That description immediately raised questions about where political organizing ends and prohibited vote-buying begins.
McAdams identified the initiative as a “paid relational program,” an organizing strategy associated with political consulting company Relentless and its Rally software. The concept differs from traditional door-to-door canvassing because participants are encouraged to communicate with people they already know.
Rather than sending campaign workers to approach strangers, relational organizing relies on existing networks of friends, relatives and acquaintances. The goal is to use those personal relationships to encourage people to register, participate and vote.
The controversy centers on the $25 payment and how participants are selected and compensated.
In the video, McAdams appeared to acknowledge that directly offering money in exchange for a vote would cross a legal line.
“You can’t pay someone to vote for someone,” McAdams says in the video. “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.’ And then the class just talks about the importance of… It’s a little gray,” he continues, apparently referring to the legality of the activity.
McAdams then offered an unusually blunt assessment of how the arrangement could look to Republicans.
“If I was a Republican, I would be pissed. I would be like, that’s shady as f**k.”
The remarks have become the central focus of the controversy, although they do not by themselves establish that Texas Majority PAC illegally purchased votes.
Texas law prohibits certain forms of compensation tied to voter-registration activity, while federal law also prohibits paying or offering something of value for voting. At the same time, political campaigns and organizations can compensate people for legitimate campaign work. The legal question therefore depends heavily on what participants were actually being paid to do and whether the payment was conditioned on voting.
Texas Majority PAC has strongly rejected McAdams’ description.
The organization said participants were being compensated for legitimate grassroots organizing activities rather than for casting ballots. The PAC also said McAdams’ account was inaccurate and announced that he had been fired after the video became public.
“Participants in the program are being paid for grassroots organizing work,” a PAC spokesperson said, according to Texas Scorecard. “The way it was described by one rogue employee is factually incorrect, not how we operate, and they were immediately fired.”
The financial records surrounding the program have added another layer to the controversy.
A July campaign-finance filing showed Texas Majority PAC paid Relentless $500,000 for a “relational organizing program.” That expenditure represented a significant portion of the PAC’s spending at the time.
Relentless describes its own paid relational programs differently from McAdams’ characterization. The company says such initiatives recruit voters considered less likely to participate and compensate them for spending time reaching out to friends and family members to encourage political participation.
The company has also said it operated similar programs during the 2024 election cycle in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Relentless has promoted the strategy as a way to expand political conversations through existing personal networks rather than relying exclusively on conventional campaign outreach.
Rally, the software associated with the program, is similarly marketed as a tool for scaling up those personal conversations.
“We built Rally to allow campaigns and organizations to wield the power of these conversations at scale,” the company says.
The promotional material describes Rally in explicitly political-organizing terms.
“Rally is a tool that is built by organizers, for organizers,” the video says, adding its purpose is to “build long-term political power.”
The controversy has also drawn attention because Texas Majority PAC has been involved in efforts to increase Democratic turnout ahead of the November election, including events featuring Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.
However, the evidence released publicly so far does not establish that Talarico personally designed or directed the $25 program, nor does it show that his campaign directly paid individuals in exchange for votes.
That distinction is important as the allegations continue to circulate.
What the undercover footage does establish is that McAdams, a Texas Majority PAC organizing manager, described a $25 payment tied to a political Zoom session as a “roundabout way of paying people for their votes” and acknowledged that directly paying someone to vote for a candidate would not be permissible.
Texas Majority PAC, meanwhile, says that description came from a rogue employee and does not accurately describe how the organization operates.
That dispute is now at the center of the controversy.
With the November election approaching, the video is likely to fuel additional questions about paid political organizing, the use of voter-targeting technology and the boundary between compensating people for legitimate campaign work and providing incentives connected to their ballots.
The ultimate legal significance of the program will depend on the underlying facts—including what participants were required to do, how payments were structured and whether compensation was conditioned in any way on voting.
For now, the competing accounts leave one major question hanging over the operation: Was the $25 simply payment for political organizing work, as Texas Majority PAC maintains, or did the program function in practice as something closer to the “roundabout way” McAdams described?
That question is likely to remain under scrutiny as Texas heads toward November.
