Last week’s Supreme Court decision in NRSC v. FEC altered decades of campaign finance law. It might also have changed the trajectory of the 2026 midterms.
The question that was at the heart of the case might seem dry: Did the law limiting the amount of money a party-controlled campaign committee can spend in coordination with a candidate violate the First Amendment? That limitation was created in an effort to keep large donors from using party donations to circumvent limits on what they can give to individual candidates. The court found, in a 6-3 decision, that the law ran afoul of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free political speech, since some of its less-restrictive measures could advance the same goal.
Such an arcane finding might have been of interest only to lawyers and campaign strategists but for a fact not presented to the court: Another law provides candidate campaigns with significantly reduced rates on television and radio ad time. Factor that in, and suddenly the ruling offered the GOP a massive boost.
More than that, it gave President Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC a golden opportunity to reset the fall’s campaign narrative.
The initial boost is straightforward: The court’s ruling means that each party’s committees — their national committees, along with House and Senate campaign arms — can now spend unlimited amounts in coordination with candidates, thereby getting much more television bang for their bucks. Coordinated expenditures also qualify for lower ad rates because they are deemed to be effectively the candidate’s own advertising, even if a party committee is the buyer.
Both parties can do this, of course, but right now the rule change is much more important for Republicans. That’s because Democratic candidates have vastly outraised their GOP counterparts in recent years.
In 2024, for example, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown raised about $75 million more than Bernie Moreno, his GOP opponent in the Senate race. Republican groups had to pony up more than $200 million to try to even the playing field, ultimately spending $51 million more on ads than the Democrats but still airing fewer spots.
During the same cycle, Democratic Senate candidates in Wisconsin and Michigan outspent their opponents by $21 million and $38 million, respectively. That gave them a significantly larger presence on television, despite tens of millions spent in the final months by Republican Party and aligned committees and super PACs. The Democrats’ edge could well have been the difference in the two races, each of which was won by tenths of a percentage point even as Trump carried both states.
In the House, the Democratic ad edge was even greater. Data show that the party aired more ads than Republicans in the vast majority of competitive races. This could have been a reason Democrats gained seats despite Trump’s victory.
At a minimum, the court’s decision will substantially narrow Democrats’ edge. The national Republican congressional committees can now leverage a big cash advantage over their Democratic counterparts to air more ads in coordination with their candidates. Democratic candidates’ fundraising advantage may still help them win the air wars, but almost certainly by a much smaller margin than they have been.
The story is the same at the national committees. The Republican National Committee had over $125 million in cash on hand as of the end of May; the Democratic National Committee owed $3.5 million more than it had. This massive advantage can now be deployed in coordination with candidates to get those less-expensive ad rates.
In fact, the GOP’s cash edge among party committees is so large that it could free up MAGA Inc. to run its own partisan campaign, independent of the candidates. That’s where Trump’s big opportunity lies.
The president’s super PAC had $350 million on hand at the start of June. Before the ruling, it appeared inevitable that a large portion of that would have to be deployed — at sky-high ad rates — to support candidates fighting uphill battles in a blue environment. But now that the party committees’ hands have been untied, MAGA Inc. can expend its resources differently.
It could, for example, take on some of the get-out-the-vote work that the RNC and state party committees typically provide. This would be a way to maximize the value of every donor dollar. But a possible alternative is suggested by Trump’s ego and his innate sense of how to set a political narrative.
What if MAGA Inc. used its money to create a partisan narrative designed to drag down Democrats nationally while boosting Trump’s image?
Recall that voters who approve of a president’s job performance give between 90 and 95 percent of their votes to his party in midterm elections. If MAGA Inc. could raise Trump’s approval rating just two or three percentage points above the abysmal 41 percent he has in the latest polling of registered and likely voters, that would probably be enough to put GOP-leaning states such as Ohio, Iowa, Alaska and Texas just out of reach of Senate Democrats.
The MAGA Inc. money could reinforce the case, which Trump and other Republicans are already making, that Democrats have moved so far left that they can’t be trusted. It’s an obvious line of attack given how many democratic socialists and other strongly progressive candidates have won primaries this year. Putting hundreds of millions of dollars behind an ad campaign making that claim would amplify the reach of Trump’s fall speeches and social media posts on this theme.
As of today, Democrats are still favored to win the House and make a play for Senate control. But the Supreme Court’s campaign finance ruling makes a Republican recovery a greater possibility than it was before. That’s some positive news for a party that badly needs it.
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