the Data
AI in ads tracking reported here comes from the Wesleyan Media Project’s original assessment of election advertising that either explicitly states in a disclaimer that it uses AI, has been reported by news media and/or by AdImpact to include AI-generated or AI-enhanced content, or has been flagged by our coding staff as likely to be incorporating AI and been confirmed by our team. Our goal is to assess known prevalence over time. We rely on AdImpact estimated spending for each ad identified. This tracking is undoubtedly an underestimate given there are a lot of ways in which AI might be incorporated that may go undetected.
About this Report
The Wesleyan Media Project provides real-time tracking and analysis of all political television advertising in an effort to increase transparency in elections. Housed in Wesleyan’s Hazel Quantitative Analysis Center – part of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life – the Wesleyan Media Project is the successor to the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which disbanded in 2009. It is directed by Erika Franklin Fowler, professor of government at Wesleyan University, Michael M. Franz, professor of government at Bowdoin College and Travis N. Ridout, professor of political science at Washington State University. WMP personnel include Breeze Floyd (Program Manager), Pavel Oleinikov (Associate Director, QAC) and Yujin Kim (Post-Doctoral Fellow).
The Wesleyan Media Project’s real-time tracking in 2026 is supported by Wesleyan University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Wesleyan Media Project is partnering again this year with OpenSecrets, to provide added information on outside group disclosure and candidate status.
The Wesleyan Media Project’s digital advertising tracking is supported by the contributions of students in Delta Lab, an interdisciplinary research collaborative focusing on computationally-driven and innovative analyses and visualizations of media messaging. We are also grateful to our Coding Supervisors Saul Ferholt-Kahn and Helen Xie and the numerous student research assistants who facilitate additional content analysis of television and digital advertising.
Periodic releases of data will be posted on the project’s website and dispersed via LinkedIn, Bluesky @wesmediaproject.bsky.social and Twitter @wesmediaproject. To be added to our email update list, click here.
For more information contact: media@wesleyan.edu.
About Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn., is known for the excellence of its academic and co-curricular programs. With more than 2,900 undergraduates and 200 graduate students, Wesleyan is dedicated to providing a liberal arts education characterized by boldness, rigor and practical idealism. For more, visit www.wesleyan.edu.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
We are social investors who support democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and in the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once had newspapers. Learn more at kf.org and follow @knightfdn on social media.
