SCOTUS Political Ad Case Could Be Headache or Windfall for Broadcasters

In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the NRSC, Vance and others challenge limitations on spending by political parties coordinated with candidates. If the case goes the NRSC’s way, it could lead to increased donations to political parties and higher campaign ad spending, including on broadcast ads.

However, it could also mean that FCC limits on what broadcasters can charge candidates for ads would apply to a broader swath of political ads, cutting deeply into broadcasters' income.

It's not yet clear how the matter will shake out, broadcast attorneys told us, but BIA Advisory Services political ad expert Steve Passwaiter is concerned. “If this happens, I've heard estimates [of] anywhere from half a billion to a billion dollars in losses for broadcast, coming mostly from the buy side,” he told us in an interview.

In the case’s cert petition, the NRSC, Vance, the National Republican Congressional Committee and former Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, argued that the court should overturn its 2001 ruling that limits on coordinated spending are constitutional. The limits restrict the amount campaigns can spend on advertising in coordination with political candidates, while allowing them to spend without limit on independent campaign efforts. Those limitations don’t comport with modern campaign finance doctrine and have “harmed our political system” by leading donors to give to “narrowly focused” political action committees rather than political parties, the groups said in a December petition.

The FEC limits donations to both parties and candidates, but the amount for parties is higher: For 2025-26, individual donations to candidates are capped at $3,500 per election, while individual gifts to parties can be up to $44,300 per year. Ad buys coordinated with candidates are attractive for potential donors to political parties because it's similar to a direct contribution, Tara Malloy, a Campaign Legal Center senior litigation strategist, said in an interview. “Coordinate expenditure is basically one that the candidate says, ‘Please run this ad,’ or ‘Do this. Do that.’ It's one that basically is considered as good as a direct contribution, because a candidate is telling you what to do.”

If SCOTUS rules with the NRSC and parties are free to put all their political ad spending toward the candidates, they could claim that those ads are subject to the FCC’s lowest unit rate rules, said Passwaiter. Under those rules, candidates buying broadcast political ads during the final months before an election can be charged only the lowest rate that commercial advertisers were charged for the same class of time.

Currently, party committee spending generally doesn’t qualify for the lowest unit rate, but a court ruling could allow them to funnel more money through candidates who qualify, Passwaiter said. Political ad spending has become a major portion of broadcasters' bottom lines, especially in TV, he said. “It takes these people that are paying higher rates and, by flowing money to the candidate, all of a sudden now the candidate is buying that time and is buying at a much lower rate.” In the final months of a campaign, when lowest unit rate kicks in, political ad spending is at its highest, and inventory is tight, Passwaiter said. That's why shifting huge chunks of those ad buys to fall under the lowest unit rate would hurt broadcasters so much, he added.

A ruling in the NRSC’s favor could increase money flowing to broadcasters because it would allow donors to feel confident that more of their money will go directly to their favored candidates, some broadcast industry officials and campaign spending watchers told us. “This will be an incentive for donors to give greater money to the parties,” Malloy said. “It's not that I'm just giving to a party committee that has to kind of keep it independently out there in the world." The candidate would “directly benefit from my huge contribution in a way that they could not” under current rules.

However, it's hard to quantify how much increased spending newly incentivized donors would add to the pot, broadcast industry officials told us. Big donors such as Elon Musk can already spend huge amounts of money on elections under the current rules, said Danilo Yanich, a professor who researches public policy and media at the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and Administration. “The campaign finance system is already broken, right? There's so much money in it,” it isn’t clear that looser rules “will make a difference materially about how political communication goes.” Passwaiter said he “can't envision a scenario in which it will ever completely recapture the dollars that are being lost by not having these independent groups come in and have to buy it themselves and pay a higher rate for it.”

NRSC v. FEC is expected to be argued before SCOTUS in the fall and could be decided next year, with the court widely seen as leaning the NRSC’s way, Malloy said. Since the 2010 Citizen’s United decision, “it's been pretty clear the Supreme Court is very hostile to pretty much all campaign finance law,” she said.

“I'm certain that the NRSC feels that they have a good shot with this new, somewhat different Supreme Court,” Malloy added. “I don't think it's a particularly good outlook for the health of the party coordinating limits.”