By Jeffery W. Fogg II
Every election cycle, something predictable happens.
A candidate shows up at a local diner, shakes hands, talks about the importance of community, small business, and investing in the people right here at home. The crowd nods. The photos are great. The speech lands.
Then the campaign goes back to the office and writes a check to a media conglomerate headquartered a thousand miles away.
It happens in Kansas. It happens in Kentucky. It happens in every state in the country. And most people never notice — because nobody’s been keeping track.
Until now.
Introducing Vote Local Spend Local
Vote Local Spend Local is a national movement built around one simple idea: if you want votes from a community, you should be willing to invest in it.
Not just in photo ops. Not just in yard signs. In the actual local news outlets that cover that community every single day — the papers and digital outlets that show up to city council meetings, school board hearings, and water district disputes that never make cable news.
The ask isn’t complicated. We’re not telling campaigns to abandon television or go dark on digital. We’re asking for proportion — a meaningful slice of every campaign’s media budget directed toward locally owned, community-rooted outlets.
Ten percent. That’s it. Ten cents of every advertising dollar staying in the community that dollar is supposed to represent.
Why this matters
Local news is not just a business. It’s infrastructure.
When a locally owned outlet thrives, the whole community benefits. The jobs are local. The revenue stays local. And the journalism — the kind that holds local officials accountable and keeps neighbors informed — stays alive.
When campaign dollars flow exclusively to national platforms and out-of-state media giants, that infrastructure erodes a little more. The message candidates send isn’t just about ad strategy. It’s about values. And voters are paying attention.
There’s a word for saying one thing and doing another. Politicians know it well. We’re just applying it to media budgets.
Who we’re asking to join us
This movement has three audiences — and we need all three.
To independent news outlets across the country: you are not alone in this fight. Vote Local Spend Local exists to give you collective leverage. When one outlet asks a campaign to buy local, it’s easy to ignore. When a hundred outlets ask together — and publish a scorecard showing who said yes and who went silent — that’s harder to brush off. Join us at VoteLocalSpendLocal.org.
To political candidates at every level: signing the Vote Local Spend Local pledge is not a sacrifice. It’s an opportunity. It signals to voters that your commitment to community isn’t just a stump speech. It’s backed by dollars. The campaigns that sign early will be remembered. The ones that don’t will be on the list too.
To voters: you have more power here than you think. Ask your candidates where their ad dollars are going. Share this article. Follow us on Facebook. And the next time a politician tells you they believe in supporting local — ask them to prove it.
This started in Kansas
This movement grew out of a simple editorial published in Topeka, Kansas, asking a straightforward question: why do candidates who campaign on supporting local communities write their ad checks to corporations in Atlanta and Irving, Texas?
The response made one thing clear — this wasn’t just a Kansas problem.
It’s a national problem with a national solution. And the solution starts locally, one community at a time, one campaign at a time, one pledge at a time.
Vote local. Spend local. It really is that simple.
Vote Local Spend Local is a nonpartisan coalition of independent local news organizations. Learn more and sign the pledge at VoteLocalSpendLocal.org.
