Rep. Kevin McCarthy is on track to raise more money this election cycle than any House Republican leader in history as the Californian eyes the speaker’s gavel.
McCarthy, the House minority leader, is slated to be elected speaker by GOP colleagues if Republicans win the majority in November. On Tuesday, he announced raising $31.5 million in the first quarter of this year, bringing his total haul for the 2022 cycle to $104 million. That figure surpasses the amount raised not just by previous Republicans to lead the House minority, but previous GOP speakers, including the two most recent: John Boehner and Paul Ryan.
“I want to thank our supporters for their generosity and faith in our mission to win back the House majority,” McCarthy said in a statement. “Their contributions will help ensure our candidates have the resources necessary to compete and win this November.”
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House Republicans are five seats shy of the majority. And with generic ballot polling giving the GOP a 3.6 percentage point edge over the Democrats and President Joe Biden’s job approval rating sitting at 41%, the Republicans are positioned to reclaim control of the House on Nov. 8. With the money McCarthy and other top Republicans are raising, the GOP should have the resources it needs to compete in winnable House districts.
To that end, McCarthy has transferred more than $37 million of the $104 million he has raised this cycle to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP campaign arm. Millions more from the minority leader’s war chest have been donated to individual Republican congressional candidates.
McCarthy, 57, has been a prolific fundraiser since before entering Congress more than 15 years ago.
But at the outset of this cycle, in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 ransacking of the Capitol by grassroots supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump, there were doubts about McCarthy’s ability to collect campaign cash for the first midterm election under Biden.
Even after the riot, a majority of House Republicans, including McCarthy, supported objections to the congressional certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory. Many GOP donors were skittish about giving. McCarthy and his team kept them on board by furiously working the phones in the 48 hours or so after the insurrection.
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Biden’s political stumbles in the summer that followed, polling that shows voters prefer Republican control of Capitol Hill over Democratic rule, and McCarthy’s aggressive fundraising efforts have combined to hasten his record accumulation of campaign resources.
