Along with the outpouring of grief at the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—the crowds and memorials outside the Supreme Court, the heartfelt social media posts—has come an outpouring of financial contributions to Democratic Senate candidates. We don’t know the full tally for every race, but two of the lesser known candidates illustrate just how huge this flood of money is.
Alaska and Mississippi have not been ranked as the most likely red-to-blue flips of this or any recent election cycle. But Al Gross in Alaska took in nearly $3 million in the immediate wake of Ginsburg’s death. And Mike Espy in Mississippi has raised $700,000.
Don’t let up now! Can you chip in $1 to each of these Daily Kos-endorsed candidates to help Democrats win the Senate?
In North Carolina, Cal Cunningham raised $6 million. And we still don’t know how much Mark Kelly in Arizona or Sara Gideon in Maine or Jaime Harrison in South Carolina or Amy McGrath in Kentucky have raised—any or all of them might have topped Cunningham, and for Harrison, that would come on top of a multimillion dollar week before Ginsburg’s death. Already, Gideon has reserved an additional $600,000 in cable ads.
Jon Ossoff or Raphael Warnock in Georgia may have done very well. Or Theresa Greenfield in Iowa. Steve Bullock in Montana. MJ Hegar in Texas. John Hickenlooper in Colorado. Any of these candidates may have had record weekends.
ActBlue had a record $160 million weekend, so we can assume that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris probably did okay as well.
None of this gets back the great Justice Ginsburg. None of it undoes the far-right extremist judge the Republicans are about to jam through the Senate in record time. We still don’t know how the overall voter mobilization effect of the Supreme Court fight will shake out—will Republicans retain their historical edge in turning out voters over the courts, or does this financial tsunami on the Democratic side portend a voting tsunami as well?
But the money does not hurt one bit when it comes to putting every possible seat on the table.