-Speaker!
Speaker! Speaker!
-The 2018 midterm election is on track
to become the most expensive midterm election
every in US history.
More than $5 billion will be spent
as of the end of this election cycle.
That includes more than $1 billion raised
by democratic candidates for Congress.
So we crunched the data from the midterm elections,
from the result, and we found that among
the 80 most competitive House
districts one third of the democrats
who had out-raised their republican opponent lost.
Some of the most successful fundraisers
got really close to winning a seat
and flipping it for democrats but not quite.
One of them is Amy McGrath.
-This is my new mission.
-Who raised $8 million in a super red district
in Kentucky.
Which was almost unheard of for a first time candidate.
-We desperately need change in our politics in our country.
-She got pretty close, but Andy Barr the incumbent,
still edged her out by a couple of points.
There's also MJ Hegar who ran in Texas.
She did a good job fundraising,
she had the most viral campaign video of the cycle,
but she still lost.
So even though small-dollar donations
can be a good sign of momentum building for our campaign,
it has a lot of limitations
in whether that will translate to votes at the polls.
People who are giving, $50, $20 at a time
might not live anywhere close to your district.
They're just really excited about your candidacy
and want to support you.
But they're not in your district to vote for you.
Just because you're getting a lot of these donors
doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna win
because it matters what you're gonna do with that money.
Are you gonna spend that money to build a well-built campaign?
Are you gonna spend that money
to build a strategically sound ground game?
Even though it didn't translate to victories
for each of these candidates, it helped keep the map,
as expansive as it was, for the House,
and as competitive was it was for the House.
The money that all these candidates
were able to raise really put more districts into play
when they otherwise would not have been.
Because they may have been considered
a safe republican seat.
-I don't know any way to say this other than,
El Paso, I love you so much.
-On the Senate side,
the real money maker this cycle was Beto O'Rourke.
He raised more than $60 million.
That was unheard of for a Senate campaign, but he still lost.
Beto had been trailing in the polls behind Ted Cruz,
so it wasn't a huge surprise, but it also does
show you the limitations of how far money can take you.
A lot of his donations did come from inside the state.
But still it just did not translate into success
at the polls. One the Senate side,
we're seeing a lot of outside group spending.
On both the democrats and the republicans sides.
The Senate Majority PAC -- that's the Super PAC
that's aligned with Senate democrats
and they spent more than $100 million
this cycle defending many of the most vulnerable Senate democrats
who were running for re-election.
-Obviously we fell short, and that's disappointing.
-But they did not succeed,
republicans gained seats in the Senate.
On the republican side, the Super PAC helping the Senate
republicans was the Senate Leadership Fund.
They also spent a lot of money, close to $100 million,
but they clearly spent their money in a more targeted
and strategic way that allowed republicans to gain seats.
All of this money raised in 2018
doesn't give us a clear picture for 2020, not yet.
It tells you there is a lot of energized donors on the left,
but it doesn't tell you whether they're all gonna be able
to consolidate behind one democratic presidential nominee.
When it comes to 2020
and President Trump's re-election campaign,
he already has raised more than $100 million
for his re-election.
That's more money than any re-election campaign has raised,
this early in the presidential cycle.
And it's a day after the midterms.