Politics

Supreme Court loosens campaign finance laws, opening up flood of midterm cash

Published

3 months ago

June 30, 2026

The Supreme Court struck down limits on coordinated spending between candidates and political parties on Tuesday, a win for Republicans that will fundamentally change how tens of millions of dollars are spent in congressional elections.

The decision will have an almost immediate impact on the midterms. Removing the limit on coordinated spending effectively gives candidates direct control over a far greater amount of money being spent on their races. It is also likely to increase the flood of political advertising that hits the airwaves each fall.

The 6-3 decision, which divided the court along its usual ideological lines, held that the limits violate the First Amendment.

The decision is a blow to Democrats, who argued that eliminating the limit on coordination would put more power into the hands of large donors who can cut bigger checks to party committees than to candidates. Republicans tend to get more money from large donors, while Democrats have been more reliant on small-dollar donors.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, called the limits a “severe infringement on First Amendment-protected political speech.” He also argued the ruling eliminating the limits could bolster political parties generally.

“To uphold the political-party coordinated-expenditure limits here could therefore help consign political parties to continued second-tier status as compared to outside groups,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Weakened political parties distort the political system.”

President Donald Trump hailed the ruling allowing parties to spend unlimited amounts in coordination with individual campaigns.

“The Supreme Court just took restrictions off political spending!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS and, more importantly, The First Amendment!”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee brought the case seeking to overturn the limits in 2022 alongside now-Vice President J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign. Trump’s Justice Department declined to defend the law in court, while Democratic groups intervened to oppose the lawsuit.

“By striking down these unconstitutional caps on coordinated spending, the Court has restored core political speech and ensured parties can compete on a level playing field,” NRSC Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) said in a joint statement. “We are ready to fully support our candidates and put them in the strongest possible position to win in 2026 and beyond.”

Democrats, who are already staring down substantial disadvantage in party fundraising this midterm cycle and are worried that the ruling will only amplify the impact of that disparity, were quick to deride the decision Tuesday.

“Today’s ruling is a win for billionaire donors and special interests who want more influence over the GOP agenda and an invitation for corruption,” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Suzan DelBene and Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a joint statement.

The ruling strengthens the parties themselves, allowing them to directly support their preferred candidates in a way that could empower their roles in the political ecosystem — and potentially weaken the influence of super PACs. Party committees on both sides have been preparing for the possibility for months and the decision is likely to have an immediate impact on campaign spending ahead of the November midterms.

Previously, coordinated spending between candidates and party committees, such as the NRCC or the DCCC, was capped, with the specific amounts depending on the size of the district or state. Those limits no longer apply.

That significantly alters the campaign finance landscape because parties can accept far larger donations than individual candidates — $44,300 per year for national party committees compared with $3,500 per cycle for candidates. Removing the limit on coordinated spending effectively gives candidates the ability to control a far greater sum of money that is being spent on their race.

That could also substantially change the makeup of political advertising on television, because candidates get far lower rates on TV ads than other groups. If their coordinated efforts with campaigns get the similarly low rate, they would have far more cash to tap to flood the airwaves, while super PACs will still have to pay a higher rate. As a result, campaigns might spend more of their budget on TV advertising, while super PACs may be more likely to pick up other campaigning costs, such as mailers and digital advertising.

Democrats have largely had the advantage in candidate fundraising, which has generally given them a leg up in battlegrounds when candidate fundraising was the most important. But NRSC has slightly more cash on hand than the DSCC, according to recent campaign finance reports, while the Republican National Committee has wildly outraised the DNC. Those party funds could now give the GOP the financial advantage in key states.

The court’s decision additionally eliminates the need for parties to mount their own independent expenditure arms, where they have traditionally spent tens of millions of dollars.

The decision is the latest in a series of blows the high court has dealt to campaign finance regulation over the past two decades. The 2010 Citizens United and Speechnow.org decisions enabled the rise of super PACs with no limit on donations. In 2014, the court struck down aggregate limits on individual donations. And in 2022, it struck down limits on candidates using donor funds to repay personal loans they had made to their campaigns.

