Steve Bannon Says Consultants Starve GOP Ground Game for 'Massive TV Buys'

Steve Bannon said on Monday that Republican campaign consultants favor television over door-knocking because TV is where they get paid. With four weeks left before the midterms, he blamed them for leaving the party's ground game "starved for cash."

On War Room, Bannon set the GOP's spending habits against a left that, he argued, wins low-turnout races by sending people to knock on doors. His example was a state Senate seat in Tarrant County, Texas, that Donald Trump carried in 2024 and Republicans lost this year.

Steve Bannon Faults Consultants' 'Points on the Buy'

Bannon made the argument during an interview with Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty. She had cited Get Out the Vote, by political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber, saying that "knocking on doors has the highest return on investment of any action you can take."

Bannon agreed. He said there is no better investment than "the personal contact and somebody talking to a voter face-to-face," then turned to the people who run Republican campaigns.

"It's very hard for the consultants to make money off of that. That's why they're all about points on the buy. They want massive TV buys where they get a piece of the action." — Steve Bannon

"Points on the buy" is industry shorthand for the commission media consultants take as a percentage of the ad time they place. "That doesn't happen in the grassroots game," Bannon said. "That's why it's always starved for cash."

His target was the campaign apparatus, not Trump or party leaders. In the same broadcast, he praised the president's rally tour as an effort to build "this sense of urgency" among voters. Bannon has picked fights with Republican campaign messaging before, including when he said a Sarah Huckabee Sanders ad "dumped on" young men.

The Texas Senate District 9 Race Bannon Cited

Bannon described the Texas race from memory: a seat "where President Trump won by 17 points" that the left flipped in the dead of winter. "It was bitterly cold, but DSA went down there with the Working Families Party in the middle of winter and just knocked on doors and canvassed, and they won by 14 points," he said. "Showing up particularly these low turnout elections is the difference."

His numbers are close to the record. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a union leader and Air Force veteran, beat Republican Leigh Wambsganss in the Senate District 9 special runoff earlier this year (Bannon placed the race in January 2025). Trump had won the district by more than 17 points in 2024, and Rehmet won by 14, the Texas Tribune reported. Trump had endorsed Wambsganss, Spectrum News reported.

Money did not decide the race. Wambsganss raised about $2.6 million to Rehmet's roughly $570,000, according to the Texas Tribune, and Rehmet's campaign made knocking on 40,000 doors its "north star." The Texas Working Families Party said it canvassed, phoned and texted for him. The Texas Tribune and Working Families Party accounts of the race do not mention the Democratic Socialists of America.

What the Research Says About Canvassing and TV Ads

The academic record leans Bannon's way on turnout. In a randomized experiment in New Haven, Connecticut, before the 1998 election, Green and Yale's Alan Gerber found that in-person canvassing raised turnout.

Television does move voters, but the effect fades quickly. In a 2006 experiment that ran Texas Gov. Rick Perry's ads at up to about $3 million a week, the effects on voter preferences were strong but largely gone within a week, the researchers found.

Campaigns are still betting on the airwaves. AdImpact, which tracks political advertising, projected $10.8 billion in political ad spending for the 2026 cycle, "the most expensive midterm on record."

What Happens Next

The consultants Bannon criticized are spending into an unfriendly environment. Democrats lead PolitiKool's generic ballot average 48.6 percent to 40.5 percent, and Trump's approval stands at 37.7 percent in PolitiKool's polling average.

The seat returns to the ballot in November for a full four-year term. With a midterm electorate in place of a low-turnout special election, that race will test whether a January canvassing win can hold.