“Running out of money,” read the post on the social media platform X, “less than $400 remains in my pocket.” It landed on Nov. 13, from an obscure account called @pie0myWesley with just three followers. Anyone else stumbling upon it might have assumed it was a random musing from someone who had seen better days.
The account instead appears to be connected to the Republican Senate campaign of Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas. And one of its followers is @TXGOPFighter, with seeming connections to an outside group helping Mr. Hunt’s candidacy. The two anonymous accounts have spent months sharing strategic information, private polling, messaging advice and media-buying data in what may be an effort to skirt federal law.
That law prohibits candidates from coordinating in private with independent groups such as super PACs. The Hunt campaign and those allies, however, are doing so with a pair of social media accounts in plain sight for those who know where to look.
Mr. Hunt is one of three major candidates in the Republican primary for Senate that Texas will hold on Tuesday. Senator John Cornyn, who has served for more than two decades, is running for re-election and facing a serious threat from Ken Paxton, the state attorney general.
Candidates and super PACs have increasingly become bold in pushing the boundaries on coordination limits. The laws result from a tangle of court rulings, regulations and the idea that groups with no limits on what they may raise could be a corrupting force on politics. The agency responsible for being a watchdog, the Federal Election Commission, has generally done little to crack down on these efforts. The commission, which does not comment on potential cases, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The messages from the X accounts that appear to be linked to Mr. Hunt’s campaign and outside allies show the flimsiness of federal limits on coordination — and offer a rare window into the inner workings of a campaign.
The New York Times learned about the accounts from a strategist working for a rival, who was granted anonymity in order to share details of public communications that the strategist had been tracking for months.
The Hunt campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Reached by phone, a Republican political strategist linked to the @TxGOPFighter account said in a brief interview that he is an adviser to Standing for Texas, an outside group that has spent millions on pro-Hunt ads.
“Everything has been in public,” said the strategist, Stephen Puetz. The @TxGOPFighter account has posted documents that are stored in Mr. Puetz’s Dropbox account.
“I’m an adviser and there’s stuff that has been posted in public domain and I don’t have anything to add to it,” he said. “I’m not going to elaborate.”
The two accounts were both created in October 2025, the month when Mr. Hunt entered the Senate contest. The messages and requests have been quite explicit.
Last fall, the @pie0myWesley account, which appears to have links to the Hunt campaign, seemed to ask for new polling before a trip to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., for a potential meeting with President Trump. The absence of Mr. Trump’s endorsement has loomed large over the Texas race.
“Will be down in mar a lago on Friday. Would be great to have fresh data!” @pie0myWesley wrote on Nov. 17. The account said directly what it was looking for in a second post: “Given Wesley’s rising momentum in the primary, I wonder how he and his opponents are doing in the general election? I hear that’s what the president cares about the most.”
The next day, @TxGOPFighter wrote, “People who know the WH best are suggesting that the WH is already expecting fresh data on Monday am and that timeline is already set up.”
Then, less than a week later, on Nov. 23, the @TxGOPFighter account indeed posted “fresh data” — an internal poll that showed Mr. Hunt had passed Mr. Cornyn in a three-way race. “Happy Sunday to all but maybe less so for JC,” the account wrote, apparently using Mr. Cornyn’s initials.
“It is outrageous they feel the license to coordinate out in the open that explicitly,” said Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal finance reform at the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. The back-and-forth could provide a “test case” for the election commission, Mr. Ghosh said.
“Why doesn’t the F.E.C. do something about this?” he added. “This has been the question folks like me have been asking for the last decade.”
Nothing in the accounts says who is operating them. But @pie0myWesley has posted private polls from Harper Polling, which federal records show has done work for the Hunt campaign, as well as files to a Dropbox account operated by James Kyrkanides, who is on the campaign’s payroll and served as Mr. Hunt’s congressional chief of staff.
