Titanic Senate Race Floods TV Market With Cash

The U.S. Senate race between incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor and his Republican challenger, Congressman Tom Cotton, is a national event.

Financed by individual donors and political action committees from New York to California, and observed by Beltway insiders, the Pryor-Cotton contest could determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.

Earmarked from the outset as a pivotal race, 30-second political ads started appearing on television as early as February and have not relented. Though it’s impossible to determine the exact size of the election spending, based on records from the Federal Election Commission, the Cotton-Pryor race is at about $23 million and counting.

The most obvious sign that a contested race is underway is the political ads on TV that feature two contrasting images: Pryor, the folksy patriarch of the old school, and Cotton, the young and towering war veteran with a law degree from Harvard University.

Van Comer, president and general manager of local CBS affiliate KFSM-TV, Channel 5, has worked at the station for over a decade and has never seen anything quite like it. For instance, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative PAC formed by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, spent $424,000 on anti-Pryor ads that ran on KFSM between February and July, according to station records filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

“I have been with the station since 1993 and this is the largest in terms of advertising purchases that I recall,” Comer said.

 

Something Unexpected

Cotton was supposed to break out of the gate and leave Pryor in a cloud of dust. But something happened that the political pundits hadn’t predicted. Pryor competed, and poll after poll showed that Pryor was not only close to Cotton, but that he could possibly win.

The latest tally by the FEC shows that more than $8 million has been spent — and that’s just from the independent individuals, unions, corporations and PACs. According to the election commission, another $10 million has been spent by the candidates.

Though mailers, online ads, polling, radio spots and phone banks are all part of the package, the heart of both campaigns is in the TV commercials. And nowhere is that truer than in Northwest Arkansas, where the high-stakes Senate race has generated millions in revenue for the region’s three biggest TV stations — KFSM, ABC affiliate KHOG and NBC affiliate KNWA.

The glut of commercials, while impressive in its scope, was anticipated, according to a leading observer of Washington politics.

“Republicans feel like they should control a Senate seat in a state that went so overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney in 2012 and that elected a Republican senator in a landslide in 2010,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “Democrats, of course, feel that if they hold Arkansas they will likely hold on to their Senate majority. The voters may just be along for the ride as they see ad after ad from now until November.”

 

National Players

Janine Parry, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, said the election started off with a big misconception.

“The national press had all but written Mark Pryor’s political obituary,” she said.

When the reality turned out to be much different, people took notice.

“Pryor stayed alive and made the election competitive,” Parry said. “Polls showed he was viable. The big donors didn’t leave him for dead and the money kept coming in.”

On a national scale, Pryor is supported in part by unions, big energy, big liquor, big pharma, big protein, and even Kentucky Fried Chicken, according to election commission records. His campaign began in earnest in February, when, according to election commission records, Patriot Majority USA, a left-leaning policy group based in Washington, D.C., began a $1.7 million, six-month anti-Cotton campaign.

Pryor was boosted again in July, when the NEA Advocacy Fund, a super PAC with ties to the National Education Association, purchased $490,000 in TV and online advertising.

Communications commission records show that, of the $2.1 million in expenditures by the two groups, about $465,000 flowed through local stations, particularly KFSM.

Locally, Pryor has plenty of support along Interstate 49. Tyson Foods Inc. chairman John Tyson, board member Barbara Tyson, Tyson president and CEO Donnie Smith, former Tyson executive Archie Schaffer, and the Tyson Foods Inc. PAC have all contributed to Pryor’s candidacy.

Shawn Oswald, general manager at KHOG, would not speak to specifics, but records show that both candidates and their supporters have been active with the station for months.

Americans for Prosperity, the Government Integrity Fund, the National Republican Senate Committee, and the Senate Majority PAC are some, but not all, of the national groups that have advertised with KHOG.

Oswald said he knew the election would be big, but not this big.

“It’s heavier than we anticipated,” he said.

 

A Fantastic Candidate

Prof. Parry has followed state politics for 16 years and teaches the subject at UA. For Parry, the Cotton-Pryor election has been a long time in the making, from when Cotton first went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for his Harvard education, and then to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he served for five years in the U.S. Army.

“Arkansas Republicans were waiting for him to come home and Democrats were afraid he’d come home,” Parry said. “In some ways, he couldn’t be a more fantastic candidate.”

If his level of backing is any indication, Parry is right.

In Arkansas, Cotton enjoys support from George Makris, CEO of Simmons First National Corp., David Glass, owner of the Kansas City Royals, Arvest Bank Group Inc., Warren A. Stephens and Stephens Inc., and Jim and Lynne Walton, among many others, according to FEC records.

On the national stage, Cotton received a combined $1.6 million in media buys from Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group, and American Crossroads, a super PAC founded by Carl Rove. Another group, the Government Integrity Fund, a D.C.-based conservative PAC, purchased $1 million worth of advertising, and, of that amount, about $274,000 was spent in the Fort Smith-Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers market, according to FCC records.

Financing from PACs and Super PACs is part of the game.

“Senate races often feature national donors,” Kondik said.

 

Election Day

Based on election commission records, as of June 30, the Cotton and Pryor campaigns had raised a combined total of $15.1 million, a 5.6-percent increase over the 2010 Boozman-Lincoln election, when the candidates raised $14.3 million over the course of the entire election cycle.

In the 2008 Senate election, Pryor raised $5 million, whereas his opponent, a Green Party candidate, raised just $13,745.

Times have certainly changed. This year, Pryor is fighting for his political life as Mike Ross, a Democrat, battles Republican Asa Hutchinson for control of the governor’s mansion. With all four of the state’s U.S. House seats in Republican hands, wins by Cotton and Hutchinson would give the GOP a clean sweep in Arkansas and D.C.

Pryor is determined not to let that happen. His campaign has $205,000 in ads running on KHOG in September and October.

Pryor has also purchased $197,000 in ads on KNWA that will run from September up to Election Day, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“Right now the spending is comparable to Boozman-Lincoln, but it will be much bigger in the end,” said Lisa Kelsey, station manager at KNWA.

Kondik, whose specialty is Senate and gubernatorial elections, declined to predict a winner, and said only time will tell how Arkansans really feel about Cotton and Pryor.

“I’m not sure the voters are as interested as the activists and parties are,” said Kondik. “The one way we’ll measure that — turnout — has to wait until Election Day.”