President Donald Trump's Republicans lost the 2026 midterm elections in a remarkable sweep for the Democrats — a result made all the more striking, MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace observed on Thursday, because Republicans spent as much money as they legally and practically could.

Wallace made the point during a conversation with The Bulwark's Tim Miller, arguing that Elon Musk's extraordinary spending failed to move the needle in the cycle. The candidates at the center of the exchange were James Talarico, a Democratic state representative from the Austin area, and Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general.

“All of Elon Musk's money didn't move Talarico's favorables down a point,” Wallace told Miller. “Didn't move Paxton's up, right? Like, Elon Musk spent all of the money that he could pour into the cycle [roughly $200 million]. There was no limit. The number he spent wasn't because that was all he was willing to spend, that was because that was all that there was to buy in terms of airtime and mailers and consultants that could burn through it.”

The absence of a ceiling Wallace invoked reflects a core feature of modern U.S. campaign-finance law: independent election spending — money not coordinated with a candidate's own campaign — has been protected from dollar limits since the Supreme Court's Buckley v. Valeo ruling in 1976, and the 2010 Citizens United decision extended that protection to corporate-funded efforts.

Miller, for his part, reflected on why he found Wallace's observation meaningful, framing Musk's outlays against the scale of his wealth and business footprint.

“He's a trillionaire,” Miller said of Musk, who is CEO of companies including Tesla and SpaceX. “He's the richest guy in the world. He's got this little fiefdom out by the airport now. They're pushing data centers in the state. And then he has $200 million plus on TV trying to buy his own senator.”

The Bulwark pundit also singled out a line from Talarico's acceptance speech on Tuesday night as particularly poignant: “Texas is not for sale. You cannot come here, take our land, take our rights, and buy your own personal senator.”

“The crowd reaction to that was really powerful,” Miller added.

Despite burning at least one-fifth of a billion dollars in the effort to defeat Talarico — and reportedly a quarter-billion elsewhere — Musk does not appear to have voted himself.

“State and local records show that Musk did not vote for her—or anyone,” The Daily Beast's Noah Kirsch reported, adding that Musk “did vote during Flores' race in June, records show, and also previously cast an absentee ballot in the 2020 elections.” The June contest Kirsch referenced was the special election won by Republican Mayra Flores, whose U.S. House district includes part of Cameron County.

In comments cited by Kirsch, the election administrator for Cameron County — the far southern Texas county that is home to SpaceX's Starbase launch site near Boca Chica — said, “based on our records, we do not have any indication that Mr. Musk participated in the November 2022 Election in Cameron County.” The official continued that “Musk could not have voted in another county, since that would have triggered the cancellation of his initial registration.”

Kirsch added that “an official in the Texas Secretary of State's Office confirmed that Musk is only registered to vote in Cameron County, noting that any changes would show up in state databases. The office's records also showed that Musk did not vote in the midterms.”

In October, former President Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary Robert Reich described Musk — who said Reich should go to prison for criticizing him — as “a bully-in-chief in the Oval Office and the world's wealthiest bully dictating American foreign policy — both of whom are now pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into our elections in order to avoid accountability.”