The Supreme Court Just Upended Campaign Finance Law

The Supreme Court on Tuesday axed longstanding limits on how much money party committees can spend in coordination with candidates, upending the campaign finance landscape in the middle of the 2026 midterm election cycle.

The ruling is a boon for Republican Party committees, which teamed up with Vice President JD Vance, who was a senator from Ohio when the case was filed, to argue that expenditure coordination limits violated the First Amendment right to free speech and have harmed party committees’ power in the super PAC era.

Vance and the GOP committees lost in lower courts before bringing the case before the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 in their favor.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the decision hinged on the question of whether the limits were necessary to prevent corruption — and ultimately decided they were not.

“The Court agrees with petitioners that the political-party coordinated-expenditure limits are not proportionate, necessary, and narrowly tailored given the other less-speech-restrictive tools available to the Government to prevent,” Kavanaugh wrote in the court’s opinion.

Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters called the ruling “a massive victory for the First Amendment.”

“Limiting the ability of political parties to work with and provide support directly to their candidates is not only ridiculous, it’s unconstitutional as the Supreme Court has now ruled,” Gruters wrote in a statement. He said the party committee had “been preparing for this ruling, and we are ready to expand the ways we directly help and provide resources to Republican candidates across the country.”

Party committees, which can raise significantly more money from a single donor than a candidate can, were already allowed to spend that money to back their candidates — but there were limits on how much they could spend in coordination with a campaign before it counted as contributions, which are also capped.

Kavanaugh’s ruling will allow those party committees and candidates to pool their resources, a change proponents argue allows party committees to reassert some of the power they previously lost to super PACs.

“By invalidating the coordinated party expenditure limits, you start to restore ... political parties to the relative political power that they’ve ultimately had, which I think is ultimately to the benefit of democracy itself,” Noel Francisco, the lawyer for Vance and the party committee, said during oral arguments in December 2025.

Experts expected the ruling to usher in the biggest change to campaign finance since Citizens United, the landmark 2010 Supreme Court ruling that limited independent spending by corporations and other outside groups violated their First Amendment right to free speech. Using that logic, a federal appeals court ruled in another 2010 case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, to allow unlimited contributions to “independent expenditure” committees, including super PACs — as long as the committee does not coordinate with candidates and files requisite disclosures with the Federal Election Commission.

Critics argue that striking the coordination limit opens the door to corruption, a concern raised during oral arguments by liberal justices as well as conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh said in December that, while he was worried about the loss of political parties relative to super PACs, “I’m also concerned, of course, about quid quo pro corruption and the circumvention concerns” that donors could effectively get around far lower candidate contribution limits by giving money to the party committee that will be used to support their campaign.

Kavanaugh also suggested in December that the parties could be back to challenge contribution limits altogether — limits he described as “the real source of the disadvantage” between party committees and super PACs.

Liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

“To count on disclosure to prevent corruption is as much as to give up on the goal itself. Which is, sad to say, what this Court does today,” Kagan wrote.

Republican Party committees have raised more money and had more cash on hand than their Democratic counterparts, giving the GOP an edge in some of the most hotly contested midterm elections.

The Republican National Committee had more than eight times as much cash on hand as the Democratic National Committee, according to the committee’s latest reports to the FEC. The RNC had almost $125.5 million in cash on hand as of April 30, while the DNC had just under $14.9 million.

The DNC also reported $18.3 million in debt, which includes a $15 million loan taken out in October 2025 and nearly $2.9 million to MissionWired for direct mail.

Political committees in both parties, including the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, have spent months preparing for the court’s long-expected decision, readying for what some of them call the biggest behind-the-scenes change to how campaigns operate in a generation.

In a joint statement, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene and DNC Chair Ken Martin slammed the ruling as “a win for billionaire donors and special interests who want more influence over the GOP agenda and an invitation for corruption.”

While the Democratic party committees criticized Republicans for “rewriting the rules in an effort to drown out the will of the voters by flooding elections with more money from their billionaire backers,” they stand to benefit from the decision as well.

At its heart, the ruling gives the committees — and the big-dollar donors who fund them — more power over how elections are run, the opportunity to fund more ads, better coordinate the party’s political response, and potentially even take over entire voter-outreach programs that were once the sole domain of individual campaigns.

That reverses a yearslong decline in the influence of the party committees, especially those tied to House and Senate, who have steadily ceded power to better-funded super PACs since the SpeechNow.org decision in 2010. The committees still can’t raise money in unlimited sums like outside groups can, but their ability now to freely coordinate with candidates (which super PACs are legally barred from doing) restores their place as the central hub of election activity.

“Committees almost get to be a quarterback,” said one national Republican operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “They essentially get to ensure what is going to be done by the campaign and campaign committees is going to be communicated effectively.”

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Tim Scott and NRCC Chair Richard Hudson said the ruling “made clear that the federal government has no authority to place arbitrary limits on how political parties support the candidates they nominate.”

The ruling’s most direct effect will likely be on how campaign ads are funded. For years, candidates’ own campaigns had a major advantage over party committees and super PACs when it came to ads, able to purchase them from TV and digital vendors for a much cheaper rate. But the fall of coordinated expenditure limits means party committees are now expected to have access to that lower rate, which political strategists say can be anywhere from three to 11 times cheaper than what outside groups have to spend.

“With the candidate rate, that’s hands down going to be the most important practical outcome of this ruling,” said Ryan Dollar, general counsel for the NRCC.

Committees previously had to set up independent expenditure committees to run ads, which were legally prohibited from coordinating with the official committees. Those IE programs are now expected to be heavily minimized this election cycle, if not outright eliminated.

Political strategists say the effects of the decision will be felt as soon as this year’s midterm election. But the full scale of its impact won’t be known for several more election cycles, as committees try to figure out the most efficient way to spend their money under the new set of rules.

“This is definitely going to have massive impacts on this election,” said one national Democratic operative, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about internal party strategy. “Because obviously we have not spent money yet in terms of coordinated spending. But do I do think you’re going to see a lot of, ‘Let’s try this. Do this work?’”