In a victory for Republicans in the run-up to the midterms, the Supreme Court on Friday found that political parties are entitled to the same low-cost TV ad rates as candidates. The ruling focused on an obscure but crucial part of political campaign funding that has given Democrats an advantage in recent years. The court’s majority found that Republican Party committees were likely to suffer “irreparable harm” unless the justices cleared the way for them to receive the low-cost ad rates, saying that requiring party committees to pay more for advertising would hamper “their efforts to reach the electorate in the critical weeks leading up to the midterms.” The majority added that such an injury “implicates their First Amendment rights to speak and coordinate their political activities freely.”

As is typical in such emergency applications, the order did not include a vote count. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s liberals, dissented. Republican leaders praised the court’s ruling. A spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Will Kiley, called the decision “a win for candidates, parties and broadcasters who have relied on the same rules for years.” He added: “Democrats can’t win at the ballot box, so they ran to the courthouse in the final weeks of an election to try to limit protected party speech.”

Democratic counterparts pushed back against Friday’s ruling. A joint statement from senior officials with Democrats’ congressional campaign committees called the Republicans’ move “a concerted effort by Donald Trump and national Republicans to flood the midterm elections with money from billionaire donors.” The officials, Devan Barber and Will Van Nuys, added that Republicans were seeking to “drown out the power of the grass roots because they know their agenda is deeply unpopular and they cannot win on the merits.”

The dispute focuses on the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, which set out rules for how broadcasting stations must interact with political candidates during election seasons. The federal law requires broadcasters to give political candidates low rates to buy TV ad time in the weeks before an election — a key way to reach voters. Before the court’s ruling, party committees had not been able to take advantage of those same low rates. That distinction had traditionally benefited Democrats, whose candidates tend to raise more money than their committees. The opposite is true for Republicans.