I've seen a lot of MAGA pump accounts hyping the eye-popping sums that Republicans have been spending in the final weeks to save their congressional majority. Some of the main "here's how Republicans can still win" narratives involve the hundreds of millions of dollars Elon Musk is reportedly spending to "save Texas." I can't fault people for finding hope in these endeavors, but it's important to look at how these vast sums of money are spent, by whom, what they're used for, and how they could be better spent.
Republicans have enjoyed a tremendous reported fundraising advantage this cycle, and yet the national polling has barely moved. Democrats have maintained a substantial lead on the generic congressional ballot, and both parties are spending enormous sums defending districts Trump won comfortably in 2024. Looking at an analysis Patrick Ruffini did in September, the median 2024 district margins where the NRCC and DCCC are spending imply roughly an average 10-point shift toward Democrats. That's both REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS.
I'm sure some of these vast sums of money will save individual Republican candidates. But the party is trying to spend its way out of a political environment that has been deteriorating for most of Trump's second term. A handful of us warned that this was coming as early as June 2025, and there was little appetite within the Republican Party to exert the effort and courage necessary to provide feedback up the chain and course-correct. Instead, most people offering concerns were attacked as "panicans," with the hubris of a movement that behaved as though it had a two-thirds mandate even as it lost more voters with every passing day. But despite this dynamic, this is a story about the advertising spend and, more specifically, the bigger problem revealed by the ineffectiveness of that spending.
The first problem is that much of this money is being spent at the worst possible time. Campaign advertising is not like buying something off Amazon. Candidates and outside groups reserve advertising inventory months in advance, and the cost of reaching voters can increase dramatically as Election Day approaches. Outside groups also frequently pay higher rates than candidates for comparable television inventory. Reporting has shown how Republican advertising spending has had less comparative reach than Democratic spending, with campaign-level discounts contributing to this disparity. A leaked recording of Ken Paxton also illustrates how PAC-driven spending can involve messaging that isn't controllable by the boots on the ground.
So when Republicans celebrate another billionaire coming in to spend hundreds of millions of dollars with three weeks left in the election, the obvious question should be how many voters that money is actually going to reach. And how much more could it have accomplished six months ago, spent with more intent?
The second problem is who controls the money. When a donor contributes to a national super PAC, that money isn't handed to the candidate to spend on whatever his campaign needs. It goes into an organization run by the consulting class, which decides which races to target, what advertisements to produce, which vendors to hire, and how much money to allocate to each activity. We all know these organizations aren't allowed to coordinate their independent expenditures with campaigns. That becomes a HUGE issue when your national party people aren't great at messaging, aren't directly accountable to the candidates who lose, and stand to potentially benefit personally depending on how that money gets allocated.
But there's a third problem, and I think it's the most important one. What exactly are Republicans trying to accomplish with all this advertising?
Campaign advertising can certainly help win elections. It can introduce candidates to voters, improve turnout, and persuade people who haven't made up their minds. But there are limits to what it can accomplish when the political environment itself is the problem.
Trump's approval has been deteriorating for well over a year, and the generic congressional ballot began following a similar trajectory not long afterward. The voters who are abandoning Republicans aren't doing so because they haven't seen enough Republican advertisements. They're doing so because they're unhappy with their PERCEPTIONS of what Republicans have done with the power they were given. This is where the failure becomes much bigger than campaign strategy.
Trump's 2024 victory was built on an unusual coalition of traditional Republicans, independents, younger voters, Hispanics, and working-class Americans who had little historical loyalty to the Republican Party. In my final 2024 Rasmussen polling, 42% of Trump's supporters identified as independents or Democrats.
These weren't people who suddenly fell in love with the Republican establishment. I often describe 2024 as a "coalition of the desperate." The post-COVID financial situation has strained many families to near breaking, the job market is a wreck, institutional trust has never been lower, and people expected brutal and swift retribution, with the fundamental goal being massive, systemic change. Trump convinced them that he could deliver those things.
The problem is that Trump's mandate was never particularly large, and the voters who gave it to him weren't particularly patient. He won the popular vote by about a point and a half, and Republicans actually lost seats in the House. Yet the administration seemed to operate under the assumption that it had years to figure everything out, and that MAGA voters would continue supporting Republicans regardless of what happened.
