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2024 Campaign Advertising Highlights: What Was and Wasn’t Featured in Issue Discussion on Television

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And its implications for future policy to promote population health

2024 was another record-breaking year of campaign spending, with campaigns reaching citizens through their television screens, mobile devices, online, in their mailboxes and via social media platforms in an effort to convey their policy achievements and future priorities and their opponent’s policies and priorities.

Understanding the issue discussion – both what candidates for office discuss and what they leave out of their advertising – is important because the messaging can influence public opinion and perceptions of what policy areas deserve to be addressed and what might be lower priority. Television advertising has been shown to be more substantive in policy discussion than online advertising, and therefore, we draw on data released by the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP), to provide an overview of what issues were discussed in federal advertising in 2024 and what policies failed to make the agenda.

Similar to our description of the 2022 midterm elections, abortion continued to be an important theme for Democratic candidates, and in fact, Democratic ads in federal races gave more attention to abortion this cycle than they have in any other cycle going at least as far back as the 2012 election cycle. Much of this messaging focused on the dangers faced by women seeking treatment during pregnancy and attacking Republicans for supporting abortion bans. By contrast, Republican advertising rarely discussed the topic, and the rate of discussion has declined slightly from earlier years.

Health care, although still on the agenda for both parties, was not featured as prominently as 2018 and 2020. When it occurred, however, the conversation was primarily around lowering the costs of health care and health insurance (including Medicare) premiums, tying the issue into broader concern about higher prices. The cost of living – including discussion of grocery prices and unaffordable housing – featured prominently in advertising from both parties in the presidential race and congressional races. Pro-Democratic ads also touted their achievement of capping the cost of insulin for seniors at $35 per month, which was a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Similar to COMM analyses of the 2022 midterms, 2024 advertising featured a continuation of Republican-led discussion of racially-related themes, with discussion of immigration reaching a historical high. Much of this anti-immigration rhetoric explicitly described “illegal aliens” committing violent crimes, which our team’s prior research has suggested may increase worry about crime. Democratic rebuttals to this messaging (while much lower in volume) did not tout the positives of immigration but typically doubled down on a law enforcement perspective – frequently featuring police officers and sheriffs or border patrol describing their support of the Democratic candidate who cares about border control. 

Another identity-related topic took a prominent spot in pro-Republican messaging this cycle: attacks on the transgender community. While this type of messaging occurred and was also dominated by Republicans in the 2022 midterms, it was much lower in volume in 2022 than what we saw this cycle. More specifically, four times as many Republican airings in the House and eight times as many Republican airings in the Senate were aired on the topic in 2024 compared to 2022, the combined total of which were more than double the number of airings given to the topic by the Trump campaign. Republicans took varying lines of attack against their opponents for “exposing minors to life-altering sex changes,” overturning laws “protecting children from dangerous transgender surgeries,” and supporting biological men in women’s bathrooms and biological men participating in women’s sports thereby “steal(ing) your daughter’s opportunity.” Some went so far as to claim that they were true champions for or protectors of women’s rights, seemingly trying to use these issues as a rebuttal to the abortion attacks from Democrats. A number of the ads including the ad by the Trump campaign that aired during the World Series closed with lines about the attacked candidate being “for they/them” while the favored candidate was “for you.”

As in 2022, it is worth mentioning what was left off of the 2024 campaign agenda on both sides . Despite widespread concern about climate change, the topic was mentioned in 0.2 percent of all federal advertising in 2024, an even lower total than in 2022. This is consistent with a very low volume of attention in 2022 as well.

Although cost of living and affordable housing along with mentions of billionaires being big beneficiaries were featured prominently in 2024, explicit attention to poverty remained extremely low, which is consistent with analyses of prior presidential cycles.

Although this is just our first look at 2024 advertising, which we will expand upon as our team digs further into specific messaging on different topics, we have good reasons to suspect that the focus of the ads have consequences. More specifically, a wide range of evidence suggests that attitudes surrounding race and health equity are already politically polarized, and the messaging from 2024 – similar to what we saw in 2022 – is likely only to reinforce these attitudes and divisions. However, explicit attention to crime, portraits of immigrants and transgender people as problematic, and a lack of attention to structural barriers that reinforce systemic inequalities means that the messages most Americans are receiving are prone to priming negative stereotypes about race and identity politics that are ill-suited to change – and in fact may depress – support for policies to improve health and racial equity outcomes.

Read more related work from the COMM team:

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