Elon Musk’s America PAC is focusing its war chest on the most consequential Senate races this midterm cycle—and doing so by financing attack ads on Democrats, as voters nationwide sour on the Trump administration’s agenda.
The trend of political parties and outside groups focusing on trashing their opponents is not a new phenomenon. But America PAC’s approach has been unusual: for every dollar it has spent supporting GOP Senate candidates, it has spent almost three dollars attacking Democrats.
To monitor America PAC’s spending on digital ads and mailers this cycle, our ace team at WIRED has created a live tracker that updates daily and highlights where Musk’s political contributions are heading as we enter the waning years of Trump’s second term.
The political stakes are especially high for Republicans this midterms cycle because of the possibility of Democrats taking the majority in the US Senate, should the party flip four battleground races and retain three of the Senate seats it currently holds.
For Musk, the implications of a Democratic-controlled Senate would also be far-reaching, as he personally could become the target of congressional investigations, while his companies might be affected by bills related to tech and AI regulation.
Texas Senate Race
For the critical Texas Senate race, America PAC has poured more than $9.4 million into ads opposing Democratic candidate James Talarico and roughly $1.8 million into ads backing Republican candidate and state attorney general Ken Paxton.
The lopsided spending here is perhaps the least surprising of all of the close Senate contests. Paxton comes with so much personal baggage—from facing impeachment charges that were eventually dropped to having his wife (who has since endorsed him with an ad that doesn’t mention him by name) file for divorce on “biblical grounds”—that trying to boost him with ads highlighting his background is tough.
Republicans in Texas also cannot realistically do positive ads of President Donald Trump and Paxton together, since both men have terrible approval ratings.
The largest single expenditures by America PAC have been two $1.3 million digital media buys opposing Talarico. America PAC has not put any money into television ads, which is being handled by other groups, like MAGA Inc., the Trump-affiliated super PAC.
Meanwhile, the Senate Republican Conference–affiliated Texas PAC has so far booked the lion’s share of television ads. Punchbowl News reported last month that Texas PAC has booked around $120 million and was looking to buy $100 million in ad slots before November 3.
Ohio Senate Race
In Ohio’s Senate race, America PAC has spent $3.3 million against Democrat Sherrod Brown compared to $1.6 million supporting Republican candidate Jon Husted.
Husted has been struggling to distance himself from supporting data centers at a time when voters in the state have become fed up with rising costs associated with the projects. Husted has been tagged as “the face of data centers” because of a planned Nvidia data center project in Ohio that will be leased by OpenAI, and for his past support for data centers when he served in the state government.
The effort by Brown to cast Husted as the champion of data centers has in fact been so effective that a memo by the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm in August said it was tying an anchor around the neck of Husted’s public polling.
At a rally this week in Ohio, despite the cratering public support for data centers, Trump could not help himself and declared to the crowd: “We want them.” Husted’s campaign quickly replied that it should be a “local decision.”
Iowa Senate Race
In Iowa, America PAC has spent $1.5 million hitting Democratic candidate Josh Turek, while only spending roughly $100,000 supporting the Republican candidate Ashley Hinson—the biggest disparity, according to the WIRED tracker.
To put that another way: To date, Musk’s political operation has spent a staggering 14 times more attacking Turek than supporting Hinson.
This could be because Hinson has taken great pains to distance herself from Trump’s agenda. She recently called on Trump to ban diesel exports and end the Iran war (after previously voting six times against the House resolution to end the conflict), after Turek called for both of those measures.
To illustrate the upside-down nature of this race, Hinson recently launched attack ads against Turek, accusing him without evidence of having “received tens of millions in support from men in the Epstein files,” a remarkable situation given that Trump has sought to tamp down any mention of the files because of the negative blowback on him personally.
Once again, pro-Republican ads are likely not helpful when the candidate is trying to run a race apart from Trump and is barely ahead in the polls in what should be a safe Republican seat. In the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, Hinson was just one single, solitary point ahead of Turek.
This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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