The Senate's biggest 2026 fundraising outliers
Why it matters: Most battleground senators facing reelection this cycle put up seven-figure fundraising numbers last quarter. It's a testament to the power of incumbency, indicating their own desire to stay in office.
But Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) raised $723K this quarter, compared to $1.1 million during the same period six years ago.
Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the GOP's preferred candidate in Michigan, raised $1.5 million, much of it through his joint fundraising committee. The figure is unlikely to scare Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) out of a contested primary.
By the numbers: The Democrats' most endangered incumbent, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), had another impressive quarter, raising $10 million. That leaves him with $15.5 million cash on hand.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the only GOP senator from a state Democrats won in the presidential election last year, raised $2.4 million. She has $5.25 million cash on hand.
Zoom in: Sen. John Cornyn, facing a GOP primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, raised $3.9 million for the quarter, although more than $3 million of that was to his joint fundraising committee.
Paxton raised $2.9 million for the quarter and has $2.5 million cash on hand.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who also faces a primary challenger, raised $2.1 million and has more than $9 million cash on hand.
What we're hearing: Ernst is telling colleagues she'll make a decision to run for reelection this fall.
If she doesn't run, GOP strategists expect Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) to jump in.
Hinson raised $850,000 for the quarter and has $2.8 million cash on hand — funds she can transfer from her House race to a potential Senate one.
Ernst campaign manager Bryan Kraber told us in a statement: " Instead of fundraising trips and meeting with millionaires, Senator Ernst has been hard at work advancing President Trump's agenda and delivering a tax break for hardworking Iowans."
Go deeper: Rogers, who struggled with fundraising in his 2024 loss to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), does have some outside support from a super PAC this cycle. The Great Lakes Conservative Fund raised more than $5 million to support his candidacy, according to The Hill.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
9 minutes ago
- The Hill
Johnson visits Jerusalem after Israel trip postponed
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) visited Jerusalem on Sunday after he previously postponed a trip to Israel earlier this year. Johnson was seen in footage visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem and joining a group of House Republicans to meet with Israeli officials. 'It is such a moving time for us to be here, to be here at the Wailing Wall. We've offered our prayers, we've put our notes into the wall, as is traditional and we're so moved by the hospitality of the people and the great love of Israel,' Johnson said in a video posted to Instagram by the Western Wall Heritage Foundation. 'Our prayer is that America will always stand with Israel and that we will — we pray for the preservation and the peace of Jerusalem. That's what Scripture tells us to do. It's a matter of faith for us and a commitment that we have,' he added. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar shared a photo of Johnson and other House Republicans including Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) meeting in Jerusalem. 'We discussed the alarming global wave of antisemitism, including efforts by countries like Ireland to delegitimize Israel. I also described the horrific attacks against the Druze in Syria, the same kind of barbarism perpetrated by Hamas,' Sa'ar wrote. Johnson postponed a trip to Israel back in June, when he was supposed to address the Knesset, due to the military conflict between Israel and Iran. Jewish Insider reported Sunday that Johnson does not have plans to address the Knesset on his trip this week.
Boston Globe
9 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump fired America's economic data collector. History shows the perils.
There is the case of China, where earlier this century local authorities manipulated data to hit growth targets mandated by Beijing, forcing analysts and policymakers to turn to alternative measures to gauge the state of the country's economy. Advertisement Perhaps most famously, there is the case of Argentina, which in the 2000s and 2010s systematically understated inflation figures to such a degree that the international community eventually stopped relying on the government's data. That loss of faith drove up the country's borrowing costs, worsening a debt crisis that ultimately led to it defaulting on its international obligations. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up It is too soon to know whether the United States is on a similar path. But economists and other experts said that Trump's decision Friday to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was a troubling step in that direction. Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, said the firing was not what is expected from the most advanced economy in the world. Advertisement 'This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic,' Yellen said. Essential data The Bureau of Labor Statistics is officially part of the Labor Department, whose secretary is a member of the president's Cabinet. But the agency operates independently, producing detailed, nonpartisan data on employment, prices, wages and other topics. Economists say that reliable, independently produced statistics are critical to good decision making in both the public and private sector. Officials at the Federal Reserve rely on government-collected data on inflation and unemployment to decide how to set interest rates, which affect how much Americans must pay to get a mortgage or a car loan. 'Good data helps not just the Fed, it helps the government, but it also helps the private sector,' Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said at a recent news conference. 'The United States has been a leader in that for 100 years,' he added, 'and we really need to continue that in my view.' Experts on government statistics say data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies is unlikely to deteriorate dramatically overnight. The acting commissioner named to replace McEntarfer on a temporary basis, William J. Wiatrowski, is a longtime employee of the agency who is widely respected by experts inside and outside government. The career employees who collect and analyze the data remain in place, using the same methods and procedures they used before McEntarfer was pushed out. But experts who just days ago were defending the integrity of the statistical agencies now find themselves asking uncomfortable questions about the trajectory of economic data in the United States. Advertisement 'If the poverty numbers come in and look great, is the director of the Census going to get a raise?' said Amy O'Hara, a former Census Bureau official who is now a professor at Georgetown University. 'If the household income numbers don't look great what happens then? What about GDP? What about CPI?' Andreas Georgiou knows the challenges of standing up to such political pressure. After he took over Greece's statistical agency in 2010, he found that the country has been severely understating its budget deficits. Those findings ran afoul of Greek authorities, who spent years trying to prosecute him on a variety of charges related to his work, despite independent reviews that supported his conclusions. (He fared better, though, than Olimpiy Kvitkin, a Soviet census official who was arrested and executed when his population count came in lower than Josef Stalin had announced.) Georgiou refused to bend. Reliable statistics are important for policymaking, he said. But they are also essential to democracy. 