Abstract In strategic candidacy games, both voters and candidates have preferences over the set of candidates, and candidates may strategically withdraw from the election in order to manipulate the outcome according to their preferences. In this work, we extend the standard model of strategic candidacy games by observing that candidates may find it costly to run an electoral campaign and may therefore prefer to withdraw if their presence has no effect on the election outcome. We study the Nash equilibria and outcomes of natural best-response dynamics in the resulting class of games, both from a normative and from a computational perspective, and compare them with the Nash equilibria of the standard model.