“It’s like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially,”
Does this on-tape admission from a Texas Democratic staffer warrant a formal inquiry? Let us know in the comments. We read them.
A second tape has now entered the Texas Senate race, and it does not flatter the apparatus around James Talarico.
Sky McAdams, organizing manager for Texas Majority PAC, was recorded describing a “paid relational program” meant to move low-propensity voters toward Talarico in November. The method, captured in footage obtained by Townhall, is simple on its face: pay people $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom class on “why voting is important and why the Republicans are causing all of these bad things.”
Absolutely outrageous!
James Talarico’s team just admitted they are trying to bribe people for votes.
Texans aren’t for sale, no matter how much James Talarico thinks they are. https://t.co/WI8t8jG35o
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) September 16, 2026
“So, it’s like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially,” McAdams said. Campaigns cannot, he conceded, hand someone cash and say “go vote for me.” They can, however, compensate attendance at a class. “It’s a little gray.” Then he supplied the sentence that will not stay in the room: “If I was a Republican, I would be pissed. I would be like, that’s shady as f**k.”
The company running the program is Relentless. The app they use is called Rally. Relentless describes their model as recruiting voters and paying them to reach friends and family. The firm ran similar 2024 programs in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania; producing 47,533 Democratic votes. A July filing shows Texas Majority PAC sent Relentless $500,000—roughly one-fifth of its spending to that point. At $25 a head, the check could underwrite some 20,000 “classes.”
Ken Paxton responded to the leak bluntly. Quoting the exclusive, the Republican Senate candidate wrote: “Absolutely outrageous! James Talarico’s team just admitted they are trying to bribe people for votes. Texans aren’t for sale, no matter how much James Talarico thinks they are.”
The question is not whether a Zoom stipend is identical to stuffing a ballot box. It is what kind of campaign speaks this way when it thinks the camera is off.
This recording does not stand alone. It belongs beside earlier hidden-camera material already examined on this site. In mid-September footage, Jennifer Miranda—tied to Texas Together, the Texas Democratic Party, and the same Texas Majority PAC—described Talarico’s recent softening on transgender issues as an effort to become “more palatable to Republicans,” then added that “from the character he’s shown us, he does believe the things that he’s said before.” Days earlier, a recording from Talarico’s longtime church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian in Austin, captured Rev. Babs Miller saying some members wished the 2024 Butler assassination attempt on Donald Trump “had been more successful.” Talarico has called that congregation home since childhood and still names its senior pastor a mentor “in every sense of the word.”
That is the pattern. Public language is sanded and polished for a statewide audience. Private language reveals the old strategy and the old dogma. Paying people to sit through a partisan briefing is not ordinary persuasion. McAdams himself called it shady. Texas law draws bright lines around vote-buying. Whether a $25 “class” crosses them is now a question for regulators. It is already a question for voters.
November will decide whether a Senate seat Republican for a generation changes hands. The tapes keep showing how the change is being organized.
Does a $25 “class” still look like civic education to you—or has the payment already crossed the line into buying a vote by another name? Let us know in the comments below.