“Today’s decision follows a string of disastrous campaign finance rulings from the Roberts Court that began with Citizens United,” Michael Beckel, director of money-in-politics reform at Issue One, said in a statement. “By eliminating the limits that have long governed how much money parties can spend in coordination with candidates, the Supreme Court has further empowered wealthy donors and special interests with outsized influence in elections.”

Politics

NRSC Chair Tim Scott leaves Georgia, North Carolina off his list of top Senate targets

Published

4 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is shifting its focus away from the North Carolina and Georgia Senate races as it works to shore up red states like Texas and flip other Democratic-held seats.

In a closed-door meeting Wednesday, Sen. Tim Scott, the chair of the NRSC, told Senate Republicans that the campaign arm will focus its spending going forward on defending GOP seats in Maine, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Texas and trying to flip the Democratic-held seats of Michigan and New Hampshire, according to four people in the room who were granted anonymity to share private details.

That list notably leaves out North Carolina GOP nominee Michael Whatley’s battle against Democrat Roy Cooper and Georgia GOP nominee Mike Collins’ effort to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.

Scott’s briefing is the clearest sign yet that Republicans have deprioritized the two states, as POLITICO has reported, while senior Republicans grow increasingly resigned to the possibility of losing those races. It’s a remarkable shift: President Donald Trump carried Georgia twice in 2016 and 2024 and North Carolina over the last three presidential elections.

In deprioritizing North Carolina, the NRSC is effectively ceding a state that Democrats haven’t won in the Senate since 2008.

Still, other GOP groups with massive war chests, including Trump’s MAGA Inc., could pick up the slack.

Scott also shared with the senators polling showing Republicans are locked in tight battles in several other key races, which tracks with much of the public polling, according to the four people.

For example, one poll found that GOP Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio is still trailing former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Scott also showed polling indicating Republican John Sununu is essentially neck-and-neck with Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, a seat Republicans are laser-focused on trying to flip.

NRSC did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Collins’ campaign.

“As Roy Cooper said earlier this year about U.S. Senate races in North Carolina, ‘Democrats are often ahead until they are not.’ And then just last week Cooper, correctly, observed, ‘We know a lot of undecided voters lean Republican.’ We’re confident we will have the resources to get our message out to North Carolina voters and win,” said Whatley Spokesman DJ Griffin in a statement.

Georgia GOP party chair Josh McKoon dismissed the notion that his state was being deprioritized by Republicans in Washington, even as he acknowledged beating Ossoff will be a challenge.

“Every cycle, someone in Washington leaks that they’re thinking about moving money,” he said in a text message. “What matters is who shows up — and what the actual numbers say.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is set to headline a fundraiser for Collins in Atlanta on Thursday, alongside the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp. The Collins campaign is also making the case that one in 10 Georgia voters — who backed Trump in 2024 and plan to vote for Jackson — are still “up for grabs,” according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.

“The goal in Georgia is to strike a balance where you are spending as little for Senate as possible while not derailing Rick Jackson’s, so far, very strong bid for Governor in a difficult environment,” said a GOP pollster granted anonymity to speak candidly about the landscape. Public polling shows the governor’s race has much tighter margins, with Jackson leading Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms in some recent surveys.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who lost his Senate primary to Trump-backed Ken Paxton, was also in the room. He later told Blue Light News that the party has to make tough decisions.

“At some point I think the people spending that money are going to have to make hard choices and figure out where the money can have the biggest impact, and certainly Texas is the most expensive,” Cornyn said.

Politics

The NY governor race pollster scrum

Published

5 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A new Quinnipiac University poll has Gov. Kathy Hochul leading her Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman by a sizable margin.

Q THE LANDSLIDE: Quinnipiac University released a poll today that found Gov. Kathy Hochul leading Republican Bruce Blakeman 58-39 — putting her on track for the fourth-largest landslide by a New York gubernatorial candidate in the past 200 years.

