Democrats experiencing agita over midterm elections prospects—as inflation keeps rising, the pandemic drags on and the Biden agenda continues to stall—have another reason to agonize: Republicans already have a major edge in the political ad game surrounding the U.S. Senate.

Today, we kick off our ad tracking for the 2022 election cycle, as part of our award-winning Campaign Trail coverage. Our guiding principle, as always: If you want to understand politics, follow the money—especially the ad money. Campaign Trail is a project of Ad Age Datacenter, led by Director of Data Management Kevin Brown in partnership with Kantar/CMAG. Bookmark us at AdAge.com/CampaignTrail.

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An executive summary of—and essential context for—the charts you see below:

• Among the five states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Alabama and Wisconsin—with the highest ad spending so far on U.S. Senate campaigns across TV, radio and digital, $37.2 million has been spent by Republicans vs. $7.5 million by Democrats. Those figures tally booked spending from Dec. 28, 2021, through Election Day as of Jan. 18, 2022. (As we note in the fine print below, some candidates and political action committees began spending—some significantly—in 2021, but for the purposes of our analysis, we’re tracking all candidates’ spending from Dec. 28 forward.) 

• In all, 34 U.S. Senate seats are in play; we’re tracking spending across every one of those races—but for the purposes of this edition of Campaign Trail we’re just focusing on the five biggest-money races (so far). Of those five races, four—in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Alabama—are in play because the incumbents (all of whom are Republican) are retiring.

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• Republicans, of course, are looking to retake the (theoretically) evenly split U.S. Senate—though they arguably already have, given that Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have sided with the GOP on budget bills and filibuster reform.

• Other factors fueling ad spending: Some high-profile exits in key states—Rob Portman (R), the junior senator from Ohio, and Pat Toomey (R), the junior senator from Pennsylvania, have both announced they’re retiring—have created a primary-season free-for-all among the would-be successors. Ohio’s primaries are slated for May 3 and Pennsylvania's for May 17.

• The biggest ad-spender in Pennsylvania so far is Mehmet Oz, the TV doctor, to the tune of $2.9 million, followed by Dave McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO who served as under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs in the George W. Bush administration, at $1.8 million. Both Republicans are vying for Toomey’s seat.

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• The biggest ad-spender in Ohio so far is businessman Mike Gibbons, to the tune of $6.8 million, followed by Matt Dolan, a state senator, at $4.5 million. Gibbons has recently been polling below former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel and “Hillbilly Elegy” author/venture capitalist J.D. Vance. All are Republicans. As for Dolan, he’s been polling badly enough (near the bottom of the heap in the single digits) that Cincinnati public radio station WVXU’s website recently ran a story titled “Let’s not forget Matt Dolan exists in Ohio’s Senate race for Rob Portman’s seat.”

The piece contends that Dolan “is the only one of the seven Republican candidates in Ohio’s U.S. Senate primary who hasn’t spent every waking moment sucking up to Donald Trump and his followers.”

In other words, the 2022 midterms for Republicans in Ohio—and elsewhere across the country—are really about the 500-pound elephant in the room (a room, that is, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida).

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