No, do not pause your ads during election season. Shift them. Political money concentrates in broadcast TV, cable, and connected TV, so the fix is to move budget toward channels political buyers barely touch: search, email, local service ads, and streaming audio. Pausing hands your category to whoever stayed on.
Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026, which leaves about five weeks from the first week of October. That is enough time to restructure a media plan, and it is not enough time to wait and see what happens.
We get the pause question every cycle, and it usually arrives framed as caution. It is not caution. It is a decision to be invisible during the weeks when your competitors are still buying, and it costs more to restart a cold account in December than it would have cost to run lean through November.
Should you pause your ads during election season?
No. Reduce where you are being outbid, hold where you are not, and move the difference into inventory political campaigns do not compete for. There is a real cost problem in an election year, but it is concentrated in specific places rather than spread evenly across every channel you use.
The scale is worth understanding before you decide anything. AdImpact projects the 2026 election cycle will reach $11.6 billion in ad spending, a record, up from $8.9 billion in the 2022 midterms. That is a lot of new money entering a fixed supply of impressions, and the auction does not care that your business is not a campaign.
What matters for your media plan is that the money is not evenly distributed. It piles into a few channels and largely ignores others.
Which channels actually get squeezed, and by how much?
Broadcast television takes the largest share by a wide margin, and connected TV is the fastest-growing pressure point. AdImpact’s updated projections put broadcast at $5.6 billion, roughly 48% of cycle spending, connected TV at $2.7 billion or 23%, cable at $1.4 billion, and digital across Facebook, Google, Snapchat and X at $1.6 billion.
Read those numbers as a displacement map. Here is how we translate them into a plan.
| Channel | Political pressure | What we do about it |
| Broadcast TV | Highest. Nearly half of all political dollars | Pull back in the final three weeks. Hold only dayparts political buyers skip, such as early morning and late night |
| Connected TV | High and rising. Nearly a quarter of the cycle | Keep running, but tighten targeting and expect to pay more. Shift toward longer-form placements where competition is thinner |
| Cable | Moderate | Usually survivable. Watch news programming specifically, which absorbs the most political weight |
| Paid social | Moderate, and uneven by geography | Keep. Costs rise in contested markets but the auction is far less crowded than broadcast |
| Paid search | Low. Campaigns rarely bid on commercial intent | Protect this budget first. Somebody searching for a roofer is not being chased by a Senate campaign |
| Streaming audio and podcasts | Low to moderate | Underused as a substitute. Reach holds up and the inventory is not being bought out from under you |
| Email, SMS, local service ads | None | Increase. No auction, no political competition, and the audience already knows you |
The pattern in that table is the whole strategy. Political money buys attention broadly. Your business buys intent narrowly. Those are different products, and only one of them is being bid up.
Where should the money go instead?
Into channels that sell intent rather than reach, and into audiences you already own. The reallocation we run most often in an election October looks like this, in priority order.
- Paid search, fully funded. This is the first budget we protect and the last we cut. Commercial search intent is effectively insulated from political bidding, and in a noisy month it is the most reliable lead source in the account.
- Local service ads and map placements. For home services, legal, and medical especially. These sit outside the display auction entirely.
- Email and SMS to the existing list. Zero media cost and no competition. An election cycle is the best possible argument for having built a list in the first place.
- Streaming audio. Frequently the cleanest substitute for the TV weight you are giving up, and it holds attention in a month when screens are saturated with attack ads.
- Retargeting. Cheap, and it keeps the people who already visited your site from forgetting you during five weeks of noise.
- Organic and local SEO work. Not a media buy, but October is the right month to spend agency hours on the things that do not get auctioned.
If you are moving money out of TV and want a sense of what the substitute actually costs, our breakdown of streaming audio advertising covers pricing and the cases where it works.
“Every election year somebody asks us to turn the ads off until it blows over. The businesses that do it spend January paying to be remembered.”
— Liz Mbwambo, Upwynn Marketing
What is worth building in October that you will still have in January?
An owned audience. Election season is the clearest annual reminder that rented attention gets expensive without warning, and the businesses that weather it best are the ones with an email list, an SMS list, and a retargeting pool large enough to matter.
