Trump MAGA Inc. $403 million war chest spending in 2026 midterms

After sitting on a $403 million war chest for months, President Donald Trump’s flagship super PAC has finally opened the spending floodgates. The rapid deployment of Make America Great Again Inc.’s cash is reshaping some of the tightest congressional races ahead of the 2026 midterm election.

For Republicans, the cavalry couldn’t come soon enough.

GOP candidates spent months wondering when Trump’s massive coffer would come to their aid as Democratic opponents outraised them, sentiment soured on the economy and an expanding number of competitive Senate races pushed the party onto the defensive.

But with fewer than seven weeks until Election Day, the question is how much value Trump’s allies can wring from such an enormous sum, with some of the best advertising space already reserved and the most valuable voters being bombarded from every direction.

“They can still effectively use that money, but the ship has sailed on using it as effectively as possible,” said Joshua Wolf, a partner at AL Media Strategy, a Democratic political media firm, and co-founder of Warchest, a campaign budgeting platform used by Democratic campaigns. “It is not too late for it to have an impact. But they’ve sort of missed their window to optimize the value of that money for sure.”

Still, finding places to spend it is not the problem.

“Can it be deployed? Sure,” said Ken Goldstein, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco and a former president of a political consulting firm that has worked for both Democratic and Republican campaigns. “Is it a little bit more difficult later in the game? Sure. But there’s plenty of ways to deploy that money.”

Entering July, Democratic candidates held a roughly 2-to-1 cash advantage across seven of the most competitive Senate battlegrounds, stockpiling about $75 million in combined cash compared with the GOP’s $38 million, according to a CNBC analysis of the most recent Federal Election Commission filings.

The gap was starkest in Texas. Democratic nominee James Talarico entered July with $21.5 million in cash on hand, more than 12 times the $1.8 million held by his Republican opponent Ken Paxton, according to FEC records.

That early cash advantage can give campaigns more time to shape the race before most voters fully tune in.

“Democrats will tend to try and go a little bit earlier with advertising and try and define the race before it gets baked in,” Goldstein said. Republicans, he said, have historically been more willing to wait, on the theory that voters — particularly in midterms — do not begin paying close attention until closer to Election Day.

Over the past two weeks, three Trump-linked super PACs have reserved more than $136.5 million in advertising across House…