'Official statistics, government statistics are a mirror that society holds up to itself,' he said. If that mirror is distorted, or broken entirely, then the accountability that is central to a democratic system cannot work. 'If society cannot see itself clearly, then it cannot identify its problems,' he said. 'If it cannot identify its problems, then it cannot find the right solutions. It cannot find the right persons to solve these problems.' Data integrity at risk Trump said he fired McEntarfer because the numbers produced by her agency were 'rigged' to hurt him politically. Experts on the government statistics, including former commissioners in both Democratic and Republican administrations, have called foul on that accusation. The commissioner, who is the bureau's sole political appointee, does not control the numbers that the agency publishes, or even see them until they have been finalized by a staff of career technocrats whose careers typically span multiple presidential administrations. Advertisement Erica Groshen, who led the bureau under President Barack Obama, recalled getting resistance from the agency's staff when she tried to liven up the language of the monthly jobs reports. The bureau's staff insisted that the agency's job wasn't to say whether the glass was half-full or half-empty, only to report that, 'It is an eight-ounce container with four ounces of liquid.' Groshen relented. That is not to say political interference would be impossible. Government statistics rely on hundreds of methodological decisions, many of them judgment calls with no obviously correct answer. A sufficiently sophisticated agency head might, over time, be able to nudge the data in a politically advantageous direction, without any single decision being so egregious that it led to a mass resignation of career employees. 'I could imagine a new commissioner coming in and trying to make changes to those methods and procedures that try to move those numbers one way or the other,' said Katharine G. Abraham, who led the bureau during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. 'They would have to know a lot in terms of where to put the finger on the scale.' Private alternatives There are also blunter approaches. In Argentina in 2007, the government of then-President Néstor Kirchner pushed out the mathematician in charge of the country's consumer price data, then released an inflation figure that was dramatically lower than the one the mathematician had calculated. The public wasn't fooled. Nor were international bond investors, who ultimately turned to alternative sources of inflation data, calculated by researchers outside the government. Advertisement But such alternative sources are inherently limited, said Alberto Cavallo, a Harvard University economist who developed one of the most widely used private inflation indexes in Argentina. 'Private alternatives can complement official statistics, but they are not a substitute,' Cavallo wrote in an email. 'Government agencies have the resources and scale to conduct nationwide surveys -- something no private initiative can fully replicate.' Recently, Cavallo has been publishing data on consumer prices in the United States, which has shown the impact of Trump's tariffs more quickly than the government's data. But while such real-time sources are valuable, they don't carry the 'institutional credibility' of government data. The trouble is that once that credibility is eroded, it is hard to repair -- particularly at a time when partisans on both sides of the political aisle are skeptical of numbers put out by members of the opposing party. Nancy Potok, a former Census official who served as chief statistician of the United States during the first Trump administration, said that in the past there had been strong bipartisan support for the statistical system in Congress and the business community. But partisanship seems to have eroded that support at a moment when a combination of political pressures and long-standing budget challenges are making it most necessary. 'There were some people who really understood the value of the economic data, and now that's not the conversation and those champions aren't there that were there in the past,' she said. 'There's no one leading the charge to make these kind of investments.' This article originally appeared in Advertisement
USA Today
39 minutes ago
- USA Today
Trump says nuclear submarines are 'in the region' amid tension with Russia
Russia faces an Aug. 8 deadline from Trump to make peace with Ukraine or face economic consequences such as secondary tariffs and sanctions. WASHINGTON − President Donald Trump says the nuclear submarines he said he was deploying in response to threatening comments from Russia's former president are "in the region." Trump also signaled that he's preparing to hit Moscow with economic sanctions over its war against Ukraine. 'I've already put out a statement, the answer is, they are in the region," Trump told reporters traveling with him in New Jersey before he boarded Air Force One. Trump ordered two nuclear submarines to the "appropriate region" on Aug. 1 after former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev referenced Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities in a social media post that heightened tension with the U.S. leader. The dispute stemmed from Trump's ultimatum to Russia last month: make peace with Ukraine or brace for sanctions and secondary tariffs aimed at choking off the country's oil revenue. He gave Russian President Vladimir Putin a 50 day-deadline, which he later revised to Aug. 8. Trump offers Putin an ultimatum: Senate pressure builds to sanction Russia The president told reporters on Aug. 3 that if the deadline arrives and Russia has not agreed to a ceasefire, "there'll be sanctions." "But they seem to be pretty good at avoiding sanctions," he added. "You know, they're wily characters. ... So we'll see what happens." Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff had been expected to visit Russia before the deadline, but the president signaled to reporters that trip had not yet taken place. He said Witkoff is currently focused on addressing starvation in Gaza, but could go to Russia later in the week. Trump says he ordered 2 nuclear subs: They're heading to 'appropriate regions' after Russia nuclear threats The president stressed the need for a deal in Ukraine in which people stop being killed. "And now we're adding towns, where they're being hit by missiles," Trump said. Medvedev serves as deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council. He said in a July 28 post on X that Trump should remember that "each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country." Trump hit back in a Truth Social post that said: "Tell Medvedev, the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he's still President, to watch his words. He's entering very dangerous territory!" After Medvedev said Trump should remember "how dangerous the fabled 'Dead Hand' can be," in a post on the messaging app Telegram that referenced the Soviet Union's doomsday nuclear system, the U.S. president said he would reposition the submarines. Calling the comments "highly provocative," Trump said on Truth Social that he was taking action, "just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that."
