U.S. Senate candidate Mazie Hirono is back in the political TV ad game.
The Democrat this week spent more than $51,000 on 170 spots that are airing this week on all the local broadcast stations, according to Civil Beat’s most recent look at the public files.
A spot set to air Saturday during college football was her most expensive buy, costing $5,000. Hirono also paid $4,000 to air an ad that ran Monday during Hawaii Five-0.
Hirono is the second local candidate to buy time on local airwaves in the post-primary campaigning period. Her Republican opponent Linda Lingle was the first. As of Wednesday, Hirono had spent about $765,000 total on ad time this election season.
Civil Beat each week has been stopping by Hawaii’s three broadcast stations to review their political ad contracts. The series is modeled after a ProPublica project to “free the files.”
The documents are by law public records — broadcasters have to make them available to the public. But in Hawaii, the documents are only available as hard copies at each of the stations. Only contracts with Oceanic Time Warner cable networks are accessible online.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Lingle spent another $83,000 on 269 spots that are airing this and next week on KHON, KITV, KITV subsidiary MeTV, KGMB and KHNL.
That’s in addition to the $180,000-worth of general election spots she bought over the last three weeks, when she was still the only local candidate to run TV ads.
Lingle’s most pricey purchase of the week was a $5,000 spot set to air Saturday during the University of Hawaii vs. University of Southern California football game on KHNL. She also paid $3,000 for another spot that will air at the beginning of the game before halftime.
In fact, Lingle this week is airing at least 11 spots during football programming. The Republican aired eight spots on KITV and MeTV during 49er pre-season football Thursday and bought one spot that is set to air on KGMB during NFL games next Sunday. The KGMB spot cost her $1,450.
Oceanic Time Warner cable has not yet uploaded contracts from this week onto its website.
As of Wednesday, Lingle had spent nearly $263,000 on post-primary ad time, meaning she has spent about $845,000 total this election season.
Grand Totals
Total ad buys this week amount to about $134,000. As of Wednesday, total post-primary TV ad spending was nearly $300,100. That for the entire election season was more than $5.8 million. Non-candidate political committees have spent about 34 percent of that money, or approximately $2 million.
