Published July 8, 2026
Last week’s Supreme Court decision in NRSC v. FEC altered decades of campaign finance law. It might also have changed the trajectory of the 2026 midterms.
The question that was at the heart of the case might seem dry: Did the law limiting the amount of money a party-controlled campaign committee can spend in coordination with a candidate violate the First Amendment? That limitation was created in an effort to keep large donors from using party donations to circumvent limits on what they can give to individual candidates. The court found, in a 6-3 decision, that the law ran afoul of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free political speech, since some of its less-restrictive measures could advance the same goal.
Such an arcane finding might have been of interest only to lawyers and campaign strategists but for a fact not presented to the court: Another law provides candidate campaigns with significantly reduced rates on television and radio ad time. Factor that in, and suddenly the ruling offered the GOP a massive boost.
More than that, it gave President Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC a golden opportunity to reset the fall’s campaign narrative.
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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a globally recognized expert on American elections and policy as well as global populism.
