The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision in NRSC v. FEC ruled on Tuesday that political parties can spend unlimited amounts of money in coordination with candidates, undoing a decades-old law limiting such coordination.

The case was brought to the court by Vice President JD Vance and the NRSC, the Republican Party’s Senate campaign committee, during the 2022 election when Vance was running for an open Senate seat in Ohio. Limited by weak fundraising, Vance wanted to rely on the NRSC’s deeper pockets for advertising that would be fully coordinated with his campaign. But federal campaign finance laws limited the amount a candidate and party could spend in coordination.

Following the court’s decision, those limits are no more. Parties, which can raise much larger contributions from individual donors than candidates, can now spend unlimited sums in coordination with their candidates. That is likely to benefit Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterms as Democratic candidates have been outpacing their Republican competition while Republican Party committees are raising more than Democrats.

The weakening in campaign finance laws means that donors seeking influence will have a greater ability to increase the sums to individual campaigns through their larger donations to political parties that work with those candidates.

But the loosening of coordination rules may also benefit political parties as institutions. The court’s previous decisions in Citizens United v. FEC and subsequent cases radically transformed the campaign finance landscape by introducing or turbocharging unlimited contributions to super PACs and undisclosed dark money. Super PACs now play a dominant role in campaigns, undermining the ability of parties to organize and structure themselves — and democracy — while providing the greatest venue for campaign finance corruption possible.

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