3Q 2017 Fundraising

We're collecting the Senate reports in our quarterly fundraising roundup chart, which we'll update continuously. We'll have a House fundraising chart after the Oct. 15 reporting deadline.

● AZ-Sen: Kelli Ward (R): $690,000 raised, $250,000 cash-on-hand

● MO-Sen: Claire McCaskill (D-inc): $2.9 million raised, $7.1 million cash-on-hand; Josh Hawley (R): $821,000 raised (in two months)

● WI-Sen: Tammy Baldwin (D-inc): $2.4 million, $5.3 million

Senate

● AL-Sen: Republican Pollster Cygnal just released their first survey of December's special election for the Senate in Alabama, and they find Republican Roy Moore beating Democrat Doug Jones 49-41. That's very similar to a recent poll from JMC Analytics that had Moore ahead 48-40. Cygnal's final poll of the GOP runoff was pretty spot-on: They put Moore up 52-41, and he won 55-45, almost the exact same margin.

Gubernatorial

● ID-Gov: Developer Tommy Ahlquist, who is running for the GOP nomination to succeed retiring Republican Gov. Butch Otter, recently announced that Mitt Romney will hold a campaign event for him on Oct. 25. Ahlquist is also a Mormon like Romney is, and the latter's support might particularly resonate in a state where a significant proportion of Republican primary voters belong to the LDS church.

● IL-Gov: Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar announced he was dropping out of next spring's Democratic primary for governor, arguing that he simply couldn't keep up with the financial advantages his opponents had in terms of campaign spending. Pawar had been struggling to break out in a field where billionaire J.B. Pritzker has already self-funded into the eight-figure range and has been gaining endorsements from top Illinois Democrats. Nonetheless, Pritzker still faces a field that includes wealthy businessman Chris Kennedy and state Sen. Daniel Biss.

● MD-Gov: Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, who leads a policy consulting firm, is the latest Democrat to kick off a bid for the nomination to face Republican Gov. Larry Hogan next year. Rockeymoore Cummings hasn't run for office herself before, but she has over two decades of experience working in various political and public policy roles, such as once serving as chief of staff to former New York Rep. Charlie Rangel. Her husband is also longtime Baltimore Rep. Elijah Cummings, meaning she undoubtedly has some major connections in Democratic politics.

Rockeymoore Cummings joins what has become a very crowded field of Democrats that includes Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker, state Sen. Richard Madaleno, Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz, former NAACP president Ben Jealous, prominent attorney Jim Shea, tech entrepreneur Alec Ross, and Krish Vignarajah, who was once the policy director for Michelle Obama.

● NJ-Gov: New Jersey Republican Kim Guadagno's latest ad borrows from the racial fearmongering over immigration that has so far been a hallmark of the GOP's campaign in Virginia's gubernatorial race. Guadagno starts out by detailing the brutal crimes of a man named Jose Carranza, whom the spot describes with big bold letters as an "illegal alien" and "child rapist" who shot several New Jersey students, killing three of them. She then pivots to attacking Democrat Phil Murphy by playing a context-free quote of him saying "my bias is going to be having their back." Guadagno then argues that Murphy will have the backs of "deranged murderers" because he wants to make New Jersey a "sanctuary state" that doesn't fully enforce the Trump administration's deportation policies.

● VA-Gov: The Latino Victory Fund launched a new Spanish-language TV ad attacking Republican Ed Gillespie. The spot says that "with one vote," Latino voters can say "no" to hate, fear, insults, and destroyed families. The ad also urges voters to say "no to Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie's efforts to divide us," referencing the GOP's ad campaign of racial demagoguery to attack Democrat Ralph Northam over immigration.

House

● FL-06, FL-Gov: GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis is still publicly considering running for governor next year, and an allied campaign committee has $1.6 million in the bank ahead of his potential campaign. If DeSantis goes for it, several Republicans will eye his conservative seat, and one is already kicking off his bid.

Businessman and Navy veteran John Ward, whom the Associated Press reports is a multi-millionaire, announced he was running on Thursday, and pledged he would have $1 million in his campaign account in January through a combination of fundraising and self-funding. It's not clear what he'll do if DeSantis decides to run for re-election after all. This coastal seat, which is dominated by Volusia County, went from 52-47 Romney all the way to 57-40 Trump, though former Deputy National Security Advisor Nancy Soderberg is running for Team Blue.

● NH-01: Immediately after Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter shocked the political world last week and announced she was retiring from this swing seat, attention turned to Executive Councilor Chris Pappas. Pappas has acknowledged that he's considering seeking the Democratic nod, but says he won't decide before the Nov. 7 local elections.

Several other Democrats are considering, and we have another new name. Rochester City Attorney Terence O'Rourke, a retired Army captain who earned a Bronze Star in Iraq, says he's "very much considering it" and expects to decide in the next three weeks. Ex-state Sen. Burt Cohen also says he's thinking about running, "but I don't think it will happen."

