Sky McAdams had a one-hour Zoom class to sell. For $25, participants would log in, learn why voting matters, and hear why Republicans are supposedly ruining everything. Then they'd go vote for Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico. McAdams, the organizing manager for the George Soros-backed Texas Majority PAC, described the arrangement on hidden camera with the precision of a man who didn't know he was being recorded.
"It's like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially," McAdams said.
The undercover footage shows McAdams walking through the mechanics of the operation without a trace of hesitation. The PAC contracted with a company called Relentless, which runs software called Rally to conduct what it markets as "paid relational programs." Participants get $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom session pitched as civic education. The content of that education, per McAdams himself, is a rundown of why Republicans are "causing all of these bad things."
Then comes the part where McAdams evaluates his own program's legality. "It's a little gray," he told the undercover journalist. And the kicker, the line that turned a local PAC story into a national one: "That's shady as f**k."
His words. About his own operation. On camera.
The financial trail makes the scale clear. Texas Majority PAC paid Relentless $500,000 through July — roughly 20 percent of the PAC's total expenditures. At $25 per head, that's a theoretical ceiling of 20,000 purchased ballots. Relentless itself has claimed responsibility for generating 47,533 Democratic votes across five states in 2024. That's not a guess. That's their sales pitch to future clients.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running against Talarico for the U.S. Senate seat, responded within hours. "Absolutely outrageous," Paxton said. "James Talarico's team just admitted they are trying to bribe people for votes. Texans aren't for sale, no matter how much James Talarico thinks they are."
The PAC's defense was swift and predictable. A Texas Majority PAC spokesperson told Conservative Review that McAdams had "misrepresented the program" and that he'd been fired. Participants, the spokesperson insisted, were being paid for "grassroots organizing work." The man running the program called it vote-buying on camera. The organization's response was to fire him and call it a misunderstanding. The program itself continues.
Talarico won his primary against Jasmine Crockett by 145,000 votes. He's now trying to flip a seat in a state where Colin Allred lost the 2024 Senate race by 959,000 votes and John Cornyn won in 2020 by over a million. Those are the margins a Democrat has to close in Texas. And this is apparently how the Soros network plans to close them — one $25 Zoom call at a time.
The undercover footage doesn't require interpretation. McAdams wasn't tricked into a gotcha. He wasn't taken out of context. He explained the operation, assessed its legality, and rated its ethics — all in the same breath. "Shady as f**k" wasn't an accusation from the outside. It was an internal review.
When your own organizing manager grades the program and the grade is "shady as f**k," the voters being paid aren't the ones who should worry about what they signed up for.
