Richard W. Rodriguez/AP Photo Elections O'Rourke raised over $9M online in August

Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas) raised nearly $9.1 million online for his Senate bid in August, according to a recent campaign-finance filing, increasing the pressure on GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in an unexpectedly close race.

The online haul puts O'Rourke on pace to have one of the most prolific fundraising quarters of any Senate candidate in history, excluding self-funders. In the past two months, O'Rourke has raised nearly $12 million online — already more than the eye-popping $10.4 million he brought in from April through June of this year. By comparison, Cruz raised $4.1 million in the second quarter of this year and $13.2 million from January 2017 through June 2018, according to his latest campaign finance report.


Cruz has led in most polls of his reelection campaign in Texas, which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. But O’Rourke has kept close to Cruz and is outspending the Republican incumbent 3-to-1 on TV so far, according to Advertising Analytics. Republicans in Texas and Washington have raced to marshal big donors to help Cruz across the finish line.

Meanwhile, a surge of small donors is powering O’Rourke’s challenge. O’Rourke had more than 221,000 individual donors online in August, according to the latest Federal Election Commission filing by ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising platform used by O’Rourke’s campaign.

He had already raised $2.8 million online in July — but a series of attacks from Cruz and President Donald Trump in August drove his online fundraising into overdrive. O’Rourke raised more than $1 million in a weekend after Cruz began airing an attack ad on TV, and he raised nearly $1 million on the last day of August alone, after Trump tweeted that he would hold a rally boosting Cruz in October.