This seat, which narrowly backed Obama and Trump, was a top GOP target before Shea-Porter retired, so unsurprisingly, few Republicans have shown interest in running who weren't already considering it. WMUR adds that businessman Andrew Hemingway's name has "surfaced this week," though there's no other information. Hemingway ran for governor in 2014, and while he had some connections to conservative activists, he struggled with fundraising and lost the primary 56-37 to Walt Havenstein, who lost the general to Democrat Maggie Hassan.

● NY-01: On Wednesday, Kate Browning, who is serving her sixth and final term on the Suffolk County Legislature, announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin on this eastern Long Island seat. A few months ago, when her name first surfaced, Newsday's Rick Brand described Browning as popular and argued that she "could cut into Zeldin's hometown political base." Browning has consistently won the Democratic nomination for her seat in the county legislature, though she only switched her voter registration from the Working Families Party to the Democratic Party in May. In her announcement, Browning highlighted her union background and working-class background.

Browning faces some primary opposition, and the latest quarterly campaign fundraising reports will give us a better indication of what candidates are capable of raising the money they'd need to win in a district that's located in the expensive New York City media market. This seat, which is entirely in Suffolk County, is very affluent by national standards, but it also was very amenable to Donald Trump. While Obama carried this seat just 49.6-49.1 in 2012, Trump won 55-42 here. Zeldin, who is a strong fundraiser, has been betting that his district still loves Trump, and he's been a vocal Trump ally.

● NY-02: GOP Rep. Pete King has never had a close campaign since his initial 1992 win, even as his central Long Island seat has swung all over the place, but one Democrat is hoping 2018 will be his lucky year. Businessman Tim Gomes, who runs an electrical light company that Newsday reports had $120 million in sales last year, announced he would run this week. Gomes did not say if he'd self-fund, but estimated that he would raise between $2 million and $3 million, which seems like a very optimistically small sum for what will be a very tough race in the expensive New York City media market.

Gomes himself has switched his party enrollment back and forth from Democratic to Republican several times over the years, with him making his most recent switch back to the Democrats in December over what he says was disgust with Trump, something that could rub Democrats in the wrong direction. However, Gomes may not need to go through a competitive primary. This seat went for Obama 52-47 in 2016, but Trump carried it 53-44. Even in a good Democratic year, King will be a very difficult target. As we wrote in 2015, King has managed to carve out a reputation as a security-obsessed loudmouth who knows when to break with his party and support local interests, which has played quite well in suburban New York.

● PA-08: On Wednesday, attorney Dean Malik, a Marine veteran and former Bucks County prosecutor, announced that he would challenge freshman Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in the GOP primary. Fitzpatrick, like his brother and immediate predecessor Mike Fitzpatrick, has a reputation for being one of the more moderate Republicans in the caucus. Notably, Brian Fitzpatrick voted against the House version of Trumpcare. Malik used his kickoff to argue that while Fitzpatrick had failed Trump across the board, he would advance the Trump agenda.

Malik himself has run for this seat twice, but been chased out of both races by the Fitzpatricks. In 2010, after Mike Fitzpatrick announced that he would try to avenge his 2006 loss to Democratic incumbent Patrick Murphy (which he did), Malik deferred to him. Last year, Malik did the same thing after Brian Fitzpatrick entered the race to succeed his retiring brother. Neither of those abridged campaigns inspire a lot of confidence about Malik's campaign skills.

Democrats would absolutely love if Malik beat Fitzpatrick, or even just dragged him to the right. While Romney and Trump each carried this suburban Philadelphia seat by very narrow margins, both Fitzpatricks ran far ahead of the top of the ticket in each race. So far, the only noteworthy Democrat who has stepped up to run is Navy veteran and JAG attorney Rachel Reddick.

● PA-11: This week, Republican businessman Andrew Lewis and Democrat Dennis Wolff, a dairy farmer who served as the state's agriculture secretary from 2003 to 2009, each announced that they would seek this open Wyoming Valley-based seat. Lewis, who is the chief operating officer of his family's drywall business, has run for office once before, losing a 2016 primary to now-state Sen. John DiSanto 51-49. Lewis joins former state Revenue Secretary Dan Meuser and state Rep. Stephen Bloom in the GOP primary for this 60-36 Trump seat.

State Republicans drew this seat to be safe for their party, and Democrats haven't had much luck here in other races. Still, Wolff may have the connections and profile to run a credible race in this sprawling rural district.

● PA-18: On Thursday, Westmoreland County Commissioner Gina Cerilli announced that she would seek the Democratic nod in the not-yet-scheduled special election to succeed soon-to-be-ex. GOP Rep. Tim Murphy. This Western Pennsylvania seat backed Trump 58-39 and it's going to be a very tough lift for Team Blue, but local Democrats still win down-ballot races in this area. Notably, Cerilli's 2015 win gave Democrats the majority on the County Commission, even though Westmoreland would back Trump 64-33 the next year. Under state law, both parties will choose their special election nominees through party conventions instead of a primary.

● House: On behalf of the Democratic group Patriot Majority USA, PPP has conducted polls in a dozen different GOP-held House districts, three of which are open seats while the other nine feature incumbents seeking re-election (at least for now). We've assembled all the numbers into the table below, though note that some matchups feature unnamed generic candidates standing in for one or both parties (so all the usual caveats apply):