What Politicians Could Learn from the Music Business: A Midterm Election Primer

You can buy the airplay. You can’t buy the hit.

Elon Musk has reportedly spent approximately $366 million on political efforts during the current election cycle, including $276 million since July, much of it directed toward helping Republicans retain control of Congress. According to Reuters and the Associated Press, his contributions include $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund alone. That’s an extraordinary amount of money from one individual trying to influence the political direction of the country. Yet, with the November 2026 midterms approaching, Republican organizations are spending heavily to defend seats in states that have historically been reliably Republican.

As someone who has spent my entire professional life in the music business, I find this situation remarkably familiar. Record companies, wealthy investors, and ambitious artists have been trying to buy hit records for decades. They hire expensive producers, publicists, promotion teams, and marketing agencies. They purchase advertising, radio promotion, and every conceivable form of exposure, hoping to manufacture the next superstar. Sometimes it works. Sometimes they spend millions of dollars making sure everyone hears a record that nobody particularly wants to hear again.

There is an old joke in the music business: How do you make a million dollars in music? Start with ten million. The joke survives because the business has never discovered a reliable formula for turning money into popularity. Political campaigns have a similar problem. Money can buy attention, but it cannot guarantee that the message will connect with the audience.

And right now, the Republican Party is spending an extraordinary amount of money trying to reach voters who appear increasingly dissatisfied with what they’re hearing.

The Problem May Not Be the Advertising

According to the advertising intelligence company AdImpact, political advertising during the 2025–2026 election cycle is projected to reach $11.6 billion, making it the most expensive election cycle on record. The Financial Times recently reported that Republican organizations increased their Senate and House advertising commitments by $434 million over just three weeks as competitive races emerged in Kansas, Texas, Iowa, and Florida.

Meanwhile, the latest AP-NORC polling presents a significant challenge for Republican messaging. Eighty-five percent of voters identify the economy as one of their most important election issues, and 84% say the same about the cost of living. Yet 79% disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the cost of living, while 74% disapprove of his handling of the economy.

Consider Kansas, a state Donald Trump carried by approximately 16 percentage points in 2024. Republican Senator Roger Marshall now faces a competitive reelection contest against Democrat Adam Hamilton, with recent polling showing a close race. Kansas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator in more than 90 years. Although polling doesn’t establish what will happen on Election Day, it does explain why Republican organizations are devoting resources to states they might otherwise have expected to defend more comfortably.

The challenge is that economic messaging competes with personal experience. Politicians can run endless advertisements telling voters how well the economy is performing, but voters also buy groceries, pay rent, fill their gas tanks, and deal with insurance premiums. They have their own opinions about how things are going, and those opinions aren’t necessarily changed by another thirty-second commercial.

This is where the music-business analogy becomes particularly relevant. If people aren’t responding to a song, a record label has to consider whether the problem is insufficient promotion or the song itself. Those are very different problems, and confusing them can become extremely expensive.

Twenty-One Million Dollars. Ten Points. One Loss.

We already have a striking example involving Musk’s political spending.

In April 2025, Musk and organizations affiliated with him spent approximately $21 million supporting conservative candidate Brad Schimel in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election. Total spending by both sides exceeded $100 million, making it the most expensive judicial election in American history. Despite the enormous expenditures, Schimel lost to Susan Crawford by approximately ten percentage points.

That doesn’t mean Musk’s money accomplished nothing. His spending may have increased Schimel’s support or affected turnout, and the election might have unfolded differently without it. But an enormous financial investment failed to deliver the desired outcome.

Of course, Musk also spent heavily in the 2024 presidential election, when Donald Trump won. That matters too. Political advertising can make a meaningful difference, particularly in close contests. The lesson isn’t that money is irrelevant; it’s that even the wealthiest donor cannot guarantee the result.

Democrats have experienced the same problem.

In 2024, Maryland Congressman David Trone, the wealthy co-founder of Total Wine & More, invested approximately $62 million of his own money seeking the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate. His opponent, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, had substantially fewer financial resources, although she enjoyed strong endorsements, an established political network, and outside support.

Trone saturated Maryland with advertising. Voters saw him on television, online, and in their mailboxes. He was already a sitting congressman who understood political campaigns, and he possessed nearly unlimited resources to promote his candidacy.

According to the Maryland State Board of Elections, Alsobrooks won 53.37% of the vote. Trone received 42.80%. After spending approximately $62 million, he lost by more than ten percentage points.

Think about that. Trone didn’t lose because nobody knew who he was. He had spent a fortune making sure they did. But name recognition and repeated advertising weren’t enough to overcome the appeal of his opponent and the other factors influencing voters’ decisions.

In music-business language, he had the promotional budget of a superstar, but another artist sold more tickets.

Two Million Dollars to Make a Record. Almost Nobody Bought It.

Now consider Heidi Montag, whose experience in the recording industry provides an equally fascinating example.

In 2010, Montag was already famous thanks to MTV’s The Hills. She had national recognition, substantial media exposure, and access to the entertainment business. Wanting to establish herself as a pop star, she reportedly invested nearly $2 million in creating her debut album, Superficial, working with professional songwriters and producers.

The results were brutal. Contemporary Nielsen SoundScan reporting indicated that the album sold fewer than 1,000 copies during its first week, including a widely reported 658 digital album downloads. That was a disappointing commercial response to a project Montag had spent heavily to create.

