House Speaker Mike Johnson has raised a whopping $32.2 million in campaign funds during the first quarter of the year since Republicans swept into the trifecta governance in Washington of the presidency and both houses of Congress.
The speaker has given $5 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee and $4 million to Republican incumbents. His team called the haul the most amount of money raised during a single quarter ever.
Reacting to the quarterly report, Johnson posted on X, “After we defended our majority, the American people are enthusiastic about keeping House Republicans on offense in 2026. While we deliver our America First agenda, we are also building a massive war chest by hitting the ground running in the first quarter.”
But Democrats have outperformed Republicans in fundraising, and that has shown up in the numbers. The NRCC had $15 million at the end of February with $11.2 million in debt, compared to the its counterpart Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had $26 million and owed $12.5 million. The NRCC raised $9.2 million, while the DCCC raised more than $11 million.
Johnson has shepherded House Republicans through an impressive number of legislative victories, including passage of the SAVE Act last week and voting to strike down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s overdraft fee cap from the Biden administration. Johnson is currently working on a budget bill, which is aimed at cementing Trump administration policies on defense and border security.
President Donald Trump remains a popular figure, having raised $35 million last week at a dinner hosted by the NRCC. The overall political landscape for the 2026 midterms will, as always, also be heavily impacted by super PACs with billionaires on both sides of the political aisle weighing in.
Last month, more than $90 million was poured into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, almost doubling what was spent on another seat on the state’s highest court in 2023. That race had set the previous record at $51 million. Much of that came from a handful of wealthy individuals including leftist billionaire George Soros; Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotel empire, and industrialist Elon Musk. The Republican candidate for the Wisconsin high court seat lost that race, although Badger State residents also voted to enshrine voter ID requirements into their state constitution.
It’s not uncommon now for Democrats, whose party increasingly skews wealthier, to outraise Republicans. For example, between January 2023 and October 16, 2024, then-President Joe Biden and then the successor Kamala Harris campaign committee raised $997.2 million, whereas the Trump campaign raised only $388 million. However, financial advantages do not always translate into electoral victory.