Trump should have been managing toward the 2026 midterms from the moment he took office. Not because winning elections is the purpose of governing, but because maintaining congressional control was essential to accomplishing the agenda he was elected to deliver. Every month spent on distractions was a month that could have been spent demonstrating progress to the voters who had taken a chance on him.
Instead, the administration became increasingly consumed by foreign policy, internal disputes, and controversies that had little to do with the economic problems facing ordinary Americans. Project 2025 was sidelined, DOGE was allowed to collapse, and the congressional agenda never developed into a coherent plan for the kind of systemic change these voters expected. Once the One Big Beautiful Bill passed, there was little attention AT ALL on what legislative achievements were going to be pushed through future reconciliation efforts. Instead, it was a bunch of public infighting over the perpetually doomed SAVE Act. Despite my pleas to the administration, there was no meaningful leadership effort to sell what Republicans were going to focus on in 2026 (and we've heard even less about 2027 and 2028 if Republicans win).
And I think that's an enormous missed opportunity. Republicans have spent much of the last year telling voters how disastrous it would be to lose Congress, but have spent very little time explaining what they intend to accomplish if they keep it. That's a pretty difficult argument to make to people who are already disappointed with what they've gotten so far.
It also puts Republican congressional candidates in a terrible position. They're being asked to defend an administration whose priorities they don't control, while offering voters little reason to believe the next two years will be any different. So the national party spends enormous sums trying to make the election a referendum on Democrats, rather than giving people something affirmative to vote for. Socialists are scary, haven't you heard?
I don't think it's surprising that this isn't working particularly well, even ignoring the polling showing that Republicans increasingly support policies commonly labeled socialist.
And this brings us back to the people controlling the money.
In my previous commentary, I argued that Trump managed to take over the Republican electorate without really taking over the Republican Party. The donors, consultants, congressional leadership, and policy institutions that operated the Republican establishment largely survived his political revolution. Trump brought millions of new voters into the coalition, but the institutions operating the party continued to serve many of the same interests they had served for decades.
Trump bears responsibility for allowing this to happen. He chose his advisers and decided which battles to fight. But there's also a serious institutional problem when the people responsible for maintaining a political coalition have little incentive to confront the leadership when that coalition starts falling apart.
The same apparatus that spent much of 2025 dismissing concerns about the direction of the administration is now managing enormous budgets to rescue Republicans from the consequences. GROSS! Meanwhile, some of the same people are overseas stuffing foreign money into their pockets even as Republicans desperately struggle to maintain their majority. And while individual consultants certainly have an interest in winning, the political consulting industry as a whole can remain remarkably profitable even when the party it serves is failing. I've heard these people say that fundraising is GREAT when you're in the minority.
That's a problem worth examining before celebrating another thousand gorillion dollars in emergency spending.
And it's why I keep coming back to the need for an independent national-populist political infrastructure. I've previously called it a shadow Republican Party, but the name is less important than the function. We need institutions that can recruit candidates, develop policy, raise money, and hold elected officials accountable to the people who put them in office, without depending on the approval of the existing Republican establishment.
The money being spent in the final weeks of this election could have funded years of that work. It could have supported independent research into what Trump's coalition actually wanted, built organizations capable of challenging bad policy decisions, planned for politically advantageous workarounds to gridlock, and created some institutional pressure to keep the administration focused on its mandate.
Instead, we're spending it on television commercials asking voters to overlook the fact that Republicans haven't given them much reason to believe the next two years will be any different, and change was the whole point of the Trump movement!
And the worst part is that the people who could have helped prevent this situation had every opportunity to do so. The polling was there. The warnings were there. The deterioration was gradual enough that there was plenty of time to respond. But the incentives within the Republican political apparatus rewarded defending the administration and protecting relationships far more than delivering uncomfortable but productive feedback.
If (as almost certainly) the Republicans lose the House, I expect we'll hear plenty about the money that wasn't raised, the advertisements that didn't run, and the candidates who weren't good enough. There will be very little discussion about why so many voters who supported Trump in 2024 no longer want to support Republicans in 2026.
And if the lesson is simply that Republicans needed another few hundred million dollars, nothing will change. As I’ve heard from leadership in the RNC, “we have the right message, we just need to vote harder!” Not going to work.
The Republican Party doesn't have a money problem. It has a problem with the people who control the money, the incentives under which they operate, and the political outcomes they're being paid to produce.
Until the national-populist movement fixes that, the Republican establishment will continue making enormous amounts of money trying to repair political damage it helped create. Starve these people or you will continue to lose.
