Four dollars does not buy much. Multiplied across every 1,000 views of a video, it becomes the pay rate at the center of a new report on the Texas Senate race.
The New York Times published an interactive investigation on Oct. 9 examining how TikTok content is shaping the contest between Democratic nominee James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton, the sitting Texas attorney general.
Times reporters collected 1,189 TikTok posts that mentioned either man during one 24-hour stretch last month. Talarico drove 70 percent of that content. Paxton drove the remaining 30 percent.
That tally counts favorable and unfavorable videos alike, according to the newspaper. It measures how often each man surfaced on the platform, not how viewers received him.
Inside that pool of posts, the Times reported finding “dozens of accounts” that earn $4 for every 1,000 views of content promoting Talarico.
Reporters based the finding on job listings and on online records that creators themselves maintain.
Under that formula, a clip that reaches 250,000 viewers would pay its creator $1,000.
A group calling itself Frontier Media said it wrote the job listing. The Times tried to get a response from the organization and did not receive one.
Talarico’s campaign denies any role. Campaign representatives told the newspaper they did not pay anyone to promote the candidate.
The two campaigns operate at very different scales on the app. Talarico’s TikTok account has more than 2 million followers.
Paxton posts there regularly, but his following numbers only in the low thousands, the Times reported.
Their ages also stand far apart. Talarico is 37, and Paxton is 63. TikTok skews toward younger users.
The report landed days after Talarico returned to public view following a short absence.
His disappearance from the trail prompted online chatter about whether he had spent time at a mental health facility in Ohio.
No confirmation of that claim has surfaced in the reporting on the story.
Talarico describes himself as a Christian. He belongs to St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.
The Western Journal published an article about Babs Miller, a woman the outlet describes as his pastor.
According to that article, Miller denies the virgin birth of Christ, says Jesus did not die for humanity’s sins, and claims nobody can know whether He existed.
The church’s own website features a page on “inclusive language.” It instructs readers to refer to God as “non-gendered.”
The Republican National Committee’s research account on X separately posted a clip from Talarico’s past remarks.
In it, Talarico discusses climate change, capitalism and white supremacy.
He says “only understanding the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together are we going to be able to begin the process of dismantling them.”
Neither the TikTok payment findings nor the church coverage has produced a response from Frontier Media. The company has not commented publicly since the Times published its report.
Talarico’s campaign continues to say it had no hand in the payments.
Voters will settle the Senate race in Texas’s November midterm elections.
