Campaigns’ Favorite Game Show Is About to Change

Plus: Freedom Caucus chairman shivved in his primary.

Photo by Gerardo Mora/Getty Images

When Pat Sajak retires from hosting Wheel of Fortune next month after 41 seasons at the helm, it could upend one of the surest bets of every election cycle going back more than a decade. 

That’s because in the world of political advertising, Wheel of Fortune is widely considered to be the best bang for your ad-spend buck. While Wheel doesn’t have the massive viewership of Monday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, or even Regular Old Sunday Daytime Football, its audience is quite large, averaging more than 8 million viewers per night. That audience is also highly demographically concentrated: The median viewer is in Nielsen’s oldest tracked category, 65+, which is to say that the show’s viewers belong to the most dedicated bloc of active voters in the country. Wheel also airs in every market in every corner of America and often leads into the nightly news, which adds to its political value.

It’s no surprise that Wheel has raked in the dough in the past several election cycles. The 2008 cycle saw Obama leading the field in placing big bets on Wheel’s audience. In the former president’s 2012 faceoff with Mitt Romney, Sajak’s show earned $57 million from campaign ads. Wheel spending during the 2016 campaign cycle would reach even greater heights. 

Despite Sajak’s own conservative views (he’s currently the chairman of the board of trustees at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan), the ad spending at Wheel is a bipartisan mainstay. Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-N.C.), who is currently running for attorney general in his home state, outlined the importance of Wheel to his campaign, telling constituents in a video:

Last year for my campaign, I had to buy a lot of advertising on TV, so I learned how much it cost. Running one ad on Judge Judy cost me $300, one ad on Chicago Fire was $5,000 because it’s a big primetime show, and one ad during a Panthers football game was $50,000. I could afford zero of those. But Wheel of Fortune—ads during Wheel of Fortune cost $3,000, but they come with a pretty big audience, so I bought a lot of those. I loaded up on Wheel of Fortune and some other shows at similar price points. The effect was immediate. It was amazing. It was like all of the sudden I existed to a bunch of people I had never existed to before. 

Here’s why I’m telling you this: because last week, we were all on the House floor to vote on the debt ceiling. This was the big vote to avoid default. And I’m standing next to a congressman who’s been there for a while, and I say something to him, like, “I hope the country understands that we can’t keep getting this close to disaster. It’s not good.” And he looked at me and said, “How much are you willing to spend to teach them?” And I knew what he meant. He was talking about Wheel of Fortune.

Sajak is retiring on Friday, June 7, just as the general election kicks into high gear. Presidential and statewide office debates will start to air soon after, and a couple months later, the major party conventions will blanket the news media for days at a time. The show will return after those big summer events are finished, at which point its new host—Ryan Seacrest—will make his debut.

Unlike the 8 p.m. hour of Fox News, Wheel of Fortune and other popular television programs have to be careful about their choice of host, lest they offend or alienate their audiences. Networks can’t just hire any person with a whitened smile and an expensive suit and trust the audience to hold. Just look at Jeopardy!, which has seen a big drop in viewers since the retirement and death of its longtime host Alex Trebek. 

A significant drop in Wheel of Fortune’s audience numbers could put a dent in the show’s political advertising revenue as campaigns reassess where they can get the best return on the investment of their ad spends. If older viewers don’t find Seacrest as compelling as they’ve found Sajak over the decades, we’ll find out about it this election cycle.

Not Good, Bob.

Donald Trump endorsed Virginia state legislator John McGuire this morning in his primary challenge against House Freedom Caucus Chairman and Virginia Rep. Bob Good.

In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote:

Good’s résumé is that of a MAGA company man. He is far to the right of most of his House colleagues and he often sows dysfunction in Congress by doing things like threatening to tank important votes. He was also one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House last year.

Good’s luck went bad when he endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president during this cycle’s brief Republican primary. The Freedom Caucus chair was also caught on video suggesting that Trump might not be the best candidate to defeat Joe Biden—a capital offense in today’s GOP. The recording, which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene incredulously shared in early December, caught Good saying the unimaginable to a constituent:

You’re asking me privately, I don’t say this in public. [Trump] might be the only person that could lose to Joe Biden.

McGuire, who founded a fitness company inspired by his time as a Navy SEAL, has served in the state legislature for the last six years. He has branded Good as “Never-Trump.” As someone who has ears and eyes and occasionally speaks to Good on the Hill, I can confirm that the man is not a Never Trumper, even if Trump has become a Never Gooder. 

Regardless, it appears other Republicans and constituents are buying the idea that Good is opposed to Trump. He was even kicked out of a Trump-themed store* in Farmville, a town southwest of Richmond, in February.

And now he might lose the primary on June 18. 

Back the blue?

Congress is defying a law it signed into existence earlier this session by neglecting to mount a plaque honoring the police officers who protected the Capitol on January 6th. According to CBS News:

In a letter sent this month to House Speaker Mike Johnson and obtained by CBS News, [Rep. Zoe] Lofgren [(D-Calif.)] wrote, “I am deeply concerned about the delay in installing the plaque, which was mandated by law to be placed on the western side of the Capitol building.”

A spending bill passed and signed into law in March 2023 required the creation of a plaque listing the names of officers who served on Jan. 6 and required it to be placed on the western front of the Capitol, the site of some of the most violent attacks against officers.

A CBS News review of the dispute over the plaque—and the delay in its completion—yielded unclear responses from House leadership and revealed concerns that the honorary plaque is mired in the toxic politics of 2024 and has fallen victim to the fight over the election denialism that arose after President Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

Lofgren, who served on the House Select Jan. 6 select committee that investigated the attack and former President Trump's efforts to overturn that election, said the plaque is an important honor for officers. “Officers were brutally attacked. Yet, the plaque hasn't been finished,” she said. “It's wrong. Not complying with the law is also disrespectful to the officers who saved our lives.”

CBS quotes a a spokesperson for Johnson as saying that “the Speaker’s office is working with the [Architect of the Capitol] to get the plaque mounted.” 

The failure of the 118th Congress to follow its own law and mount the plaque is another example of its speaker’s pattern of election denialism and his defenses of the former president and the individuals who attacked the Capitol. In December, Johnson said they were blurring faces of individuals who breached the Capitol in a tranche of video footage of the events of January 6th that the House had decided to release. The reason he gave at the time was that blurring was necessary to prevent the perpetrators from being charged by the authorities. (Johnson’s staff later clarified that blurring was actually intended to prevent private retaliation, not DOJ scrutiny, seeing as the DOJ already had all the footage being released.) The speaker later went back on blurring entirely. In a statement, Johnson’s office claimed the decision to not blur the faces after all was the result of “logistic hurdles.”

Johnson and other Republicans in the House and Senate are also busy laying the groundwork to again make the same kinds of claims that led to violence after the past election, preemptively framing illegal immigrants as election thieves whose illegal votes are going to swing the 2024 results. It bears repeating every time these claims are made that there is no evidence of noncitizen voting happening in any meaningful way, let alone happening at a scale that could affect the outcome of a national election.