Sky McAdams, an organizing manager for Texas Majority PAC, sat down with undercover journalists and explained how her outfit pays people $25 each to attend a one-hour Zoom class about "why voting is important." The PAC is backing Democrat James Talarico's U.S. Senate campaign in Texas.
McAdams herself acknowledged the legality was "a little gray." Her exact assessment of how the other side would view it: "If I was a Republican, I would be like, that's shady as f*."
So we're clear on the setup here. A political action committee aligned with a Democrat Senate candidate is handing out cash payments to people in exchange for participating in what amounts to a voter mobilization exercise. Texas Majority PAC paid $500,000 to a campaign organization called Relentless, according to a July campaign finance report. Relentless, which uses a software platform called Rally to manage its operations, claimed it delivered 47,533 Democratic votes across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania during the 2024 cycle.
The math isn't complicated. At $25 per head, $500,000 buys you 20,000 contacts. Whether you call it a "Zoom class" or a "civic engagement session" or a "totally not vote-buying program," the transaction is identical: cash changes hands, and the expectation is that those people show up on Election Day for your guy.
The scheme comes as Talarico tries to do what no Texas Democrat has managed in years — flip a Senate seat blue. Colin Allred lost to Ted Cruz by 959,000 votes in 2024. John Cornyn won his 2020 race by more than a million. Beto O'Rourke fell short by over 200,000 against Cruz in 2018, then lost to Governor Greg Abbott by 900,000 in the gubernatorial race.
Talarico beat primary opponent Jasmine Crockett by 145,000 votes, so he's got the Democratic base fairly-well locked down. The problem is the general election math in Texas, where Democrats keep spending enormous sums to close gaps that never actually close.
Which makes the $25-a-head strategy look less like civic engagement and more like desperation accounting. When your party has burned through hundreds of millions across multiple cycles and still can't crack Texas, you start looking for cheaper units. Twenty-five dollars is what you pay when the traditional playbook has failed so many times that the donor class wants receipts — literal, per-person receipts.
Former federal prosecutor Shipwreckedcrew flagged the legal exposure on social media. Texas election law isn't ambiguous about paying for votes, and dressing it up as compensation for attending a "class" doesn't change what the payment incentivizes. The organizer's own words — "a little gray" — suggest the people running the program know exactly where the line is and how close they're dancing to it.