The pattern we see is a business that has run paid media for years and never seriously collected contact information, because paid traffic always worked and there was never a forcing event. Then October of an election year arrives, broadcast costs jump, and the only lever available is to pay more. What we do in those accounts is unglamorous. We put a real offer behind an email capture, we route it into something that actually sends, and we treat the list as a channel rather than a byproduct.
Three things make an October list-building push worth the effort:
- The cost of reaching those people never rises. Whatever happens to CPMs in the last week of October, sending to your own list costs the same as it did in June.
- It compounds into the holidays. Every address captured in October is somebody you can reach on Black Friday without entering an auction.
- It survives the next disruption. Election season is this year’s version. Next year it will be something else, and an owned list is the only asset that does not care which.
This is also the part of the plan nobody wants to fund in October, because it does not produce leads this week. It produces an advantage in January, which is exactly when an account that went dark in November is trying to buy its way back into relevance. The work takes a few hours and one decent offer, and the asset it creates outlasts every auction you are worried about right now.
What does this look like in Florida?
Florida is one of the more expensive places in the country to be a local advertiser this fall, because the state has a governor’s race and a Senate special election on the same November 3 ballot. Two statewide contests means political money saturating every media market in the state rather than concentrating in a few contested districts.
The money behind those races is not small. Florida’s gubernatorial candidates alone had collectively raised nearly $130 million heading into the midterms, and more than $660 million has gone to Florida state races overall. A meaningful share of that becomes television and streaming inventory in Orlando, Tampa, Miami, and Jacksonville over the next five weeks.
For a Central Florida business, the practical consequences are specific. Broadcast and cable news dayparts in the Orlando market get expensive and stay expensive through the first week of November. Connected TV follows, with less warning, because programmatic political buying can move into a market in days rather than weeks. Search and local service ads stay roughly normal.
The Orlando accounts we manage through an election cycle tend to come out fine, and the ones that struggle are almost always the ones heavily weighted to broadcast with nothing else built. When an account has a functioning search program, a list, and a retargeting audience, losing some TV weight for five weeks is an inconvenience. When TV is the entire plan, it is a blackout.
How much more should you expect to pay?
Expect meaningful increases in broadcast, cable news, and connected TV in contested markets, and roughly normal pricing in search, email, and local service ads. We will not put a single percentage on it, because the honest answer varies by market, daypart, and how contested your specific races are, and any agency quoting you one number for the whole country is guessing.
What we do instead is set the expectation in October rather than explaining it in November. If your plan is TV-heavy in a Florida market this year, the cost per point is going to move against you, and the choice is to pay it, reduce weight, or substitute. All three are defensible. Being surprised by it is not.
One more piece of arithmetic that gets missed. Political advertising ends abruptly. The inventory that is unaffordable on November 2 is available again on November 4, and it stays soft for a couple of weeks while political buyers are gone and holiday buyers have not fully arrived. That window is real, and planning for it in October is what lets you use it.
How do you tell political displacement from a real campaign problem?
Look at whether your costs moved or your conversion rate moved. Political pressure raises what you pay for the same audience. A broken campaign changes what happens after the click. Those leave different fingerprints, and treating one as the other is how good accounts get torn apart in October for no reason.
This is the diagnostic we run when a client calls in a panic about November numbers.
| What you see | Likely cause | What to do |
| CPM up, click-through rate steady, conversion rate steady | Political displacement. You are paying more for the same performance | Nothing structural. Shift budget to cheaper channels and wait it out |
| CPM up, click-through rate down | Creative fatigue made visible by higher costs | Refresh creative. The election exposed it, it did not cause it |
| Costs flat, conversion rate down | A real problem. Tracking, landing page, or offer | Fix it now. This has nothing to do with the election |
| Impressions collapsed, costs flat | You have been outbid out of the auction entirely | Raise bids or move that budget to another channel. Broadcast and CTV first |
| Search steady, TV and CTV degraded | Textbook election-year pattern | Confirms the plan. Protect search, substitute for the video weight |
The last row is the one we hope to see, because it means the account is behaving exactly as an election year predicts and no emergency surgery is required. The third row is the one worth losing sleep over, and it is the one that gets ignored every cycle because the election makes a convenient explanation for everything.
Which businesses genuinely should pull back?
