Democrats' long-shot Senate races get a multimillion-dollar boost
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Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Florida Rep. Angie Nixon speaks at a "Fighting Oligarchy" rally in Melbourne, Fla., on Saturday. Photo: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Steve Pajcic, the 80-year-old Florida attorney funding a surprise $7 million Democratic ad blitz in four red-state Senate races, tells Axios his family could double that and expand into more long-shot states.
Why it matters: Pajcic is testing whether buying cheap TV time in races the party has been slow to fund can stretch a Democratic wave to places it hasn't won in decades.
- He says his party is "too cautious" and aiming too low, both in the seats it's pursuing and what it hopes to accomplish in power.
Driving the news: Pajcic and his children, Michael and Helen, launched the New Deal for All super PAC this month to run ads in Florida, Kansas, Mississippi and South Carolina.
- The New York Times first reported their $7 million commitment last week.
The strategy: Pajcic sought races "off the radar screen" with promising candidates, little outside spending and cheap airtime.
- Florida is the costly exception, where Senate nominee Angie Nixon's surprise primary victory convinced him to invest anyway.
- Pajcic says he used AI to calculate the "optimum allocation" of ad dollars to elect more Democrats, but he hasn't consulted Democratic Party leaders or any of the candidates he hopes to help.
Where he's investing: Polling suggests some races long considered safely Republican are drawing closer.
- Florida: Nixon has built a statewide campaign on limited resources but trails appointed Sen. Ashley Moody 49.5%-43.1% in FiftyPlusOne's polling average.
- Mississippi: In a race with limited polling, District Attorney Scott Colom faces Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who blocked his 2023 federal judicial nomination despite backing from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and two former GOP governors.
- South Carolina: Pediatrician Annie Andrews trails Sen. Darline Graham, appointed after her brother Lindsey Graham's death in July, 45.8%-44.2% in FiftyPlusOne's average.
- Kansas: Adam Hamilton, pastor of the nation's largest United Methodist church, leads Sen. Roger Marshall 46.9%-45.5% in the average. Kansas hasn't elected a Democratic senator since 1932.
Zoom in: Nixon is Pajcic's favorite longshot, he says.
- Florida TV is pricey, but he sees "a little bit of the Mamdani effect" in her online appeal. A Wall Street Journal analysis found she has the largest share of positive TikTok videos of any Democrat.
- Nixon would be Florida's first Black senator. Colom would be Mississippi's first since Reconstruction.
The ads: One South Carolina spot dubs Graham "Data Center Darline," replaying an August debate clip in which she acknowledged she wasn't well informed on national security.
- The Florida ads hit Moody and Attorney General James Uthmeier over a scandal involving $10 million from a Medicaid settlement routed through a charity into a political committee overseen by Uthmeier.
Flashback: Pajcic has a history of backing candidates others doubted.
- After losing Florida's 1986 governor's race, he and his late brother Gary recruited and helped elect Jacksonville's first Black sheriff in 1995.
- In 2007, Pajcic and his late wife, Anne, hosted an early fundraiser for Barack Obama, then an underdog to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
The big picture: Pajcic traces his convictions to growing up in the segregated South and watching high school friends die in Vietnam.
- He named his PAC after Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, hoping this election will bring similarly sweeping change. He wants Democrats to aim far beyond a bare 51- or 52-seat Senate majority.
- "The only Democrat in the last 100 years who's done anything big is Franklin Roosevelt," he says.
