“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,” McAdams said before adding, “So it’s like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially.”
That characterization quickly spread across conservative media and prompted questions about exactly what participants were being paid to do.
McAdams himself acknowledged an important legal distinction in the undercover footage.
“You can’t pay someone to vote for someone,” he said.
He explained that participants instead receive money for attending the political training session, describing the situation as “a little gray.”
The fallout came quickly.
Texas Majority PAC subsequently fired McAdams and rejected his characterization of its operation. According to the group, participants are compensated for legitimate grassroots organizing rather than for casting ballots.
“Participants in the program are being paid for grassroots organizing work,” a PAC spokesperson told Texas Scorecard. “The way it was described by one rogue employee is factually incorrect, not how we operate, and they were immediately fired.”
The distinction is crucial.
Federal law prohibits offering or making expenditures to someone in exchange for voting in a federal election. Paying campaign workers and organizers to perform legitimate political work, however, is a routine feature of American elections.
The Texas program involves Relentless, a political organizing operation that describes its model as “paid relational organizing.”
Instead of relying exclusively on traditional door-knocking or cold calls, relational organizing attempts to turn participants’ existing social relationships into political outreach. Organizers communicate with friends, relatives and acquaintances who may be more receptive to hearing from someone they already know.
Relentless says its paid programs recruit voters who do not regularly participate in elections and compensate those people for spending time contacting, persuading and mobilizing members of their personal networks. Its stated position is that compensation is for the organizing work rather than the act of voting.
Campaign-finance records cited by Townhall show Texas Majority PAC reported paying Relentless $500,000 in July for a “relational organizing program.”
Relentless has also said it operated comparable programs in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania during the 2024 election cycle. According to the company’s own figures, those efforts mobilized more than 30,000 low-propensity voters to reach more than 1.2 million people in their personal networks.
The company claims the programs generated a net increase of 47,533 Democratic votes. That figure is the company’s own assessment of its programs rather than an independent determination that individual votes were purchased.
The Texas controversy is particularly sensitive because of the high-profile U.S. Senate contest between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Republicans have seized on the recording to connect the controversy to the broader Democratic turnout operation. Rep. Pat Fallon has called for the Justice Department to investigate Texas Majority PAC over the program.
But the evidence publicly reported so far does not establish that Talarico personally created or directed the program, nor does the undercover recording by itself demonstrate that participants were required to cast a ballot—or vote for Talarico—in exchange for receiving money.
That distinction separates McAdams’ provocative description from what Texas Majority PAC and Relentless say the program actually does.
The episode nevertheless creates a political headache for Democrats at a critical moment in Texas.
The Senate contest has attracted enormous amounts of outside spending. Talarico has built a substantial fundraising operation, while Republican-aligned groups have recently poured major resources into supporting Paxton. Recent reporting describes Texas as one of the congressional battlegrounds attracting particularly heavy spending ahead of November.
And now Republicans have a video featuring a Democratic organizer using words that practically write the attack ad themselves.
McAdams knew exactly why the arrangement could provoke outrage from the other side.
“If I was a Republican, I would be pissed. I would be like, that’s shady as f**k.”
Texas Majority PAC says that description was wrong—and fired the employee who made it.
Whether further scrutiny uncovers anything beyond an organizer using extraordinarily damaging language to describe a legal paid-organizing program remains an unresolved question.
For now, what is documented is striking enough: a Democratic organizer described his organization’s voter-outreach effort as a “roundabout way of paying people for their votes,” acknowledged that directly purchasing votes would be illegal, and was subsequently fired by the political group that employed him.
