The Texas Republican Senate runoff between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton is on Tuesday 26 May, seven days from now. Combined spending across both runoff rounds has passed $120 million; pro-Cornyn forces are outspending pro-Paxton forces 4-to-1 inside the runoff itself1. Fellowship PAC, the crypto super PAC backed by Tether and Cantor Fitzgerald, filed a $1.75 million independent expenditure supporting Paxton in late April as part of the larger $3 million-plus deployment plan. The PAC then amended the Federal Election Commission filing to remove the buy after pressure from Trump adviser Chris LaCivita and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The ads never aired.
The sequence makes the scrub the news, not the spending. Fellowship PAC committed a candidate-specific buy on paper, was leant on by the establishment campaign apparatus that the NRSC inquiry under Howard Lutnick had already foreshadowed, and amended the filing within days. Brookings Institution election-law specialist Daniel Tokaji noted that an FEC amendment of this kind, while procedurally routine, is unusually rare on an active runoff buy. The Republican counter-view, advanced by Fellowship spokesman Eric Soufer, is that the amendment reflects an internal accounting move, not a withdrawal under pressure; the FEC paperwork supports both readings.
On a parallel track, Democratic state representative James Talarico raised $27 million in Q1 2026, the largest quarterly Senate haul on record in any state, with 97% of donations under $100 and 540,000-plus donors across 246 of 254 Texas counties2. Talarico awaits the Cornyn-Paxton winner; the runoff tests the limit of crypto-PAC power inside the Republican establishment. The general election will test whether grassroots Democratic money buys Texas competitiveness for the first Senate cycle since 2018.
Fellowship's May FEC monthly report is due on or about Wednesday 20 May, which will confirm or narrow the $89 million gap between claimed and disclosed cash that has accompanied the PAC since formation. The Fairshake PAC overclaim has widened in parallel, with $134.6 million raised against $193 million claimed, a $58.4 million gap. Two crypto super PACs are running the same overclaim pattern in the cycle's first major federal test.
