The most expensive advertisement of Maine’s campaign season so far begins like this: “Augusta politician Troy Jackson: While his family cashed in, you paid the price.”

A man narrates for 30 tensely soundtracked seconds over quotes pulled from years-old news articles, blaming the former Maine Senate president and Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate for higher taxes. It’s a classic attack ad.

At the end, the narrator lowers and hastens his voice.

“Pine Tree Results PAC is responsible for the content of this advertising” — all $2.2 million of it, according to a federal campaign finance filing.

A different group, SRCP Media Inc., developed the spot and bought space on the airwaves for it — not Pine Tree Results PAC.

This is a pretty normal arrangement. SRCP Media is one of the premier conservative campaign advertising firms in the country. It’s based in a waterfront office building in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

This year in Maine, with a potentially Senate-tilting election at the top of the ballot, plus a hotly contested House race and an open governor’s seat to boot, campaigns and outside groups have dropped hundreds of millions of donor dollars to persuade voters to fill in their preferred ballot bubble.

So far, the eye-watering total exceeds $300 million, according to the ad tracking service AdImpact. But little of the campaign money meant to convince Maine’s electorate is actually being spent on Maine companies.

Not all of the cash spent this cycle has shown up in federal financial reports, which are filed quarterly. But as of the last reports from late September, it’s clear that a relatively small percentage of campaign spending comes home to Maine broadcasters or other advertisers.

Instead, well over half is going to D.C.-area consultants and firms like SRCP Media, a Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram analysis of the data found. Only about 8% is spent in Maine.

Between a relative lack of locally based campaign expertise and the explosion of money available to campaigns and PACs, the modern election has turned into an expensive game of D.C.-area consultant chess, experts say.

Ben Coolidge Gagnon, a veteran of two Maine gubernatorial campaigns, said this small state’s campaigns can only grow so big before they run out of places to spend money. Sara Gideon’s record-fundraising 2020 U.S. Senate campaign, he noted, still has millions left in the bank.

“So where does all that money go in the future?” Coolidge Gagnon said. “More consultants.”

While they can sometimes get candidates in trouble, donations are the backbone of modern campaigns. Without millions from donors, candidates wouldn’t be able to pay staff, and outside groups couldn’t buy ads.

Most of those donations come from outside of Maine. In federal races this cycle, about 83% of Maine candidates’ donations have come from other states, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.

The spending of that money mostly happens outside of Maine, too.

This year, more than $67 million has gone to Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, where media firms and PACs operate in close proximity to Washington’s halls of power. Pennsylvania-based firms have raked in another $10.5 million.

In federal races, only 3.4% of the money has been spent in Maine. About a quarter of consulting costs went to Maine, and a staggeringly low 0.2% of advertising costs went to Maine firms.

Money is also flowing out of Maine even in the races for governor and state Legislature, where representatives are sent to Augusta, not Capitol Hill.

About 37% of electioneering spending for state offices has gone to the nation’s capital or its bordering states, while about 20% has gone to Maine-based companies.

Generally, campaigns were most likely to keep their money in Maine when paying for food, events and travel. Polling and advertising spending happened almost entirely outside of this state.

Coolidge Gagnon got his start in politics in 2014 on Mike Michaud’s gubernatorial campaign, and later worked for the Maine Democratic Party and on the finance team in Janet Mills’ first gubernatorial run.

He’s watched the elections industry explode in recent years, jet-fueled by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which has allowed super PACs to independently raise and spend without limits.

Maine has mostly been left on the outside of that boom, Coolidge Gagnon said, and the reason is simple: this state only has three statewide elections, for governor and its two U.S. senators. It’s difficult to get experience here, and it’s not particularly lucrative to stay.

Massachusetts, by contrast, elects six executive officers and its two U.S. Senators in statewide elections. New York has six statewide elections. North Carolina has 34.

Consulting firms based elsewhere have more races to draw from, Coolidge Gagnon said, and political operatives “will hop state to state anyway” to follow big campaigns and big money.

