Midterm Election Week Is Coming. Here's How It Will Wreck Your Ad Spend, and What to Do Instead.

Election Day is November 3. For the four weeks around it, the cheapest advertising money you spend all year will not be yours.

Political campaigns, PACs, and outside groups are projected to spend $10.8 billion on advertising this cycle, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact. That would make 2026 the most expensive non-presidential election cycle on record, more than 20 percent above the $8.9 billion spent in the 2022 midterms and not far behind the $11.2 billion of the 2024 presidential cycle [1]. About half of it goes to broadcast TV. Connected TV takes a projected $2.5 billion, and local cable another $1.29 billion.

That spending does not happen evenly across the year or across the map. It compresses into the final weeks, and it lands hardest where races are close. In the last election season, connected TV ad prices climbed in swing states while they slipped everywhere else [2]. If your business advertises in a contested state such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Arizona, you are bidding against campaigns that do not care what a click costs. You pay more for the slot, and you get a worse one.

Why your ads get worse, not just more expensive

Three things happen at once in the final push.

First, your cost per thousand impressions goes up because campaigns outbid you. Second, your creative performs worse because every ad slot before and after yours is political. The user's attention budget is drained before you ever reach them. Third, with the best slots bought up, your ads land in cheaper placements that convert worse.

The result is predictable. Clicks get more expensive, conversion rates fall, and the ROI you measured in September does not survive October. Many SMBs discover this only in mid-November when they look at the month's spend and wonder what happened.

The teams that win the next five weeks do one thing. They move money from paid acquisition to owned relationships. Not forever. Just for the eleven days where paid is a bad trade.

The owned-channel playbook for the next 30 days

Owned channels have a quiet math advantage that gets loud during election season. Paid traffic bills you again for every click. Owned channels work the other way: once the audience exists, the incremental cost of reaching it is minimal, and the return compounds over time [3]. During a four-week window when paid is much more expensive and performing worse, that gap is the whole ballgame.

Here is what to do with the money you were going to spend on ads from October 20 through November 10.

Text your existing customers. People tend to read a text within minutes of getting it, far sooner than they open an email. If you have a list of 500 past customers and a reason to text them, that is a channel election ads cannot touch. You do need to be registered for A2P 10DLC through your phone provider before sending business texts in the US, which takes a few days to a couple of weeks, so start the paperwork this week if you have not already.

Call the customers you have not heard from in 90 days. This is the single most underused move in SMB sales. A one-minute call to a dormant customer costs roughly nothing and converts at rates no cold ad can match. If you have five people in your business, that is 50 calls a day across the team. Over four weeks you reach a thousand existing relationships that paid traffic was going to cost you a fortune to not quite reach.

Email your list more than once a week. Not with a promotion in every send. With actual value. Your subscribers signed up when CPMs were cheap. Election week is when that asset pays rent.

Push for reviews. Google reviews collected in October rank into November and December when consumer buying intent is highest. The last two weeks of October are when your competitors are distracted. Ask every customer who had a good experience.

Invest in content that ranks. SEO work done in October indexes by December. Paid ads done in October evaporate on November 4.

The one paid play worth making

If you must run paid in election week, run it on retargeting only. Your retargeting audience is small, warm, and not what political campaigns are bidding on. Pause the cold acquisition campaigns. Keep the warm ones. Spend the difference on the owned work above.

What this looks like in practice

Take a small business with a $5,000 monthly ad budget. In a normal month that money buys a steady flow of new leads. In election weeks the same spend buys noticeably fewer, and they close worse.

Spend that same $5,000 of time and effort on texting 2,000 past customers, calling 1,000 dormant ones, and sending four strong emails, and you have a good shot at beating the November paid-ad outcome. You will also still have the list, the relationships, and the ranking content on November 15. The ad spend you skipped was going to be gone.

This is the quiet trick of election cycles. The businesses that come out ahead are not the ones with more money. They are the ones who recognized that for about three weeks, the auction was rigged against them, and they chose to not play.

A unified system that handles your calls, texts, and customer history in one place makes that pivot a lot easier, which is why Tonet treats every past call and message as a timeline you can act on instead of a log you have to dig through. Election week is a good reason to make sure your communication tools are set up to reach the people who already know you.

The campaigns will spend a projected $10.8 billion to get in front of strangers. You get to spend the next 30 days talking to people who have already bought from you. That is the better side of this trade.

Which campaign are you shifting first, email, SMS, or outbound calling? Drop a note below.

Sources:

[1] Campaigns & Elections (2026). AdImpact projection of $10.8 billion in political ad spending for the 2026 cycle, with comparisons to 2022 and 2024 and a breakdown by medium.

[2] MarTech Connected TV ad prices in swing states versus the rest of the country during an election season.

[3] Campaign Monitor (2026). Why owned channels cost little to reach once built and compound over time.