Political Ads Target TV, But Not Everyone Is Tuning In

Although the election is more than a year away, it's not keeping political commercials off of our TV screens. Yet, according to a new survey, the audience for those ads is shrinking.

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies and Democratic pollster Thomas Eldon of SEA Polling surveyed likely voters about their TV viewing habits. "The No. 1 finding in the survey, which really shocked me, is that 31 percent of voters we talked to said they had not watched live TV in the past week," Newhouse says. Live in this case doesn't mean a live event, like a baseball game — it means watching a TV program when a channel or network airs it. So if about a third of TV viewers only watched recorded programming in the previous week, there's no reason to assume they sat through the commercials. That's what the fast-forward button is for. "You do a little deeper dive in the data, and there's not a gender difference, there's not a partisan difference — Republicans vs. Democrats — not really an educational difference," Newhouse says. "Where there's a real difference is a generation difference. The generation gap is stark and wide." Younger people, says Newhouse, are much less likely to watch TV in real time — or even to watch television on a television. They may find computers or smartphones more convenient.