Stay tuned after the show for a message from United Health Group.

Good Thursday morning. I'm Anna Palmer and welcome to your Politico Playbook audio briefing.

And I'm Jake Sherman. Good news has been hard to come by for Republicans during this pandemic.

A Republican president is presiding over nearly 15% unemployment. Mitch McConnell, who rarely opines

about the political climate, said this in the

Capitol Wednesday about the battle for control of the Senate. It's a challenging environment.

It's been consistently throughout this cycle. Just look at the numbers. That's the only

conclusion intelligently to read from it. But if you're a Republican, there are two glimmers of

hope for you this week. First, the NRCC outraised the D-Triple-C in April.

The House-GOP party committee pulled in $11.4 million last month, narrowly edging the D-T-R-C

by somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000, according to party sources. The DEMS announced $11.3 million.

The D-T-T-T-C still has more money on hand and has routinely beat the NRCC, so this will be a welcome sign in GOP circles.

And there was also the results in the special election in California 25.

On Tuesday night, Republicans snatched a house seat in the L.A. suburbs from Democrats.

Now, yes, special elections are weird. Yes, Republicans held the seat for years before now.

But this is a seat Hillary Clinton won by seven points in 2016 and won the GOP thought they'd

have a tough time getting back. So for the moment, this is a good

thing for Republicans. Mike Garcia, the Republican Congressman-elect was a fighter pilot with

no voting record and he was running against Christy Smith, a state lawmaker. The CLF and NRCC painted

Smith as being responsible for teacher firings while giving herself a pay raise a message that their internal

polling said broke through. The NRC was up on TV and CLF ran a digital ad campaign in a mail

push to get people to return their ballots. CLF only spent $700,000 in this seat. Last cycle,

...