A Democratic political action committee in Texas fired its organizing manager after undercover video captured him describing a $25-per-person Zoom payment program as "a roundabout way of paying people for their votes", and the PAC has already spent more than $718,000 on the scheme this year.

Sky McAdams, the organizing manager for Texas Majority PAC, made the remarks in footage obtained by Townhall Media and published Thursday. In the video, McAdams laid out the mechanics plainly: the PAC pays people $25 each to attend a one-hour Zoom class that teaches "why voting is important and why the Republicans are causing all of these bad things." He did not dress it up.

Texas Majority PAC fired McAdams after the video surfaced. A PAC spokesperson told Blaze News that "the way it was described by one rogue employee is factually incorrect, not how we operate, and they were immediately fired." The PAC insisted participants "are being paid for grassroots organizing work."

But McAdams' own words on camera tell a different story, one that raises serious questions about how far a Democratic operation will stretch the law to put cash in voters' hands.

McAdams acknowledged the legal line, and said the PAC walks right up to it

The undercover footage does not show a confused low-level staffer fumbling through talking points. McAdams spoke with the confidence of someone who understood the program's design and its legal exposure. He acknowledged that paying voters directly for their ballots is illegal.

As McAdams put it on camera:

"You can't be like, 'Here's $25, go vote for me.' You can say, 'Attend a one-hour class and you can receive $25.' And then the class just talks about the importance of... It's a little gray."

"A little gray" is a remarkable concession from someone running the program. McAdams went further, volunteering what the other side would think of the arrangement:

"If I was a Republican, I would be pissed."

That line alone suggests McAdams understood the program's purpose was not standard voter education. He framed it as something that would, and should, provoke outrage from political opponents. The PAC now calls him a "rogue employee." His description of the program, however, tracks closely with the PAC's own spending records.

$718,000 to a single firm for 'relational organizing'

Texas Majority PAC's campaign finance filings show the operation is not small. A July filing with the Texas Ethics Commission revealed the PAC paid $500,000 to a firm called Relentless for a "relational organizing program." That payment alone represented roughly 20 percent of the PAC's total expenditures at the time. By this year's count, the PAC has paid Relentless more than $718,000, with additional transfers going to Relentless' own PAC.

At $25 per participant, the $500,000 figure alone could theoretically cover payments to 20,000 people. The PAC has not disclosed how many individuals have actually received payments or attended the Zoom sessions.

With the 2026 midterms approaching and Republicans looking to build on recent momentum, the scale of spending raises a basic question: what exactly are Texas voters being paid to do?

Relentless distances itself from its own client's employee

Relentless, the firm running the program, posted a statement on its website Wednesday, the day before Townhall published the video, insisting McAdams "is not an employee or volunteer with Relentless, and has never been." The company said it "provides a service running organizing programs, and we abide by all applicable laws."

The statement added that Relentless "does not support the description or characterization in the video of the program we are running for our client in Texas." On a separate page of its website, the firm addresses the compensation question directly: "Is the compensation tied to votes? No. That's illegal."

Relentless describes its paid relational programs as recruiting low-propensity voters, people unlikely to show up on Election Day, and compensating them for their time as they "reach, persuade, and mobilize friends and family." The company is not new to this work. In 2024, Relentless ran similar programs in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. The firm claims those programs produced nearly 50,000 Democratic votes.

That number, if accurate, shows the model's reach. It also shows the stakes. Five battleground states. Tens of thousands of votes. And a payment structure that even the PAC's own organizing manager called "a little gray."

Texas Majority PAC built its operation from Beto O'Rourke's playbook

Texas Majority PAC was founded in December 2022, originally under the name Texas Together. Its co-founders and "most" of its staff are alumni of Beto O'Rourke's campaigns. The PAC's stated goal is to "permanently flip Texas blue." It currently supports Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful James Talarico.

Talarico has not publicly commented on the payment scheme or McAdams' firing. The Christian Post sent a request for comment to Texas Majority PAC on Thursday and received no response.

The PAC's ambitions are large. Flipping Texas would reshape national politics for a generation. But the methods matter. When your own organizing manager describes your flagship program as a workaround for vote-buying laws, on camera, in plain English, the "rogue employee" defense only goes so far.

Critics of Democratic campaign tactics have long argued that the party's ground-game infrastructure pushes legal boundaries in ways that would draw immediate scrutiny if Republicans tried the same approach. Vice President Vance has warned that Democratic leadership is drifting toward methods and ideologies that put political power ahead of the rules ordinary Americans are expected to follow.

No investigation announced, yet

No law enforcement agency or election authority has publicly announced an investigation into the payment program. No charges have been filed. McAdams himself noted on the video that direct vote-buying is illegal, while describing the Zoom-class structure as the legal workaround that makes the payments permissible.

The distinction matters legally. Federal and state laws prohibit paying someone to vote or to register to vote. Paying someone to attend a class that happens to urge them to vote, and to vote for Democrats specifically, occupies territory that McAdams himself called gray. Whether prosecutors or election regulators see it the same way remains an open question.

Meanwhile, the political environment in Washington continues to sharpen. The Senate's razor-thin confirmation of Attorney General Todd Blanche underscored how closely divided the parties remain on questions of law enforcement and institutional accountability. Whether the new Justice Department takes interest in schemes like the one McAdams described is anyone's guess.

What is not a guess is what McAdams said on tape. He called the program a roundabout way to pay for votes. He said it was gray. He said Republicans should be angry about it. Texas Majority PAC can fire him, but it cannot unring that bell.

Relentless, for its part, has expanded from five battleground states in 2024 to Texas in 2026. The model is growing. The money is flowing, more than $718,000 this year alone from a single PAC. And the firm's own website acknowledges the question everyone is asking: is the compensation tied to votes?

Their answer is no. Their client's organizing manager, on camera, said yes, just with extra steps.

The ongoing political battles in Texas Republican circles have consumed plenty of attention this year. But this story deserves a different kind of scrutiny, the kind that follows the money, reads the filings, and asks whether a one-hour Zoom class is really what $718,000 buys.

When the man running the program tells you it is a roundabout way to pay for votes, the least a free country can do is take him at his word and investigate.