The @TxGOPFighter account has posted a private donor memo from Standing for Texas, a group that has spent more than $6 million in pro-Hunt ads, as well as numerous private polling, messaging memos and ad-buying information.
The documents have provided an unvarnished look at the campaign’s internal operations.
On Thursday, @pie0myWesley posted a link to a poll conducted in recent days showing that Mr. Hunt’s level of support had collapsed to the midteens — far behind both Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton.
The survey, which has not otherwise been released publicly, was hosted in a Google drive that listed Mr. Kyrkanides’s email address as the owner, and that said it was “Owned by Hunt for Congress.”
Sidestepping federal limits on outside coordination is not new. The F.E.C. is designed to be divided equally between Democrats and Republicans and often deadlocks on enforcement matters. Currently, the commission does not even have enough commissioners to form a quorum to take any meaningful investigative or punitive actions. Mr. Trump recently named two new commissioners who have yet to be confirmed.
Dozens of candidates use so-called red boxes on their websites to make suggestions for how super PACs should spend money to support them. They include both top Democratic candidates in the Texas Senate race: James Talarico, a state legislator, and Representative Jasmine Crockett.
“Spanish speaking voters need to hear radio ads in the RGV, San Antonio and El Paso that there is no Democrat who Donald Trump fears more than Jasmine Crockett,” read the instructions on Ms. Crockett’s website.
The 2022 Senate campaign of JD Vance in Ohio pushed past a previous boundary, when an allied super PAC with more cash than the campaign committee posted reams of private data to a Medium account. In 2023, a super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in his presidential bid posted research, polling and messaging advice.
Usually, such communication goes in one direction. The Hunt accounts are distinctive in that they appear to include communications by people on both sides of the supposed firewall. At least two times, the accounts replied to each other on X.
When @pie0myWesley posted a screenshot of an “interesting” pro-Hunt text message that it received on Nov. 21, the @TxGopFighter account replied with a screenshot of a different text attacking Mr. Cornyn, writing, “Word on the street is this also landed today.”
In January, @TxGopFighter posted extensively about the different markets where the campaign could get better rates for television ads than those of outside groups, including charts with more than a dozen media markets in the state that showed the difference in prices from 2025 for Fox News ads.
Memos linked to by @TxGOPFighter offered advice — “lean into youth and strength,” read one bullet point in December. The @pie0myWesley account appeared to make suggestions about where to spend.
In mid-February, @pie0myWesley posted a screenshot of a handwritten note with information on how much money and where to invest in TV advertising — “$500k for 800 points” in “Houston.” There was also a suggestion on the three specific talking points to hit Mr. Cornyn with, including the fact that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. once praised him.
Earlier messages were more coded. “Wow, half of Johnny’s support comes from the cowboys,” read one post in December, linking to a poll. It was an apparent reference to the Dallas media market where the Cowboys football team plays.
The nonprofit group Standing for Texas is not required to disclose its donors. It spent millions of dollars on pro-Hunt ads before he entered the race, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking service. On some media-buying documents in early 2025, the nonprofit listed a longtime Texas Republican operative, David Polyansky, as a contact. Mr. Polyansky, who said he had become an adviser to the Hunt campaign, declined to comment.
Mr. Hunt has not been shy about his alliance with Standing for Texas. In a radio interview the day after he entered the race, he said: “We started this project a while back ago,” because Mr. Cornyn was vulnerable.
“We don’t have ubiquitous name ID,” Mr. Hunt said on “The Michael Berry Show” on Oct. 7. “I have not been on a statewide ballot. So we started raising money and started running ads throughout the entire state of Texas to get our name ID up.” He later added, “We have spent $6 million.”
The same day as the interview, @pie0myWesley posed a question on X, presumably about Standing for Texas: “Is there a bitcoin link on SFT website?”
It is unclear when it was added. But there is one now.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
The post How Wesley Hunt of Texas Is Working in Plain Sight With Outside Groups appeared first on New York Times.
