How to Advertise in an Election Year: 2026 Midterm Edition

Sep 25

Election years have never been known for their restrained advertising environments, but if it feels particularly crowded this year, you’re not imagining it. Political ad spending for the 2026 election cycle is projected to reach $11.6 billion, making it the most expensive cycle on record and surpassing both the $8.9 billion spent during the 2022 midterms and the $11.2 billion spent during the 2024 presidential cycle. Broadcast television alone is projected to account for $5.6 billion of that spending, while another $2.7 billion is expected to go toward connected TV.

I wrote about this same problem for MediaPost during the 2024 election cycle, when businesses were already competing for attention in a media environment flooded with political advertising. Two years later, we’re back here again, but midterms create a slightly different version of the problem. Instead of so much attention concentrating around a presidential race, spending is spread across congressional contests, gubernatorial races, ballot measures, and local campaigns, all while businesses are still competing for the same finite supply of inventory and consumer attention.

The good news is that you don’t need to stop advertising until November. You just need to be a little smarter about where, when, and how you spend.

Expect the Competition Before It Shows Up in Your CPMs

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make during an election year is treating rising media costs like an unexpected platform problem. Sometimes your Meta campaign didn’t suddenly break… there are simply more advertisers trying to buy the same attention you are, particularly as Election Day gets closer. That pressure also won’t be distributed evenly. Political spending is inherently tied to geography, which means advertisers operating in areas with expensive congressional, gubernatorial, ballot-measure, or other local races may experience considerably more competition than advertisers selling the exact same thing somewhere else.

Before you start making dramatic changes to bids, budgets, audiences, creative, and landing pages all at once, zoom out and look at what is actually happening. Compare CPMs over time, look at geographic markets separately, and check whether changes in performance are happening across channels or isolated to one platform. Seasonality, promotions, competitor activity, consumer behavior, and the broader media environment can all affect campaign performance, and political spending is one more variable to consider before deciding that your media buyer, your creative, or the algorithm has suddenly forgotten how to do its job. I know we all like to panic, but not every performance dip requires an optimization — promise. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is understand the context before optimizing.

Navigating Ads, One Platform at a Time

One of the recommendations I made in 2024 was to think strategically about platforms where political advertisers simply weren’t competing for inventory, and that logic still holds. LinkedIn currently prohibits political advertising intended to influence elections or advocate for candidates, parties, ballot propositions, laws, or regulations. Pinterest also prohibits political campaigning, including advertising tied to candidates, parties, election-related issues, ballot initiatives, and referendums. TikTok similarly prohibits paid political advertising across its monetization products.

That does not automatically make any of those platforms the right choice for your business, and this is not permission to pour money into Pinterest because your Meta CPM went up. Your audience still has to be there, the format has to fit the way you sell, and the channel has to make sense within the broader strategy. But! Election season is a useful reminder that your media mix shouldn’t exist on autopilot. If another channel legitimately fits your customer and your goals, this may be a particularly good time to test it.

CTV deserves attention for almost the opposite reason: political advertisers are pouring money into it. Connected television is projected to account for $2.7 billion in political spending during the 2026 cycle, or roughly 23% of total political ad spending. If CTV is already part of your media plan, inventory, geography, timing, and frequency deserve a closer look than usual.

Ad(d) Value

More competition for attention makes mediocre advertising more expensive, but it does not make good creative irrelevant. If anything, it raises the cost of being forgettable.When your audience has already watched six ads telling them what to fear, who to blame, and what catastrophe awaits them in November, becoming the seventh brand shouting at them probably isn’t your best strategy. Give them something worth watching instead, whether that means humor, useful information, a compelling story, beautiful creative, or simply an offer strong enough to justify the interruption. This was part of my argument in 2024, and I think it matters even more now in the age of AI slop. Paid media has become increasingly good at finding people who are likely to take an action, but it still needs something compelling to put in front of them. If competition makes each impression more expensive, weak creative becomes an increasingly expensive liability. The answer to a more competitive advertising environment is not always more money. Sometimes it is making better ad.

Don’t Let the Algorithm Gaslight You

Election season is also a good time to remember that advertising performance does not exist in a vacuum, and neither does your dashboard. When costs rise, marketers have a tendency to start pulling levers: change the bid strategy, narrow the audience, expand the audience, adjust the target ROAS, swap the landing page, increase the budget, decrease the budget. Then, before long, six variables have changed because performance looked weird for four days and no one is entirely sure which change helped, which one hurt, or whether the campaign would have stabilized on its own.

Start by asking what actually changed. If CPMs are climbing but click-through and conversion rates remain healthy, you may be looking at increased competition for inventory rather than a messaging problem. If engagement has dropped, creative might deserve more attention. If traffic looks fine but purchases have slowed, the problem may not be advertising at all. Marketing is a system, and election-year competition is one more variable inside that system. The job is not to react to every fluctuation, but to diagnose what is actually happening before you start mashing buttons.

Don’t Forget Your Tried and Trues

Election season is also a particularly bad time to become so focused on customer acquisition that you forget about the people who already know you. Your existing customers do not disappear because political ad spending goes up, and you don’t have to compete in an auction every time you want to talk to them. Email them. Reward repeat purchases. Give loyal customers early access. Build referral programs. Encourage reviews and user-generated content. Create organic content people actually want to share. Use your first-party data to make communication more relevant. None of these tactics are particularly groundbreaking, but they also don’t need to be. Fundamentals have a funny habit of continuing to work even when everyone is busy chasing the newest platform feature. Paid media is incredibly useful, but it is not the entirety of marketing. If reaching a brand-new customer becomes temporarily more expensive, strengthening the relationship with someone you already paid to acquire becomes even more valuable.

The Bottom Line

The 2026 midterms are going to make an already competitive advertising environment noisier. Political advertisers are projected to spend a record $11.6 billion this cycle, broadcast remains the largest recipient of that spending, and CTV continues to capture a larger share of political budgets. That does not mean businesses should panic, slash their budgets, or spend the next several weeks furiously adjusting campaigns. It means paying closer attention to context, diversifying where it makes sense, watching geographic and channel-level trends, investing in creative people actually want to see, and making better use of the customers and first-party audiences you already have. And before you blame the algorithm, make sure the algorithm is actually the problem.