Are political ads making your medical practice ads more expensive?

Let us answer the headline plainly: yes, in most of the country, political advertising is making your ads cost more right now. Digital ad space is sold in a live auction. You and every other advertiser bid for the same eyeballs, and when a giant new bidder shows up with deep pockets, the price of everything goes up. During an election, that giant new bidder is thousands of political campaigns all spending at once. Your practice is not being singled out. You are just standing in the same checkout line, and it got a lot longer.

Why this year is the worst one yet

The 2026 midterm cycle is on track to be the most expensive in history. Ad tracking firm AdImpact projects 11.6 billion dollars in total political ad spending, beating even the 2024 presidential year. You can see their breakdown in the AdImpact 2026 election report. That is a staggering amount of money chasing attention, and a growing slice of it is not on television.

About 1.6 billion dollars of that spending is going to digital platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, and the rest, according to projections summarized by Basis Technologies. Those are the same platforms where a med spa runs a Botox promotion and a dentist runs an implant campaign. When campaigns pile into that inventory, the auction heats up and your cost per thousand impressions climbs. Worse, the timing is brutal: roughly half of all political ad dollars spend in the final 30 days before Election Day. We are inside that window now.

How much more are you actually paying?

It depends heavily on where you are. If your city has no competitive race on the ballot, you may only feel a mild bump, roughly 10 to 15 percent higher CPMs. But if you practice in a battleground state with a close Senate, House, or governor race, the pressure is much higher. Analyses of the 2024 cycle found CPM lifts of 15 to 50 percent during the core six weeks, and in the final days before the election some advertisers saw their Meta costs double or even triple in the hottest markets.

States with marquee 2026 races, places like Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, are where the squeeze bites hardest. If your practice sits in one of those markets, your ad costs this month are not a little high, they are competing head to head with campaigns that measure their budgets in the millions and do not blink at a steep click price. A local clinic simply cannot outbid a Senate race, and it should not try.

This stacks on top of a trend that was already going the wrong way. Healthcare is one of the priciest categories to advertise in even in a calm month, which we broke down in why Google Ads are so expensive for medical practices. Election season takes an already expensive channel and adds a surcharge on top.

The mistake practices make: going dark

The instinct is to pull the plug. Costs are up, so turn the ads off until it blows over. We get it, but that is usually the wrong call, and here is why. Patients do not stop needing care because there is an election. People still crack a molar, still get a rash that will not quit, still decide this is the month they finally book that consultation. If you disappear, that demand does not vanish. It goes to the competitor down the street who kept their ads on.

There is a second problem. On Meta and Google, turning a campaign off and back on resets its learning. When you switch it back on in November, the algorithm has to relearn who to show your ads to, which means a few more days of wasted spend before it finds its footing again. You pay a penalty for the pause on top of missing two weeks of patients. Going dark feels like saving money. It usually costs you more.

What to do instead, before November 3

You do not have to choose between overpaying and disappearing. There is a middle path, and it is mostly about discipline:

• Watch cost per booked patient, not cost per click. A click costs more right now, but if those clicks still turn into booked appointments at a price that works for your practice, keep going. Judge the campaign by patients in the chair, not by the vanity number at the top of the dashboard.
• Tighten your targeting. Election season is a good reason to trim waste. Narrow your ads to your real service area and the patients you actually want, so you are not paying inflated prices to reach people who were never going to drive to you.
• Trim, do not kill. If your numbers get ugly in the last week, lower the daily budget rather than switching the campaign off. You stay in the market, keep your learning, and spend less while prices peak.
• Pounce right after the election. The days after Election Day can be some of the cheapest ad space of the whole quarter, because political advertisers all leave the auction at once and holiday advertisers have not fully arrived. Plan to scale your budget back up in mid November and capture that dip.
• Shift some weight to channels you do not rent by the click. This is the big one, and it deserves its own section.

The real lesson: do not let ads be your only faucet

Here is the uncomfortable truth an election makes obvious. If a Senate race in another state can spike your patient flow, your growth was renting attention, not owning it. Paid ads are a faucet. The moment you stop paying, or the moment the price jumps, the water slows. Practices that only have that one faucet feel every twitch in the auction.

The practices that barely noticed this October are the ones that also built channels nobody can bid them out of. Local SEO and a fully filled out Google Business Profile bring in patients searching for care with no auction price attached to the click. A steady stream of recent Google reviews keeps you looking like the obvious choice. Helpful content answers the questions patients ask before they book. None of that gets more expensive because of an election. We compared the two approaches directly in SEO versus Google Ads for medical practices, and election season is the clearest argument for owning both.

This is also the season to think about the calendar, not just the auction. The stretch from now through the new year has its own rhythm of insurance deadlines, FSA dollars expiring, and holiday slowdowns, which we mapped out in our guide to fourth quarter marketing for medical practices. The election is one wave inside a busy few months, and a plan beats reacting to each bill as it lands.

How EtherealMinds handles this for clients

We only work with healthcare, so we live inside these auctions every day, and election season is a scheduled event for us, not a surprise. For the practices we run ads for, we watch cost per booked patient closely through October, tighten targeting, and shift spend in and out as the price moves, so a client is never paying peak election prices for mediocre results. Managing that mix is the whole point of our patient acquisition system, where paid ads are one lever among several, not the entire machine.

At the same time, we keep building the parts that do not spike. Strong healthcare SEO and a well tended Google Business Profile mean our clients still get found when ad prices climb, so a noisy news cycle barely dents their new patient numbers. And because expensive clicks are wasted if the phone rings out, our AI receptionist answers after hours and during the rush and books the patient on the spot. When every lead costs more, catching all of them matters even more.

The bottom line

Are political ads making your medical practice ads more expensive? Yes, and in competitive markets the jump is real, 15 to 50 percent and sometimes much more in the final days before an 11.6 billion dollar election peaks. But the answer is not to panic or go dark. Watch your true cost per patient, trim instead of kill, pounce on the cheap window after Election Day, and use this as the push to finally build channels that do not have an auction price. The ad costs will settle in a couple of weeks. The question worth sitting with is whether your practice has more than one way to get found.