Operating Record

$749 Million Is About to Land on Ohio. Your Q4 Is Already in Trouble.

AdImpact raised its projection for Ohio political advertising this cycle from $440 million to $749 million, a 70 percent increase over its own earlier number, making Ohio the fourth most expensive state in the country for the 2026 midterms. Between 58 and 67 percent of political spending lands between August and November. It is late July, and if you run a home services company in Ohio, the next four months will not look like your forecast says they will.

The explanation most people give is the wrong one

The standard version goes like this. Political candidates get preferential rates on broadcast, stations preempt commercial inventory to run them, your spots get bumped, and your media costs go up.

Part of that is true. It is also mostly beside the point, for two reasons.

The first is that outside groups now account for more than 60 percent of political ad spending, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. Outside groups do not get the candidate rate. They pay market and they bid inventory up, which behaves differently than preemption and is harder to plan around.

The second is bigger. If ad displacement were the mechanism, the damage would show up in your broadcast channels and leave everything else alone. That is not what happens. Every channel goes quiet at once, including the ones political advertising cannot touch. Your canvassers knock the same number of doors and set fewer appointments. Your repeat customers do not call. Your referral flow thins out. Nothing about your media buy explains that.

What actually happens

People stop calling because they are distracted.

Home services sits in an awkward category. A new roof or a furnace replacement is a need-based purchase, but it is almost never urgent on any particular Tuesday. Most homeowners know they need the work for months before they do anything about it. What moves them from knowing to calling is a small window of attention, and that window is easy to close.

A contentious election closes it. So does a holiday, a local crisis, a school year starting. The homeowner has not decided against the project. It simply stopped being the thing on their mind, and it will not come back on its own until the noise stops.

That distinction matters because the two explanations lead to opposite responses. If your costs went up, you cut spend and wait. If your customers went quiet, cutting spend means you are absent when their attention comes back.

What it looked like in 2024

At the eight-figure Toledo exteriors company where I direct marketing, here is what our numbers did through that presidential cycle, directionally.

Lead volume for the year came in at roughly half of the prior year. Fourth quarter net revenue landed around $1.5 million. October and December finished at about the same level, which sounds unremarkable until you consider that in Ohio exteriors, October should beat December by a wide margin. December is cold and short. October is a working month. Getting the same result out of both means October did not perform like October.

The part that convinced me it was attention and not demand: close rate barely moved. The homeowners who did call bought at essentially the same rate they always had. We were not getting worse leads or facing more objections. We were getting far fewer conversations with the same people we had always been able to sell.

We also cut marketing spend that year by about a quarter, reacting to the softness as it happened. I would not do that again. The demand was deferred rather than destroyed, and pulling back meant we were smaller in the market exactly when the recovery started.

Where the political money is actually going

Before you move a dollar, it helps to know what you are moving away from. The 2026 cycle does not look like the ones contractors remember.

Broadcast television still holds the largest share at roughly 49 percent, about $5.28 billion nationally, but that share is flat and broadcast revenue is slightly down from 2024. The growth is entirely in connected TV, projected at $2.48 billion and around 23 percent of total political spend. That is more than double what political advertisers put into streaming in the 2022 midterms, and it is the only medium projected to grow over the last presidential cycle.

Meanwhile political spending on social and search platforms sits at about 13 percent of the total, down from 15 percent in 2024.

Read those together and the picture is not the one most agencies will describe to you. Television is where the pressure is, streaming included. Search is where it is not.

Where to move your money

Increase paid search

Political advertisers are not bidding on furnace replacement near me. They cannot use your keywords, because they are not selling what you sell. Search is one of the few paid channels where an election year does not change the auction you are competing in. If you are going to raise a budget anywhere between August and November, raise it here.

Increase Local Services Ads

Political advertising cannot appear in LSA at all. It is closed, verified, service-only inventory, which makes it the single most insulated paid channel available to you this fall. If your profile, review velocity and response time are not dialed in, fix that in the next two weeks rather than in October.

Start the organic work now, and be honest about the timeline

SEO does not rescue this quarter. Anything you publish in August is unlikely to move a ranking before the election is over. What it does do is put you in position for the December and January recovery, and for the next cycle, which is 2028 and will be worse. Start now because the payoff arrives after the window closes rather than during it. The framework for grading that spend against revenue is here: COM%, the number that governs a contractor marketing budget.

Pull back on broadcast, or buy it very differently

Ohio is a battleground market this cycle. CPM inflation and preemption concentrate in news and sports programming, and October is peak pressure. If broadcast is core to your mix, move to guaranteed or upfront buys now rather than flighting into the fall, and get out of news adjacency. Radio takes less of a hit than television overall, but the pressure sits in news and talk formats, so the format decision matters more than the channel decision.

Be specific about OTT rather than treating it as an escape hatch

This is where most of the advice you will hear is out of date. Streaming is the fastest-growing political channel this cycle, so buying connected TV broadly in Ohio this fall means bidding against campaign money. The useful detail is that Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ do not accept political advertising. Political dollars concentrate into Hulu, Roku and YouTube, which means CPMs spike there while the political-free platforms hold inventory with no campaign competition in the auction at all. OTT is a good move this fall if you name the platforms. It is a bad move if you hand a vendor a budget and let them buy the whole ecosystem.

Cut back on direct mail through the window

I do not have political mail volume data to hand you, so treat this one as reasoning rather than a citation. The mailbox in a battleground state in October is not a place where your postcard gets read, and mail is the channel where a distracted household is least likely to give you the three seconds you need. Move that budget rather than mailing into the noise.

Demand does not disappear in an election year. It sits still for a quarter, and then it moves again.

What else to change before October

Stop grading Q4 against Q3. Set the expectation with ownership now, in writing. A meaningful decline against your summer baseline in a saturated election market is not a marketing failure and should not be managed like one. If you have not had that conversation before the numbers arrive, you will spend November defending yourself instead of planning.

Pull demand forward into August and early September. You have roughly five weeks before the heaviest spending window opens. Accelerating decisions that were going to happen in October is worth more than the same effort spent during October.

Weight toward the channels attention cannot crowd out. Your customer database, your repeat and referral motion, your canvass, your existing pipeline. These do not depend on a homeowner deciding to search for you. They depend on you reaching out, and they work in November the same way they work in June.

Defend the appointments you do set. In a soft window, set-to-issued rate matters more than lead count. Confirmation calls, tighter scheduling and issue-rate discipline are cheaper than replacing the lead. We lost 5,555 set appointments in a single year before anyone was watching that number.

Fund December and January properly. The attention comes back. In our case the following year started normally and finished strong. Do not let a bad October talk you into a thin January budget.

One thing I cannot tell you

Our September through November was also poor in 2022, and mortgage rates crossed 7 percent that October for the first time since 2002. Those two explanations are impossible to separate with the data I have, so I have not used 2022 as evidence here. Anyone who tells you they can cleanly isolate an election effect from macro conditions inside a single company is guessing.

What I would do

Ohio is projected to absorb $749 million this cycle, most of it in the next fifteen weeks, in a state with a toss-up Senate race and the fourth most expensive governor race in the country. The demand for your services is not going anywhere. It is going to sit still for about a quarter and then move again, and the companies that hold their position through the quiet part are the ones standing in front of it when it does.

Move the money into search and LSA. Buy television and streaming with intent or not at all. Start the organic work now for a payoff you collect in January. Tell your owner what the fourth quarter is going to look like before it happens rather than after.

Then go be visible in December, when everyone who cut in October is still waiting for permission to spend again.