It’s by far the best poll for Hochul this year and certainly better than a Siena University survey out this morning that found her with a modest 9 point lead over the Nassau County executive.

So which one’s closer to reality?

The last time both pollsters released New York numbers on the same day was a few weeks before Hochul’s last election in 2022. Siena found at the time that her lead over then-Rep. Lee Zeldin was quickly shrinking, having dropped from 17 to 11 points.

The Q Poll painted a more dire picture for the governor.

“We released a poll in mid-October showing that Hochul had a 4 point lead over Lee Zeldin,” Quinnipiac spokesperson Mary Snow said. “And it went against the grain of other polls out there at the time.”

Hochul wound up winning that race by about 6 points.

Pollster vs. pollster results in prior elections have been mixed. Both Q and Siena nailed Andrew Cuomo’s eventual 23 point margin of victory in October 2018 polls, though Siena’s early November numbers that year found Cuomo’s lead had shrunk to 13. An infamous Q Poll from September 2010 found Cuomo with a stunningly small 6 point lead over Buffalo firebrand Carl Paladino, while a Siena poll the next day found a much more predictive 57-24 Cuomo advantage.

The biggest difference this time around is that Quinnipiac assumed a higher share of November’s turnout will be in deep blue New York City.

The five boroughs accounted for 31 percent of the statewide turnout in 2022 and 34 percent in 2018. Siena’s sample assumed 30 percent of this year’s voters will come from there, while 38 percent of Quinnipiac’s sample was from the city.

Quinnipiac also does more to avoid undecided voters. “One tweak that we made after 2020 was an adjustment to the questions that we ask, so that we try to cut down on the number of people who say they don’t know,” Snow said.

Only 3 percent of the Q Poll’s sample declined to weigh in on the Hochul-Blakeman race, while the comparable number was 9 percent in Siena’s poll. And it appears as if a lot of the Quinnipiac respondents who might not have answered Siena’s questions broke toward the incumbent: Siena has Hochul winning New York City 61-27 while Quinnipiac has her up 70-27; Siena had her up 57-34 among women while Quinnipiac found her lead at 63-34.

Another notable difference between the methodologies that may account for the divergent results is that Quinnipiac’s sample was based on asking respondents what party they affiliate with. Siena uses voter registration files.

“For a couple of years running, the New York Times/Siena Poll was ranked as the most accurate poll in America,” Siena spokesperson Steve Greenberg said. “Siena has been polling New York state for nearly a quarter of a century, and we have shown that we get it right almost all of the time.”

Republicans, for their part, believe both sets of numbers are far overstating Hochul’s advantage.

“Blakeman is closer in the polls I’ve seen than Lee Zeldin was at this moment in time four years ago,” state Senate Republican Campaign Committee Chair George Borrello said. “As I travel around New York state, I have seen literally thousands of Bruce Blakeman signs. Yet I can count on one hand the number of Kathy Hochul signs I’ve seen, unless you count the ones that say ‘Fire Hochul.’” — Bill Mahoney

From the Capitol

A new program has made progress in awarding large-scale batteries and contracting new renewables.

MEGAWATT DEAL: New York has made its first awards for large-scale batteries under a new program and secured contracts for new renewables that are close to getting built.

The state’s energy authority contracted for 719 megawatts from 13 solar, wind and hydroelectric projects and 950 megawatts of battery storage from eight projects.

NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen Harris announced the awards Wednesday during a Climate Week event hosted by the state’s renewable developers association.

“Everything that we do with respect to our energy system costs money,” Harris said. “When we invest in clean energy, not only are we talking about low single-digit percentage increases in cost, we are talking about benefits that far exceed those costs.”

Hochul warned that federal headwinds and rising expenses made a more ambitious pace of transitioning to clean energy too costly as she successfully fought to weaken New York’s ambitious climate law earlier this year. But she has highlighted her continued support for progress on offshore wind, renewables, storage and nuclear this week.

