CANBERRA — U.S. midterm elections campaigns are not only expensive — the bills ran to over 16 billion Australian dollars — they are months-long laboratories for parties and outside campaign groups to test the best ways to select candidates, build coalitions, communicate economic grievances, and deploy new technologies.
Australian strategists have been watching, visiting and taking note. Here are the standout campaign developments that political professionals can study and scale at home.
It’s still the economy, stupid
Governments must keep in control of the economic narrative, or they risk becoming electoral poison.
President Donald Trump may have rapid AI innovation and adoption juicing productivity, but his policy choices pushed affordability to the top of voter concerns and it stayed there. The president who promised lower prices was punished for not delivering them.
Winning campaigns communicated through household expenses examples, including food, health care, housing and fuel, rather than citing poor economy-wide statistics such as inflation figures or interest rates.
A Washington Post analysis of more than 8,000 advertisements, published Oct. 8, found three in five ads in competitive races mentioned the economy. Democrats were three times as likely as Republicans to mention grocery prices and twice as likely to mention petrol prices.
Treat AI with extreme caution
Americans voted against data centers in 40 out of 41 local ballot initiatives across 10 states. The vote ran roughly 3-to-1 against data centers and, in one instance, the officials promoting a data center were fired by voters. Around 40% of proposed new data center capacity in the U.S. may face new hurdles from unsupportive state governors.
An NBC exit poll of nearly 80,000 voters nationwide found that AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in the congressional vote of 56% of voters, while 76% opposed a new data center in their own community.
But use AI to build relationships and reduce costs
Conversational AI systems can collect more detailed information about voter concerns than conventional mass advertising or doorknocking. That creates questions about privacy and accountability around automated interactions — but it’s also a major opportunity for campaigners while the rule book remains unsettled.
Many people are now asking AI chatbots how to vote: getting your candidate or issue featured well inside a given AI system is the new Search Engine Optimization, which political strategists will try to manipulate in their favor.
Continuing a trend across the internet era, smaller campaigns can now access AI capabilities that previously required substantial staff or production budgets to produce in other ways.
AI-generated or enhanced material is being normalized, even as it generates backlash.
At least 220 synthetic ads aired in this U.S. election. Only 60 of those ads were labeled as “made with AI” — one depicted a Senate candidate in a key race as cross-dressing, another was chanting “death to America.” None of it really happened.
We are already seeing this trend hit the Australian political mainstream. Victorian Labor adopted a nearly identical approach in a now deleted state election advertisement: it depicted imagined versions of the party’s two main rivals Liberal Jess Wilson and One Nation’s Warren Pickering turning up to the front doors of Victorians handing them massive health care bills. A One Nation ad depicted home invaders and suicide bombers.
The distinction between satire, fabrication and deliberately misleading content may matter for platform regulation but for the moment there is no requirement for truth in political advertising in Australian electoral law.
Buck your party, it’s the vibe
Across the country Democrats said and did things that would have had them canceled by their own party colleagues two or four years ago — and it worked.
Sen.-elect James Talarico provides the gold standard for this candidacy model, building on the foundations of Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff.
Talarico leaned into his Christian faith, and rejected left vs. right political framing in favor of speeches about the “top vs. bottom” in American society.
Campaign everywhere
Democrats in states such as Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, and Ohio did not rely on turnout in heavily Democratic urban areas: they campaigned everywhere. In Texas this is known as a 254-county strategy.
Turnout is less of a factor in Australian elections — around 96% of eligible voters do, because voting is compulsory — getting to hard-to-reach pockets of voters matters more in today’s electorate. How Australians rank their candidates matters more in a three- or four-way contest, of which there are likely to be many in 2028.
Use an unpopular leader — but if you want to be a star, talk about tomorrow
Democrats mentioned Trump far more than Republicans did in their advertising. An Associated Press investigation found that since Sept. 1, Democrats and allies spent around $163 million on advertisements mentioning Trump. Equivalent Republican advertising was $11 million, despite Republicans having more to spend.
The translation to Australia’s context is that One Nation, the Coalition and Greens would be on solid ground focusing on Albanese and Chalmers in their advertising efforts — and that could paint an uncomfortable contrast with Labor if they aren’t also featuring their highest-profile ministers.
But the biggest stars of the midterms were able to move beyond using Trump-bashing as a campaign crutch. Jon Ossoff, James Talarico, Rob Sand, Adam Hamilton focused on their own values. The most surprising Democratic Senate victor this week — Annie Andrews in South Carolina — made it a policy to not event talk about Trump..
Candidate selection can shift races
Michigan’s Senate contest and Trump’s intervention in Republican primaries offer examples of how candidate selection disputes can carry into a general election.
There is a widespread assumption across the political aisle that if sitting Republican Senators such as John Cornyn in Texas had been supported by Trump, or if South Carolina had gone through a primary to select the Republican candidate filling Lindsey Graham’s shoes, both those seats would still be in red hands.