Texas is about to elect a United States senator. By the time the counting is done, the race between state Representative James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton will have cost well over half a billion dollars. Not the whole Texas ballot. Not the state’s twenty-some congressional races. One seat, two candidates, one election.

As of the last full accounting on October 23, spending in the race had reached about $560 million — roughly $129 million spent by the two campaigns themselves, and about $431 million spent by outside groups for or against them. The final two weeks, historically the most expensive of any campaign, weren’t in those numbers yet. By the method OpenSecrets uses for its historical rankings, no Senate race has ever cost more. The old record — Georgia’s 2020 race between David Perdue and Jon Ossoff, which ran through a January runoff — was $516 million. Texas passed it with weeks to spare.

Here’s the part of the story that usually gets left on the floor: the candidates are minority shareholders in their own election. About 77 cents of every dollar spent in this race was spent by somebody other than the campaigns. Talarico’s campaign is the spending story on one side — about $114 million through the fall, built substantially on small money; his campaign reports raising $64 million in the third quarter alone, 97 percent of it in donations under $100. Paxton’s own campaign, by contrast, had spent only about $15 million. The Paxton effort lives elsewhere: outside groups backing him had spent roughly $239 million by late October, according to Reuters, and the largest of them, a super PAC called Texas PAC, had spent nearly $149 million by itself. Texas PAC was seeded from the Senate Leadership Fund, to which Elon Musk — a Texas resident these days — contributed $158 million, per federal filings reported by Reuters. One donor’s contribution is larger than what one of the two campaigns spent in total, by a factor of ten.

Now the yardstick, because this is where the story stops being about Texas. In the presidential election of 2000 — within the adult lifetime of everyone reading this — every presidential candidate in both parties combined spent $343 million, public financing included. The outside groups in this single Senate race have spent more than that. Four years later, the entire 2004 presidential field spent $718 million. This one Senate race is already at roughly three-quarters of that figure and still counting. A quarter-century ago, half a billion dollars didn’t buy a Senate seat; it bought you the White House, with change left over. (These comparisons use candidates’ own spending for the presidential years, as OpenSecrets reported them — the honest way to make the point is to say which pile of money you’re counting, and this post has tried to do that throughout.)

And what has the half-billion purchased? A coin flip. Polling through late October had the race inside the margin of error — Talarico with a small, consistent lead, per the Texas Politics Project’s Jim Henson, in the state’s most competitive statewide contest since 1994. More than 7.6 million Texans voted early — about 41 percent of everyone registered in the state, and a midterm record. The money didn’t buy certainty. It bought volume — an ad environment in which, per AdImpact’s tracking, this became the most expensive non-presidential race in American history while remaining, on the evidence, undecided until the voters actually decided it.

One last piece of arithmetic. A United States senator is paid $174,000 a year. A six-year term pays about $1.04 million. By Tuesday night, the campaign to fill that job will have cost something like five hundred times the salary the job pays over the entire term.

That’s why this isn’t really a politics story. Nobody in it can stop. Talarico can’t unilaterally disarm against a quarter-billion dollars of outside spending; Paxton can’t either; and the outside groups aren’t spending out of generosity — they’re spending because the seat is worth it to them, which is its own piece of information about where power in this system actually sits. The presidency used to be the most expensive prize in American politics. This year, a single Senate seat in Texas cost more than the presidency did a generation ago. The seat didn’t change. The price did.

Read more

• The full accounting, race by race, on the OpenSecrets method: “The Most Expensive House and Senate Races of 2026, Ranked” (davemanuel.com, compiling FEC filings and OpenSecrets outside-spending data), Oct 23, 2026.
• On the outside money and the Musk contribution: Reuters, “Republicans bet Musk’s millions can rescue Texas’ Paxton in US Senate race,” Oct 21, 2026.
• The historical record it passed: OpenSecrets, “Most Expensive Races” (Georgia 2020, Perdue–Ossoff: $516M, candidates plus outside groups).
• The presidential yardsticks: OpenSecrets / Center for Responsive Politics, presidential spending totals for 2000 ($343.1M) and 2004 ($717.9M), candidates’ spending.
• On the ad-spending record: AdImpact, via the Wall Street Journal’s late-October accounting (Republican-side advertising ~$274M; Democratic-side ~$133M).
• On the early-vote record: Texas Tribune, reporting preliminary Texas Secretary of State figures (more than 7.6 million early votes, about 40.5 percent of registered voters), Nov 1, 2026.