Richard Schlackman, who has been in political advertising and consulting all over the country since the 1970s, said spending tens of millions of dollars across state lines is par for the course. All of the incentives point toward spending more.

“What you have to understand — if things are going well, your side gives you more money to keep it going well,” he said. “If things are going bad, your side gives you money to destroy the other side.”

It’s simply more profitable to center on Washington, D.C., or New York, Schlackman said — that’s where all of the power players are, and the big names with connections.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and Republican nominee for that state’s competitive U.S. Senate seat, said outright that D.C. consultants had taken control of his message during a fundraiser this last month, Politico reported: “I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign and, like, what issues are going to matter because it’s all coming — you know — from D.C.”

“They get more of that money,” Schlackman said of D.C. operatives. “That doesn’t mean you’re getting a better ad.”

There’s a scene in the early 2000s television series, The West Wing, where the fictional president’s chief of staff and prospective campaign manager, Bruno Gianelli, negotiate Gianelli’s pay.

“Fifteen percent of the ad buys,” Gianelli says. “You’re gonna say 10, so why don’t we just say 13?”

That scene holds pretty true to how campaign advertising consultants get paid today, Schlackman said — consultants develop the ad and charge a percentage of the total cost to place the ad on TV. For some, there’s a monthly retainer fee.

That makes consultants some of the biggest winners of expensive election seasons like this one in Maine.

“The money’s in the buy for these TV consultants,” Schlackman said.

In Maine’s state elections, campaigns and PACs regularly report their books to the Maine Ethics Commission. Federal races have similar requirements. But those public reports don’t always tell the whole story, Coolidge Gagnon said, especially on advertising.

State filings show less than $600,000 has been spent on advertising, but gubernatorial candidates’ spots have been blasting through TVs and radios for months.

While the state campaign finance guidebook recommends that groups record the final vendor — for an ad, that’s usually a TV station or social media company — campaigns and PACs often only report the first payee: the media consulting firm they used to develop and place the ad.

“They want to give the least amount of information as they legally have to,” Coolidge Gagnon said. “There’s a competitive advantage of people knowing where the buys are going.”

Campaigns and other groups can subscribe to services like AdImpact, which track ad spending, to get a bit more information. But those services cost thousands of dollars, and the Press Herald analysis didn’t find any Maine campaigns had subscribed to AdImpact.

The election cycle has long been a boon to TV and radio stations that get paid to air candidates’ ads, said Tim Moore, the CEO and president of the Maine Broadcasters Association, in an interview this summer. This year’s been no different, he said. Anyone watching or listening can vouch for that.

But while that money does help stations pay their employees and support a healthy broadcasting ecosystem, it also ebbs and flows. Off years don’t produce the same kind of political spending.

Plus, he said, stations sometimes have to hand over profits to their owners, wherever they may be.

New York-based Democratic political consultant Roy Moskowitz said Maine is a relatively cheap state to advertise in, especially compared with where he operates. Maine only has two congressional districts and three TV markets, where customers get the same channels and ads. New York City has more than a dozen congressional districts and two dozen cable advertising zones.

On the one hand, that means it’s pretty easy to buy advertising space here, he said. On the other, the relatively low cost, Moskowitz said, means there are fewer Maine-based media firms because it’s not worth it for businesses to set up shop here.

Plus, the advertising landscape is changing.

While Maine voters, who skew older, are easy to reach on broadcast television, Moskowitz said consultants see streaming services like Hulu and Apple TV and social media as the most effective forms of political advertising. It’s easier to target specific consumers based on their beliefs and habits through those platforms, he said.

More streaming-based advertising only promises to further shift money away from Maine and toward D.C.-based consulting firms and California-based media conglomerates.

And at some point, Coolidge Gagnon said, there’s only so much advertising to buy and so many people to hire.

When Maine’s ad breaks fill up and rosters bloat, there’s still millions left over.