To be fair, the reported $2 million was principally an investment in making the music, not a documented advertising budget. Montag also complained afterward that the album hadn’t received sufficient promotion. Nevertheless, she already possessed the kind of national visibility most aspiring artists can only dream about. Millions of people knew who Heidi Montag was. That didn’t mean they wanted to buy her music.

Then, fifteen years later, something remarkable happened.

In January 2025, Montag and her husband, Spencer Pratt, lost their home in the devastating Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles. Pratt began encouraging people on social media to stream and purchase Montag’s music to help the family recover. Fans, celebrities, and social media users responded, sharing her songs and encouraging others to listen.

Superficial reached №1 on the iTunes albums chart and debuted at №54 on the Billboard 200, fifteen years after its original release.

The music hadn’t changed. What changed was the context in which people encountered it. The album became part of a larger story about loss, sympathy, community, and helping someone recover from a disaster. People had a different reason to engage with it.

This wasn’t entirely organic. Pratt actively promoted the music, and the campaign benefited from viral social media attention. But the public’s voluntary response gave that promotion an impact that the original investment hadn’t produced.

That distinction is crucial. Money can help put something in front of an audience, but the audience’s motivations, experiences, and willingness to participate determine much of what happens afterward.

The Research Is Surprisingly Clear

In 2006, researchers Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts published a fascinating study in Science involving more than 14,000 people listening to unfamiliar songs. Some participants made their selections independently, while others could see what previous listeners had chosen.

The researchers discovered that social influence dramatically affected which songs became popular. Different groups exposed to the same music often produced different hits. Quality mattered, but popularity was also influenced by social behavior and momentum, making success surprisingly unpredictable.

In politics, the evidence is equally interesting. In a 2018 study published in the American Political Science Review, political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman analyzed 49 field experiments involving campaign persuasion. Their finding was striking: The average persuasive effect of campaign contact on candidate preferences during general elections was essentially zero.

There were important exceptions, and other studies have shown that advertising can influence elections, particularly lower-profile races. But the research raises legitimate questions about the assumption that more advertising reliably changes more minds.

The music industry has spent decades confronting the same uncertainty. A record company can finance exposure, but it can’t precisely predict how listeners will respond. Political campaigns can purchase a staggering number of impressions without knowing how many people have actually been persuaded.

I have seen this confusion repeatedly throughout my career. Artists can accumulate enormous streaming numbers and social media followings, then discover that surprisingly few people are willing to buy a concert ticket. The promotional statistics may be impressive, but they don’t necessarily measure a meaningful connection with an audience.

Political campaigns have their own version of this problem. Impressions, advertising expenditures, fundraising totals, and media coverage are measurable activities. They aren’t the same thing as public support.

You Cannot Market Your Way Around Reality

One of the most expensive mistakes in the music business is continuing to promote something that audiences have already decided they don’t want.

Imagine a record company spending millions of dollars promoting a single that consistently fails to connect with listeners. Rather than questioning the music, the executives decide that the answer is another five million dollars in advertising. More promotion, more publicity, more social media, and another round of expensive meetings explaining why the public simply hasn’t recognized the song’s brilliance.

Eventually, somebody has to ask whether the problem is the marketing or the music.

Politics presents a more complicated version of that question. Voters don’t make decisions in the same way consumers choose songs. Party loyalty, public policy, governing records, candidate qualifications, and turnout all influence election results. An advertisement can make a real difference in a close race, even without generating widespread enthusiasm.

But sometimes politicians and their consultants treat dissatisfaction as though it were merely a communications problem. Perhaps the slogan needs adjusting, the advertising isn’t reaching the right demographic, or the campaign needs more television time. Those possibilities deserve consideration, but so does another explanation: Voters may understand the message perfectly well and simply disagree with it.

This applies to Democrats and Republicans alike. Neither party has a monopoly on bad messaging, excessive spending, or the mistaken belief that a sophisticated campaign can substitute for public confidence.

The immediate challenge for Republicans is that they hold the White House and congressional majorities while national polling shows considerable dissatisfaction with the administration’s economic performance. Political advertising can explain policies and defend a governing record, but it cannot erase the experiences and judgments voters bring to the election.

Elon Musk and other wealthy donors can finance extraordinary amounts of political communication. What they cannot do is guarantee that those communications will persuade people whose opinions have already been shaped by events outside the advertising campaign.

The Audience Gets the Last Word

The greatest lesson the music business can offer politics isn’t that advertising doesn’t work. It absolutely can. Without promotion, talented artists struggle to find audiences, just as political candidates without adequate resources struggle to communicate their ideas.

The mistake is confusing the ability to purchase attention with evidence that people actually want what you’re selling.

The 2026 midterms offer an extraordinary example of that distinction. Billions of dollars are being spent on political advertising while polling shows widespread voter dissatisfaction and competitive races in places that were once considered relatively secure. We won’t know the electoral results until November 3, and even then, separating the effects of advertising from every other influence on voters will be difficult.

But after a lifetime in the music business, I keep coming back to something every recording artist eventually learns. You can hire the most expensive producer in the world, buy advertising on every platform, employ an army of publicists, and spend a fortune telling everyone you’ve recorded the greatest song ever written. But eventually somebody presses play, and the listener decides whether the music deserves another listen.

You can buy the airplay. You can’t buy the hit. And on November 3, American voters get to decide what’s playing next…