Reading · My Adirondack Diary

July 11, 2026 ~ Vol. 59

The Supreme Court just threw gasoline onto the political fire.

In my last Substack post, I lamented the general state of our country’s politics, and the specific mechanics of our current political system. In the last line of that essay, I wrote:

“The current system no longer works, and it is tearing us apart as a nation. Introducing ranked choice voting and open primaries, along with eliminating dark money from politics, are among the remedies that we must consider.”

No sooner had the proverbial ink dried on that comment, when the Supreme Court weighed in with their decision in the case of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) against the Federal Election Commission (FEC), striking down the currently imposed limits on coordinated party expenditures—spending by party committees like the NRSC or the RNC with the personal campaigns of active political candidates. In a surprise to absolutely no one, the court split 6-3. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the majority.

The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, with Kagan writing the dissenting opinion. According to NPR,

“the core of Kagan’s argument was that removing the coordination limits reopens the door to the kind of corruption the base contribution limits were designed to prevent. Her central image was that without a cap on coordinated spending, a political party essentially becomes a “checking account” a candidate can draw on — meaning wealthy donors who are barred from giving large sums directly to a candidate could instead route unlimited money through the party, which could then coordinate that spending directly with the candidate’s campaign, effectively erasing the distinction the individual contribution limits were meant to preserve.”

This decision didn’t change the rules for PACs generally; independent-expenditure PACs and super PACs could already spend unlimited amounts, they just couldn’t…ahem…coordinate with the actual campaigns. What changed is that the fig leaf ostensibly prohibiting the coordination of spending between supporting PACs and the campaigns themselves has now been removed. Let the dark money flow.

The all too predictable opinion pieces also flowed with conservatives praising the removal of these “unconstitutional” spending limits and liberals labeling the decision as the end of democracy as we know it. One of my favorite comments came from Marc Elias at Democracy Docket, bless his heart. Elias’s email arrived in my inbox:

“Why the Supreme Court says JD Vance is running for Senate in 2028”.

Vance running for Senate? Well, that’s absurd, but why should it matter? (If we’re going too deep into the weeds here, just stay with me for a while more—if you weren’t of the opinion that the Supreme Court is in the tank for Republicans yet, you will be when you finish reading this.)

As a general rule, the Supreme Court will only weigh in on active cases between active litigants. They cannot just pick a topic and weigh in on the merits of an argument. One of the litigants in this particular case was none other than JD Vance, who had filed the suit when he was running for Senate in 2022.

Elias’s email continued:

Why would a sitting vice president and a potential 2028 GOP presidential candidate opt to run for Senate again? He wouldn’t — and the Supreme Court very well knows that. But without that “fact,” the Court would likely have had to dismiss the Republican Party’s lawsuit.
It was then-Senate candidate Vance who sued to challenge campaign coordination limits back in 2022, so without Vance as an active candidate, the Court would have lacked jurisdiction to hear the case at all.
And the conservative justices were not about to let that happen.
Dismissal would have wiped out a case Republicans had spent four years litigating. More practically, it would have denied the GOP a sizable war chest to aid its candidates in the 2026 midterms.
The conservative majority clearly wanted to decide this case now — so it simply declared Vance an active Senate candidate, a race he plainly has no intention of running.
To get around this, the Court seized on paperwork Vance had filed before he became Trump’s running mate. As the majority put it, “Vance still maintains an active ‘Statement of Candidacy’ on file with the FEC indicating his intent to run for Senate in 2028, as well as a principal campaign committee (JD Vance for Senate) that has raised money for a Senate race.”
According to the Court, that does the trick: “The statement of candidacy and the extant campaign committee cannot be ignored for justiciability purposes, and they establish that the case is not moot.”
Courts are supposed to hear only actual cases and controversies, and to avoid deciding constitutional questions when they can. Federal candidates, for their part, are supposed to update their FEC paperwork rather than let it sit as a placeholder for offices they have no intention of seeking.
Bending the rules might be tempting in any one instance. In this instance, it was irresistible. The result is a gaping hole in our campaign finance system — one that both Vance and the Supreme Court majority happen to favor.
A genuinely conservative Court, confronted with this problem, would have dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction. It might even have called out Vance for failing to correct his federal filings. But that is not the Court we have.
Instead, the Court searched for a way to keep the case alive. It wanted to strike down a 50-year-old statute and overturn precedent — and it wanted to do so while the GOP could still cash in on a spending advantage for 2026.

You might ask (I know that I asked)—are there any other reasons that Vance would not have deactivated his Senate Campaign Committee—other than to give the court a reason to accept this case? As it turns out, there are, and all (surprise!) benefit Vance financially.

According to my assistant, Claude, the benefits of keeping an active “Statement of Candidacy” would be the following:

Fundraising capacity stays “on,” not “exploratory.” An active Statement of Candidacy lets a committee raise money under normal contribution limits ($3,500/individual per election as of recent cycles) without being treated as merely “testing the waters,” which comes with more restrictive rules. A live committee can solicit and bank money continuously.
Funds can be transferred, not just spent or refunded. Under FEC rules, a federal candidate can transfer unlimited funds between his own authorized committees (e.g., a Senate committee to a future presidential or different federal committee). Winding the Senate committee down would force him to either spend the money on the stated purpose, refund donors, or give it away to a party/other candidates — options that lose him direct control of the cash. Keeping it open preserves optionality to redeploy that money toward whatever office he does eventually seek.
No obligation to disband. Federal committees can sit dormant-but-technically-active indefinitely, filing routine reports, without forcing a decision about winding down. This avoids triggering the accounting and disposal-of-funds requirements that come with formally terminating a committee.
Donor list and joint fundraising infrastructure stay intact. An active committee can keep operating a joint fundraising committee with party committees, maintaining email/donor lists and bundling arrangements — a durable political asset regardless of which race he ultimately runs.
Now, post-ruling, added leverage. Since coordinated party spending is unlimited for candidates with live committees, keeping the Senate committee open means the NRSC or RNC could, in principle, coordinate spending with it — building infrastructure, polling, or ad capacity tied to that committee — rather than that door being closed to him.

Of course, Vance has no intention of running for Senate; he is already measuring for drapes in the White House residence. Recent polling has him running ahead of Marco Rubio in Republican circles, but that lead has diminished over the last few months—no doubt in sync with Trump’s declining approval ratings. Last month’s Big Data Polling had him at 35% among Republican voters with Marco Rubio in second place with 17%. Vance topped the recent CPAC straw poll with 53% of the vote. In May, an Emerson College poll had him tied with Rubio at 35%.

In hypothetical general election polling the results are a lot more interesting, especially if your loyalties lie with the Democrats.

Hold on to those KAMALA T-shirts; several polls have Vance trailing Kamala Harris by high single digits to low double digits (e.g., Zogby: Harris 48.5% to Vance 42.1%; Public Sentiment Institute: Harris ~49% to Vance ~38%).

Against Gavin Newsom, results vary by pollster — some show Vance with a slim lead (Center Square: 36–33%; Zogby: Vance ahead of Newsom), others show Newsom ahead by a few points (Overton Insights: Newsom +3; Public Sentiment Institute: Newsom 45% to Vance 39%; Morning Consult had it essentially tied).

But here is my favorite: against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recent polling (Public Sentiment Institute, June 2026) showed her leading Vance by roughly 9 points.

The current partisan extremism is evidencing itself in the polling, with closed party primaries stifling the voices, and prospects, of more moderate candidates.

Vance v. AOC in 28? Hey, it could happen.

Ranked choice voting looking better now isn’t it?

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