US midterms turn feral: AI Bibles, a rival's mum and an $11.2B ad war

Polling day has arrived, and the bill for getting here is enormous. Analytics firm AdImpact puts political advertising spending for this cycle at $US11.2 billion ($16 billion), with both parties emptying their pockets and the contest on track to be America's costliest ever. The ads themselves have been unusually venomous, with increasingly sophisticated AI tools opening new angles of attack.

The spot that stopped everyone cold came in Ohio's governor's race, where Republican Vivek Ramaswamy put his Democratic rival Amy Acton's estranged mother on camera. In the minute-long ad, Donna Arthur calls her daughter a liar who invented stories of a traumatic childhood in a tent. What the ad left out: court and police records confirming Acton's harrowing past, her strained relationship with her mother, and her departure from home to escape alleged childhood abuse by her stepfather. President Donald Trump said he had no issue with it, but Republicans lined up to call it bad taste and a moral red line. Ramaswamy initially defended the ad before pulling its run early under the backlash.

Michigan's Senate race has become a Democratic civil war. Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost the primary to Abdul El-Sayed, has thrown her support behind Republican Mike Rogers — reportedly the last straw being an ad from left-wing group Rebellion PAC that backs El-Sayed. Set in a grocery store, it shows a shopper telling her partner to put the eggs back because the $7 is needed for "killing Palestinians", before a narrator contrasts the candidates. Stevens blasted it on X as "fearmongering about Israel" and "not a winning strategy for any state", and the Anti-Defamation League said it pushed "the myth that Jews are to blame for society's problems". El-Sayed distanced himself completely. Even so, an election-day New York Times/Siena poll gave him an 11-point lead over Rogers.

AI-generated smears have been everywhere, helped along by Trump's habit of posting synthetic clips to Truth Social — among them a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and one of himself wrestling a tiger that had killed a man at a British wildlife park. Dozens of states have passed laws demanding more transparency around AI in political advertising, but that hasn't slowed anyone down. In New York, a fake clip showed Mayor Zoran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul strolling a sunlit park discussing a "political delusion pill", courtesy of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman's campaign. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico — a Presbyterian seminarian locked in a tight Senate race with Republican Ken Paxton — was hit by a September ad showing his AI avatar rewriting the Bible in crayon. He answered with a spot of his own, stamped as made by "humans, not AI".

Nebraska delivered the strangest swing of all. Independent Dan Osborn, who isn't contesting the seat as a Democrat, dropped a satirical election-eve clip framed as if it came from his Republican opponent Pete Ricketts, painting him as secretly cozy with Democrats, in hock to corporations and tied to donors linked to Jeffrey Epstein. The state's Democratic Party has endorsed Osborn, and The New York Times reports many Democrats back him on the theory an independent has a better shot at flipping the seat. The Times also noted a Nebraska poll found most voters see Osborn as a Democrat in disguise.