For all of the attention being paid to this year's Senate races (did you know that party control might flip? did you did you did you), there's a surprising bit of data in the Center for Public Integrity's ongoing analysis of TV ad spending. Gubernatorial races, CPI found, are outspending Senate races to the tune of over $50 million. There's an obvious reason why that is. A number of states with governors races overlap with the country's biggest and most expensive media markets. Texas, Florida and Illinois all have contests for chief executive this year, as do California and New York, although those appear not to be "contests" as such. The races in Florida and Illinois are "more expensive than any race, federal or state, thus far," according to CPI. But these are big states with big populations. At least on the metric of TV ad spending (which is all that the CPI data estimates cover), it is smaller states that are seeing far more money spent per capita. When you consider how much has been spent on state and Senate advertising so far this cycle and compare it to the number of people that live in each state, the most expensive campaigns per-person are being run in Arkansas and Iowa. You can see them on the graph below, above the "Over $8 per person" line.
Source: Arkansas is spending 40 times as much on campaign ads as California - The Washington Post
