2024 election to be most expensive in history with $15.9bn spent, new report reveals

The 2024 presidential election is on track to be the most expensive in history, even as one of the two major candidates has essentially run one of the shortest campaigns in modern times.

A report from OpenSecrets published Tuesday found that the two major-party presidential campaigns, their related super PACs, and other aligned groups will (combined with third-party candidates and organizations) spend more than $15.9bn over the course of the 2024 election cycle, breaking the record set in 2020: $15.1bn.

The report actually highlights two realities: first, the stark jump in spending, related in many ways to inflation, in campaign spending during the 2020 election cycle — a trend which is cooling, but not reversed just yet. And second, it’s a sign of the continued fundraising prowess of the Democrats, who have surged past their opponents and led the GOP in money raised in every period since Kamala Harris ascended to the top of her party’s ticket.

Inflation’s role in campaign spending is especially evident — when adjusted for current dollar-value, the total election spending from the 2020 cycle actually surpasses the projected total for this year. But even with those adjustments, the projected amount is around twice as high as the 2016 cycle’s adjusted total.

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The Harris campaign charged into October with its cash-raising momentum slowed but far from gone. The vice president’s campaign announced a fundraising total of $361m for the month prior, more than $200m higher than the Trump campaign’s total. Both campaigns are in spending mode now, too, but Harris has been able to seriously outpace her opponent in that regard, thanks to several months of fundraising success.

Donald Trump’s team has been burning cash-on-hand reserves for several months now, and enters the final month with clear disadvantages. His debate-stage conversation with Harris has been memeified and mocked a thousand times over, sending his campaign into a weeks-long effort to battle charges of sparking a racist hate campaign in Ohio. In polling, Harris has the clear momentum as well, and has fought her party’s way back into political contention in numerous battleground states, including red-leaning ones like North Carolina and Florida.

That much was clear on Tuesday when the Trump campaign announced a multi-stop bus tour across the state of North Carolina, an effort to shore up support for the former president who is now separated from his opponent in the state by a low single-digit margin. The tour will feature Iowa’s Republican governor Kim Reynolds, an endorser of Ron DeSantis in the 2024 GOP primary, as well as some former Trump administration hangers-on.

Though North Carolina has been close in the past several elections, it has gone for Republicans in every race since 2008 — an outlier year, the election of Barack Obama — and it hadn’t voted for a Democrat in decades before that.