(Bloomberg) — Buying a 30-second television ad in Harlingen, Texas, typically cost political candidates less than $500 two years ago. These days the spots are going for the price of a serviceable used car in the small city near the Mexican border.
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Last week, Democrat James Talarico’s US Senate campaign shelled out $12,000 for a half-minute ad during a Major League Baseball game on the local Fox station. That’s 26 times the cost of a similar commercial during the state’s 2024 Senate race, according to Federal Communications Commission records.
And that’s assuming a campaign can still get time. With Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton pouring unprecedented sums of money into the state, the candidates are struggling to book time on the air at all in places like Harlingen, according to GOP strategist Vinny Minchillo.
“You can’t buy it,” Minchillo said. “It’s closed out.”
It’s a similar story around Texas, where Republicans and Democrats have poured more than $500 million into the state’s Senate race. With early voting set to start Monday and a little more than two weeks to the election, the Paxton-Talarico contest is shaping up as one of the most expensive non-presidential contests ever as the two parties flood the airwaves and social media in a fight over a seat that could decide control of the Senate.
That spending is apparent every time a Texan turns on the television to watch a game or the news. The going rate for nightly news spots at a Houston NBC affiliate has almost doubled from 2024, and Paxton spent $60,000 for an ad on a Sunday Night Football broadcast scheduled for late October.
TikTok users are racking up hundreds of thousands of likes by poking fun at both sides’ ubiquitous commercials. One omnipresent ad runs so frequently that it’s turned a conservative activist from the Dallas area, Miriam Evans, into a familiar face.
The money is tilting towards Paxton, a conservative firebrand and Texas attorney general, fueled by an influx from the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk. But Talarico, a 37-year-old state representative and seminarian, has amassed a formidable haul as well. He also has a slight edge in polling as he seeks to become the first Texas Democrat to win a Senate seat since 1988.
A Talarico victory would deal a black eye to President Donald Trump, who endorsed Paxton, 63, in the Republican primary over a four-term senator, John Cornyn. In a social media post on Oct. 15, Trump lashed out at Cornyn and longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove, accusing them of undermining Paxton’s campaign.
Disenchantment among some GOP voters — including the state’s large Hispanic population, which shifted toward Trump in 2024 — is one reason pollsters say Democrats are holding their own in other state races.
Gina Hinojosa, until recently a little-known Democratic state representative, is polling close to Governor Greg Abbott, who has won three gubernatorial elections by 10 points or more.
“Right now, Democratic partisanship is on fire, and GOP partisanship is tepid,” said James Henson, executive director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He recently found that 72% of Democrats said they’re enthusiastic about voting in November, 10 points higher than Republicans.
Democrats have long dreamed of winning more in the state, with its growing non-White majority and booming urban areas. Their dreams have been crushed each time. The party’s recent high-water mark was Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 loss to Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points.
As of mid-October in that race, O’Rourke was consistently trailing Cruz in polls, in contrast to Talarico’s slim lead now. This year, Democratic strategists say they’re getting a boost from cost-of-living concerns, opposition to data centers and plunging approval for Trump.
Republicans still have a natural advantage in Texas, a state that Trump won by about 14 points in 2024. But the party has struggled to unite behind Paxton.
Cornyn, a fixture in GOP fundraising circles who warned that Paxton would drain resources from other critical races, has called him “lazy” and a “poor campaigner.” When Cornyn held a recent fundraising event for Senate candidates in close contests, Paxton was left off the list.
Other prominent Republicans have also cast doubt on Paxton’s strength at the top of the ticket, including Rove and former Texas House of Representatives Speaker Joe Straus.
At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last month, Trump poked fun at Paxton’s appearance and speaking style after the candidate’s six-minute speech, even as he lauded his performance as attorney general. Paxton later told donors the convention hurt his polling numbers, the New York Times reported.
At an individual candidate level, Talarico has easily outraised Paxton. He’s even showed early signs of beating Paxton in the money race in traditional bastions of GOP support such as Highland Park, a wealthy enclave north of downtown Dallas, although the final tally isn’t yet available.
In 2020, when Cornyn ran for reelection, he outraised his Democratic opponent by a 3-to-1 margin in the town, Federal Election Commission records show.
But GOP-aligned groups have been stepping up spending since Labor Day. Musk’s America PAC has spent $22.7 million directly in the race. He also gave $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a powerful GOP group behind Texas PAC, the biggest spender in the race.
In September, Texas PAC dumped $77 million on the race, according to data from AdImpact, an advertising tracker. It followed that with another $79.4 million in advertisements in October, and has booked a little over $3 million in spots for early November.
Talarico and his backers have run over $95 million in advertisements, with around $82 million of it directly from his campaign. But national Democrats have been more reluctant to spend big in Texas, balking at the high cost of reaching 19 million registered voters across the state’s 20 media markets.
“We’re being outspent, there’s no need to deny that, and that’s not what you want,” said Katherine Fischer, co-founder of Texas Majority PAC, a Democratic group.
Fischer argued that there’s been little shift in the polling despite all the spending. But there’s still time left, said Henson of the Texas Politics Project.
“We’ll see whether the spending can help in the final two and a half weeks of this campaign,” he said. “What we’ll see is a lot of that money going into voter identification and mobilization among Republicans in order to shore up Republican numbers. But I think we’re beyond Republicans trying to mount up much in the way of persuasion campaigns.”
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