A few should, and it is worth being honest about that rather than insisting every business run full budgets through November. The question is whether your demand is time-sensitive or whether it can wait five weeks without disappearing.
Pull back if your offer is genuinely deferrable and your channel mix is video-heavy. A business selling something a customer can comfortably buy in December instead of October, with most of its budget in broadcast and connected TV, is paying an election premium for demand that will still be there afterward. Shifting that spend into mid-November is a reasonable trade.
Hold full budgets if your demand is urgent or seasonal. Emergency home services, medical, legal, anything tied to a deadline, and any retailer whose fourth quarter starts in October. These businesses cannot move demand to a cheaper week, because the customer is deciding now and will decide with or without you.
Increase if your competitors are the ones going dark. This happens more than people expect. Election season creates an opening in categories where everybody gets cautious at once, and an account with a functioning search program can pick up share cheaply while the category talks itself into sitting out.
What should you do in the final five weeks?
Work the plan in this order. Each step takes a day or less, and doing them in sequence matters more than doing all of them.
- Week of October 5: audit your channel mix. Pull the last 90 days by channel and identify what share of your budget sits in broadcast, cable, and CTV. That percentage is your exposure. If it is above half, you have work to do.
- Week of October 12: protect search and fix tracking. Confirm conversion tracking fires correctly, then make sure search budgets are not capped. This is the channel that carries you through November.
- Week of October 19: build the substitutes. Stand up streaming audio or expand paid social with the weight you are pulling from TV. Build it now so it has data before the noisiest week.
- Week of October 26: go to your list. Email and SMS campaigns scheduled through the first week of November. This is your cheapest reach in the most expensive week.
- Week of November 2: hold steady and prepare to re-enter. Change as little as possible in the final days, and have your post-election TV buy ready to place on November 4 while inventory is soft.
For the broader strategic picture rather than the five-week version, our guide to advertising during election season covers how to think about the whole cycle, and our work on media buying ROI in Orlando gets into how we evaluate placement value locally.
What should you not do?
Three mistakes account for most of the damage we see in an election year, and all three feel reasonable at the time.
Do not go dark. A full pause saves money in November and costs more than it saved in December and January, because the account restarts cold, audiences decay, and the platforms have to relearn your conversion patterns during holiday pricing.
Do not run political-adjacent creative. Some businesses try to borrow the energy of the moment with civic-themed messaging. It reads as opportunistic, it invites a fight in your comments, and it does not sell anything. Stay commercial.
Do not judge October performance against September. Costs are up for structural reasons that have nothing to do with your campaigns. Compare against the same weeks in the last election year if you have that data, and if you do not, compare channel by channel rather than looking at one blended number and concluding something is broken.
Want your media plan adjusted before the last three weeks? Upwynn Marketing will review your channel mix and tell you exactly where your budget is exposed in a free consultation. We use real experience and 90+ data sources for the best targeting, with no long-term contracts and hands-on support. Start with our media buying services.
Frequently asked questions
Should small businesses stop advertising during midterm elections?
No. Reduce exposure in broadcast, cable news, and connected TV if those channels carry most of your budget, and move the money into search, email, local service ads, and streaming audio. A full pause costs more to recover from than it saves.
Which advertising channels are most affected by political ad spending?
Broadcast television takes the biggest hit, at roughly 48% of the projected $11.6 billion 2026 cycle, with connected TV next at about 23%. Paid search is the least affected, because political campaigns rarely bid against commercial search intent.
When do political ads stop and inventory get cheaper again?
Immediately after Election Day, November 3, 2026. Inventory typically loosens from November 4 and stays softer for one to two weeks before holiday demand fills it. Plan that buy in October so you can place it the day it opens.
Is Florida worse than other states for this in 2026?
Florida is on the expensive end, because a governor’s race and a Senate special election share the November 3 ballot. Two statewide contests spread political money across every market in the state, including Orlando and Tampa, rather than concentrating it in a handful of districts.
Should I change my ad creative during election season?
Change the placement, not the message. Keep your creative commercial and avoid civic or political themes, which read as opportunistic and invite arguments that have nothing to do with your business. If anything, lean harder into plain, specific offers, because they stand out against a month of attack ads.
