Like many voters across California this fall, those in Hayward and Fremont have been flooded with mailers targeting the two Democrats tussling for a seat in the state Legislature.

Fremont Mayor Lily Mei is slammed for her role in a secretive severance payout to the former city manager, who has been charged with embezzlement. Her opponent in the state Senate race, Aisha Wahab, a Hayward city councilmember, is accused of “elder abuse” for supporting a landlord who evicted older tenants.

Independent expenditure committees—political spending groups that are legally required to be unaffiliated with the candidates they’re trying to support—have spent nearly $40 million since Sept. 1 trying to influence competitive legislative races across California. With voting through Tuesday, that’s 25% more than what independent expenditure committees, or IEs, spent on Assembly and state Senate general election races in 2020, nearly twice as much as was spent in 2018, and just slightly below 2016.

Thanks to a wave of incumbents hitting their term limits or announcing early retirements earlier this year, California voters are being asked to fill 31 open seats in the Assembly and the Senate, of the 100 spots in the Legislature up for grabs on Tuesday. The first orders of business for this new class of legislators are likely to include picking the next Assembly speaker and voting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to tax the “windfall profits” of oil and gas producers.