The No Corporate PAC Candidates Wins

“Billionaires aren’t just buying yachts and jets – they’re buying political power, and they’re using that power to rig our political system,” says James Talarico.

If you want to wrap your head around just how broken our campaign finance system is, look at the current spending for primary races around the country. This week’s Texas Senate primary is a wild case study: At least $128 million was spent on the race so far, making it the most expensive Senate primary in U.S. history.

Worse, a bulk of the funds were largely untraceable dark money and the majority of the donations supported the rival Republican candidates, incumbent Senator John Cornyn, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Representative Wesley Hunt. A mindblowing $64 million was reportedly spent to support Cornyn’s bid to stay in office. It’s extra obvious what a giant waste of money that is now that none of the Republican candidates surpassed the 50% threshold Texas requires, so Cornyn and Paxton will campaign again for a runoff election on May 26th just as was predicted before the $128 million was spent.

Except, of course, if a Republican candidate wins in November, Cornyn or Paxton will know which businesses and tycoons he owes big favors, so in a way, the millions in spending has already done its job.

The Democratic primary winner, State Rep. James Talarico, proves that candidates can run vigorous, high-profile campaigns – and win – without relying on corporate PAC donors. Talarico is centering his campaign on a strong anti-corruption agenda. He joined End Citizens United’s Unrig Washington program, committing to voters that he won’t take corporate PAC donations, he’ll support a Congressional stock trading ban, and will advocate for legislation to crack down on Dark Money. And everywhere he goes, he calls out how, “Billionaires aren’t just buying yachts and jets – they’re buying political power, and they’re using that power to rig our political system.”

With Talarico as the Democratic nominee, there couldn’t be a sharper contrast between what Texas Democrats and Republicans are offering. Democrats are running a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian who is clear-eyed about how Big Money distorts every aspect of American life, from education to healthcare to the cost of living (you can split a campaign contribution between Talarico and End Citizens United here).

To understand what that means, first we have to look at how the Texas primary is layered with multiple forms of flagrant Republican corruption. First, these midterm races are happening in the context of a transparent, anti-democratic power grab by Republican Party leaders – the exact kind of rigging the system that Talarico is campaigning against. Remember last year, when Texas Republicans pushed through a gerrymander of their Congressional maps that they explicitly said was a favor to President Trump so that the GOP could retain power in this year’s midterms?

Texas Republicans’ gerrymander specifically diminished the power of growing Black and Latino voter blocs. According to Democracy Docket, “Even though minority groups make up 60% of the Texas population – and accounted for 95% of the state’s growth in the most recent Census – the new map slashes the number of congressional districts where they can elect the candidate of their choice from 34% to 21%.” All eight of the Congressional districts affected by the Republican gerrymander were majority-minority districts.

Then there’s Paxton, Texas’s Attorney General who will face Cornyn, the incumbent Senator, in the runoff. For years now, the state of Texas has been a primary testing ground for numerous forms of envelope-pushing, authoritarian-style Republican maneuvers. Look at how Paxton has handled abortion, for example.

In 2021, Texas enacted a six-week abortion ban that incentivized citizens to become bounty hunters who sued people for illegally accessing abortion. The law was unconstitutional on its face given that Roe was still the law of the land. Paxton was the state attorney general at the time, and it was his office that defended the law. In just one example of his extreme positions, this year, Paxton has decided to use his position to sue a nurse practitioner who lives in Delaware for the alleged crime of mailing medical abortion pills to patients. Meanwhile, Paxton also used his office to defend Texas Republicans’ recent gerrymander that explicitly disenfranchised voters.

Paxton has his own record of criminal allegations that spans almost twenty years. He’s been accused of enriching himself through state contracts and committing securities fraud. The FBI investigated him for abusing his office to cover up an extramarital affair. In 2020, four attorneys who were fired from his office sued him for violating state whistleblower protections. In 2022, the State Bar of Texas sued him for making false claims about election results. And in 2023, apparently finally fed up, the Texas state legislature –run by Republicans – held an impeachment trial against him. And yet, he might become the Republican nominee for Senate.

For his part, Cornyn has voted in line with Trump’s agenda 99% of the time, which includes, of course, supporting last year’s Republican megabill that dramatically slashed Medicaid while also dramatically increasing funding for ICE. Paxton’s fraud allegations and authoritarianism doesn’t make Cornyn less extreme: Cornyn is also an emblem of corruption.

Want to know more about how Cornyn could raise tens of millions just for a primary? He’s on the Senate Committee on Finance, which is supposed to regulate financial firms. But over the years he’s received millions upon millions from the financial sector and ultrawealthy financiers he’s supposed to oversee.

There’s no question whose side Cornyn is on. According to Open Secrets, the business whose employees gave Cornyn the most in contributions between 2019 and 2024 was Apollo Global Management, the hedge fund that is run by Marc Rowan, a major GOP donor, which stands to make serious profits from many Trump Administration decisions. During that timeframe, Cornyn’s second largest set of contributions came from employees of Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest asset managers, which has repeatedly lobbied Congress to keep loopholes that profit Wall Street financiers at the expense of American workers. In those same years, Cornyn also received $1,413,365 from the oil and gas industry – probably because he sits on the Finance Committee’s energy subcommittee. No surprise, he’s voted to expand coal, cut environmental protections, and expand tax cuts for billionaires.

Enter Talarico. He has also received campaign contributions – at least $7.4 million in the first weeks of 2026 alone, according to The Texas Tribune – but his money comes from everyday people, including Texans in every single county in the state. His campaign has said that it’s not going to unilaterally disarm, and, given the current reality of our broken campaign finance system, unfortunately candidates need money to run a viable campaign. The real question is who candidates are taking money from, and therefore who they’re going to be accountable to once they’re in office. Talarico’s campaign said that among other donations they have raised small-dollar contributions from 290,000 individuals (you can join them by splitting a donation between Talarico and End Citizens United here).

Last year, End Citizens United released research that showed that voters in swing districts perceived Democrats as just as corrupt as Republicans. To have a fighting chance of retaking Congress during the approaching midterms, the research suggested that Democrats had to run candidates willing to loudly distinguish themselves from corporate interests and the same-old cynical, transactional politics. On Tuesday night, Talarico told a crowd of supporters, “We have shattered grassroots fundraising records, all without taking a dime from corporate PACs. This is a people-powered movement to take on this broken, corrupt political system.” That should give you hope for November.