A pro-James Talarico SuperPAC is under fire after an undercover video surfaced Wednesday showing one of its organizers describing a get-out-the-vote program that pays participants $25 to attend a Zoom class — an arrangement he himself characterized as a workaround that skirts the line on paying for votes.
According to reporting by Townhall Media, the video features Sky McAdams, organizing manager for Texas Majority PAC, discussing a program aimed at helping Talarico, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, defeat Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in November.
In the footage, McAdams explains the mechanics of the effort: “We are paying people $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom class to learn why voting is important and why the Republicans are causing all of these bad things,” he says, adding, “So it’s like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially.”
McAdams acknowledges the legal boundaries around such payments while describing how the program is structured to stay within them. “It’s called the Paid Relational Program,” he says. “You can’t pay someone to vote for someone. You can’t be like, ‘Here’s $25, go vote for me.’”
“You can say, ‘Attend a one-hour class, and you can receive $25,’” he continues. “And then the class just talks about the importance of…It’s a little gray.”
McAdams also says that if he were a Republican, he would be angry about the arrangement.
What the Program Is and Who Runs It
Townhall Media reports that the Paid Relational Program is operated by a company called Relentless, which uses software called Rally.
According to the report, Relentless’s website describes its work as helping relational programs “recruit low-propensity voters and compensate them for their time as they reach, persuade, and mobilize their friends and family to vote.”
The company’s site also states that it ran similar campaigns in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania in 2024, efforts that Relentless says produced “47,533 Democratic votes.”
Paxton Responds: ‘Texans Aren’t for Sale’
Paxton, the Republican incumbent in the Senate race, reacted to the video on X, calling the described arrangement outrageous and labeling it bribery.
“James Talarico’s team just admitted they are trying to bribe people for votes,” Paxton wrote. “Texans aren’t for sale, no matter how much James Talarico thinks they are.”
The post, dated September 16, 2026, links directly to the Townhall video.
A Gray Area in Election Law
Federal law prohibits paying people to vote or to register to vote, and it bans making payments contingent on how someone casts a ballot. Whether a payment tied to attending a class or participating in a civic program crosses that line is a question that has drawn scrutiny in recent cycles as campaigns and outside groups experiment with incentives aimed at turning out low-propensity voters.
In the video, McAdams appears to draw exactly that distinction — the cash is nominally offered for attendance at a class about the importance of voting, not explicitly in exchange for a ballot. But his own on-camera description of the program as a “roundabout way of paying people for their votes” and his assessment that it is “a little gray” are likely to fuel accusations that the structure is a fig leaf rather than a genuine separation.
Townhall’s report frames the program as a coordinated effort to boost Talarico’s chances against Paxton, and it points to Relentless’s own past numbers as evidence that the model has been deployed at scale in other states. The roughly 47,000-vote figure cited from the company’s 2024 work in five swing states is the kind of margin that, if accurate, could matter in close races.
The Broader Fight for Texas
Texas is home to one of the most closely watched Senate contests in the country, and Paxton’s response signals that the video is likely to become a central line of attack. The race pits a sitting statewide Republican official with a national profile against a Democrat who has drawn attention for his progressive messaging and, now, for the outside spending supporting him.
The Gateway Pundit’s Cullen Linebarger first flagged the video’s release and Paxton’s response. Neither Texas Majority PAC nor the Talarico campaign has publicly addressed the video in the immediate aftermath of its release, according to available reporting.
The episode raises familiar questions about the role of SuperPACs and outside organizations in modern campaigns, and about where the line sits between legitimate civic outreach and inducement. For now, the answer may depend less on the letter of the law than on how voters in Texas read a video in which a paid organizer calls his own program “shady” — a characterization he appears to accept even as he defends the structure.
Source: www.thegatewaypundit.com — https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/bombshell-talarico-superpac-caught-tape-revealing-shady-as/