WASHINGTON — Democrat Ed Meier announced Tuesday that he raised $210,000 during the final three months of last year in his primary bid for the chance to replace Republican Rep. Pete Sessions in the 32nd Congressional District based in Dallas.

Meier, a businessman and former Hillary Clinton campaign adviser, outraised his nearest primary opponents, NFL player-turned-lawyer Colin Allred and former Barack Obama appointee Lillian Salerno. Both Allred and Salerno reported that their campaigns raised $160,000 during the same period. In the first nine months of 2017, Meier outraised all of his Democratic opponents as well.

While not all campaign figures have been released, Meiers had $500,000 cash on hand. Meier, Allred, Salerno are in a seven-candidate race in the March 6 Democratic primary. Also running are Dallas immigration attorney George Rodriguez, former television reporter Brett Shipp, retired aerospace engineer Ron Marshall and businessman Todd Maternowski.

Sessions' campaign said the congressman has approximately $1.3 million cash on hand. Sessions will face Paul Brown in the Republican primary.

“The momentum my campaign has built from day one makes it clear that folks are ready for a change from more than two decades of Congressman Sessions putting Washington special interests ahead of real people here in North Texas,” Meier said in a news release.

In 2016, Sessions sailed to re-election without a Democratic opponent. During the same election, however, Hillary Clinton narrowly won the presidential contest in the district by less than 2 percentage points. Although the district is still considered marginally Republican, Democrats are setting their sights on the district in their bid to regain control of the U.S. House.

This year, Democrats are hoping that anti-Trump fervor could help them flip the district. Sessions, who chairs the House Rules Committee, has been reliably conservative and voted in line with President Donald Trump 98.3 percent of the time, according to the website FiveThirtyEight.