New York and developers are racing the expiration of federal tax credits. Renewables that didn’t start construction by July 4 — or don’t finish work by the end of the year if they start after that deadline — won’t be eligible for those key incentives that lower the cost of contracts for the state.

FROM CITY HALL

Bellevue Hospital CEO Eric Wei speaks during a press conference announcing $26.5 million in funding from the City Council.

MAKING ROOM: Bellevue Hospital announced a major renovation and expansion of its inpatient psychiatric wing, fueled by an infusion of $26.5 million from the City Council.

Bellevue, which is part of the NYC Health + Hospitals system, will use the new capital funding to add 40 beds for adult psychiatric patients over the next few years — bringing the division’s total capacity to 204 beds.

Hospital officials said the expansion will ease the bottleneck of patients with severe mental illnesses who need to be admitted for continued observation and treatment; those inpatient psychiatric units have been operating consistently at 98% capacity.

“The need here demanded an investment of this scale,” Council member Virginia Maloney, who spearheaded the funding, said during a news conference in the hospital’s atrium.

Bellevue Hospital CEO Eric Wei said the facility has seen a bump in psychiatric patients since the April 2025 closure of Mount Sinai Beth Israel several blocks away. Bellevue’s dedicated ER for psychiatric patients, which Wei said sees about 30 patients daily, is undergoing its own $40 million expansion.

“We are unfortunately needing to transfer out about 90 patients a month to other inpatient units because there’s no room in our inpatient psychiatric units,” Wei said in an interview. “We’re always feeling like I’m toeing the line. We’re very busy.”

Bellevue was so overwhelmed as of late that hospital officials asked FDNY to stop bringing them patients with psychiatric emergencies, according to EMS union Local 2507. Those diversion requests continued for at least a couple weeks in late August and early September, a union spokesperson said. — Maya Kaufman

IN OTHER NEWS

— INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE: A NYC high school which once enrolled 3,000 students now has only 90. (The City Reporter)

— FIRST IN THE NATION: In a new TV ad, Hochul is touting her first-in-the-nation data center moratorium. (City & State)

— HITTING THE BRAKES: The rollout of electric school buses in New York state has been rocky. (The New York Times)

Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.

Politics

Trump officials weigh rolling back beef import plan as GOP midterm panic spreads

Published

7 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A small group of White House officials are exploring whether to cut back President Donald Trump’s decision to increase foreign beef imports, as GOP panic rises ahead of the midterms.

The proposal to reduce the amount of imports is being discussed within the Domestic Policy Council headed by Vince Haley, a longtime Trump speechwriter and former campaign official, and a few other officials at the White House, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations, who were granted anonymity to share private details.

Trump officials are unsure if anything will come of the talks. The two people said the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative disagrees with cutting back the imports, since it aims to lower high consumer beef prices in the short term and since USTR helped implement the move.

But their conversations about partly rolling back the beef policy — which Trump instituted in August — is a clear sign the White House is trying to stem the alarm from battleground and farm-state Republicans as high prices and Trump’s tariffs roil their election campaigns. The White House is also preparing a plan on diesel exports, likely with exemptions, amid sky-high prices from the Iran war.

The White House, USTR and Department of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment.

Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP Senate nominee, took the extraordinary step this week of publicly breaking with Trump, saying gas prices were too high because of the Iran war and that farmers in her state are suffering. Michigan Senate GOP nominee Mike Rogers and other vulnerable House and Senate Republicans have made similar breaks.

Farm-state lawmakers in Iowa and beyond have publicly called for the White House to provide some relief from the beef import executive action in particular, because of its impact on farmers and ranchers.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the rest of the Iowa delegation and other senior farm-state lawmakers have all pressed the administration to change course — to no avail.

Trump did sign an executive order of rancher-friendly policies as a way to address the initial backlash. But U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer made clear to a group of House Republicans in a closed-door briefing earlier this month that Trump’s executive action to import 300,000 metric tons of beef without certain tariffs and at discounted prices would go forward as planned, as Blue Light News first reported.