Hey, everyone. Sarah Longwell here, publisher of the bulwark. And as the midterms begin to heat up,

I'm going to start doing what I'm going to call the state of the race with Sarah Longwell.

Not a new show just to take, but I want to give people some context for some of the news items that they're seeing.

So right now, we've just seen Democrats start posting these bonkers fundraising numbers

for Q1. So the first quarter of the fundraising for the Senate and House races going into the

2026 midterms. So Democratic candidates are outraising their Republican counterparts at just staggering

rates. The New York Times has a great graphic that we're going to show you here that helps

outline some of it. You've probably seen some of these numbers where you've got someone like

James Taurico in Texas who had a $27.1 million dollar haul. John Ossoff in Georgia, 13.8 million.

His next closest rival only raised $1 million in Ohio, which is a coveted Senate race.

If Democrats have any hope of taking back the Senate, that path is going to run partly

through Ohio, where Sherrod Brown, who was a senator in Ohio and then lost back in 2024, is running again.

He has raised $10 million outraising his Republican opponent, John Hustead, who only raised $2.9 million.

In Alaska, another big one for Democrats, where Mary Peltola raised

$8.6 million, where incumbent Dan Sullivan only raised $1.7 million. And then you've got North

Carolina, a very important gubernatorial election where Roy Cooper is way up over Mike Watley, the Republican. Cooper raised 8.4 million.

Graham Platner raised 4.1 million, almost double Susan Collins, who raised 2.9 million. This is

interesting because there's two Democrats right now who are fighting each other in that Democratic

primary, even though Platner has been basically ahead of Janet Mills the whole time, but she raised another

2.5 million. So if you add Platner and Mills together, they're far out raising Susan Collins.

In New Hampshire, you've got Chris Papas, who raised 3.3 million, which is quite a bit more than John Sununu, who is the most likely,

I think, Republican challenger, Scott Brown. You may remember him from back in the day. He's also

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