In the South, you sometimes have to remember that cavalry and Calvary are different things. Today, President Trump and his campaign team are sending in the cavalry to keep the GOP from Calvary.
On Friday, the President told reporters in the Oval Office that he has “close to a billion dollars” in his super PAC and is allocating $400 million to $500 million of it to Republicans this fall. MAGA Inc.’s last filing actually showed $403 million on hand as of July 31, which is still more cash than any party committee in Washington has. On Saturday, the first fall filing landed: $10 million in Texas, split evenly between negative ads against James Talarico and positive ads for Ken Paxton.
Labor Day is traditionally the high water mark for Democrat polling. Republicans get engaged after their families come back from vacation and get into school. Patrick Ruffini’s work has the summer bias running about 5 points in the Democrats’ favor, and most of it washes out by November. Polling margins tend to get closer. The President’s team has held its fire, and now it is coming in guns blazing.
Before we write off 2026 as a nightmare scenario for the GOP, we should see how much the President’s team spends and how good the negative ads are. Negative ads work. Well produced negative ads can inflict a lot of damage on Democrats who have increasingly tied themselves to a far left, radical group of candidates. Talarico says God is non-binary and calls oil and gas the cassette tape industry in a state that runs on oil and gas. Abdul El-Sayed keeps turning up alongside Hasan Piker. Angie Nixon won a Florida primary quoting Marx about chains. In Michigan, Will Lawrence has posted about abolishing the police, the prisons, and the nuclear family. Republicans do not need to invent anything. They need a camera, a clip, and 30 seconds.
Unfortunately, the reason the cavalry is needed at all is that Republicans nominated people they cannot defend. Half of that Texas buy is positive advertising for a two-term attorney general in a state that has elected him three times. A party does not spend $5 million introducing a man Texans already know unless it has a problem with what they know. Talarico has raised $72 million to Paxton’s $16.8 million, in part because Paxton will not do the work. Michael Whatley is running a bad campaign in North Carolina. Mike Collins is dragging the ticket in Georgia. Every dollar spent rescuing Texas is a dollar not spent in Michigan, New Hampshire, Iowa, Ohio, Maine, or Alaska, where Republicans could actually gain ground. The war chest is enormous, but it is not infinite, and right now it is being deployed as an ambulance service rather than an offensive.
The second limit is the economy, and no advertisement has ever lowered a grocery bill. August payrolls came in at 162,000 against expectations of 53,000, unemployment held at 4.1 percent, and June and July were both revised up. That is good news the President earned. Wage growth is still running behind inflation, so people have jobs and are falling behind anyway, in part because companies are absorbing tariff costs by not giving raises.
The third limit is aim. The first ads out of Secure America PAC were pointed at MAGA voters who were already going to show up in November. The President sits around 37 percent approval while Republicans pull 41 percent on the generic ballot, which means the least motivated Republicans in the country are the ones least fond of the President. An ad about him will not move them. An ad showing them what James Talarico or Abdul El-Sayed would do with a Senate seat will. Campaigns have to be forward looking, not backward looking, and the way to get a reluctant voter off the couch is to remind him how much worse the other side would be.
The cavalry is finally riding. Whether it gets there in time depends on where it is pointed and how much of it is spent saving men who should never have needed saving. President Trump deserves credit here. It is notable that just as the stories started circulating that he might not spend his money, he did, in fact, start spending his money. That is a very good thing.
