Donald Trump is hurting local news stations with his refusal to run campaign ads

Donald Trump has spent $0 on campaign ads this year, although he is reportedly looking to start running his first ads in the coming days. It might be too little too late for local broadcasters, though, who count on the boost of political advertising this time of year, Bloomberg reports.

Spending on political advertising is down — way down — dropping 60 percent in 2016 from 2012. It is not all due to Trump, though; Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders' battle to the very end meant the turn to the general election became a focus later than it has in the past.

Still, Trump's tight hold on the advertising purse strings is reverberating. Trump essentially won the Republican nomination in late April, and since then $146 million has been spent by the campaigns in advertising. In 2012, by contrast, campaigns spent $373 million in the same period.

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The stations aren't panicking yet, though, sensing that an influx of spending for Senate races might start to bring the missing money back to their pockets. "Certainly it's not what was expected," the president of the Television Bureau of Advertising, Steve Lanzano, told Bloomberg. "But you're going to see the money coming in. It'll just come in later."