The Trailer: 5 takeaways from the fourth fundraising quarter

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

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435 districts, 50 states, one campaign newsletter.

By David Weigel

In this edition: Takeaways from the fourth fundraising quarter, campaign stops in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the unwelcome return of Rod Blagojevich.

The only newsletter that will never pay for celebrity endorsements: This is The Trailer.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) was among the Republicans who outraised her Trump-backed challengers. (Mary Schwalm/AP)

The deadline for last year's campaign fundraising closes was at midnight, revealing how much candidates had on hand and what they'd raised in the final quarter — September through December — of 2021. Here are five big takeaways, including what's changing as candidates gear up for the first midterm election in eight years with Republicans on the offensive.

Republicans are getting their own green wave. It's a perfect combination: a rotten political environment for Democrats, the near-universal adoption of the WinRed donation portal, and dozens of battle-hardened 2020 Republican winners who never stopped raising money.

Our colleagues did the math last night. Add up all the money donated to the party committees, the House and Senate campaign committees, and the parties' preferred campaign super PACs, and Republicans had $220 million at the end of the year compared with $176 million for Democrats. Both parties broke their own records, but unlike four years ago or two years ago, the Republican groups entered 2022 with more money to spend.

Most of their candidates thrived, too, especially in swing seats. In California's new 27th Congressional District, where Biden won easily in 2020 but Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) won reelection by a few hundred votes, he raised $755,000; Christy Smith, the former Democratic state legislator who narrowly lost that 2020 race, collected just $124,000. That's one of the Democrats' top targets this cycle, and across all 25 of their House targets, Republicans raised an average of $648,000. The party's old problem, with excitable online donors forcing them to spend in unexpected places, isn't recurring this year.

Democratic donors still love Senate candidates. Even a close reader of this newsletter may be unfamiliar with Lucas Kunce, a military veteran and first-time Democrat running to replace retiring Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) this year. Democrats haven't won a Senate race in Missouri since 2012. The national party hasn't restored the state to its target list.

And yet Kunce raised more money, $715,000, than anyone else running for the seat. That includes every Republican: former governor Eric Greitens ($471,000), Rep. Billy Long ($471,000), Attorney General Eric Schmitt ($457,000), Rep. Vicky Hartzler ($438,000) and Mark McCloskey ($89,000).

The small-dollar ActBlue donation machine never stops humming, and every Democrat running this year is pitching his as the race that can save the Senate majority; the result in every competitive state was Democrats outraising the GOP field. Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) was, for the second quarter, the best fundraiser in the country, piling up $9.8 million, while Trump-backed recruit Herschel Walker raised $5.4 million. (No Republican challenger in the country raised more.) Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) was just behind, raising $8.9 million, while Tucson venture capitalist Blake Masters led Arizona's GOP candidates with $1.5 million.

In two states, Wisconsin and Florida, incumbent Republican senators trailed. Three Wisconsin Democrats — Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski and Milwaukee Bucks VP Alex Lasry — reported more for the quarter than Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), with Barnes's $1.2 million nearly doubling Johnson's $628,000. For the third quarter in a row, Rep. Val Demings (R-Fla.) outraised Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), $7.1 million to $5.2 million.

But Johnson only announced his reelection campaign in January, and in 2016, he raised $20 million to defeat a Democrat who raised $24 million. After 2018 and 2020, when huge fundraising advantages couldn't pull Democrats over the line in Maine, North Carolina and other tough states, a cash lead now means less than it might look.

Trump-endorsed candidates pulled in middling money. The best thing that could happen to a Republican candidate in 2021 was getting endorsed by Donald Trump. Instant base credibility, a news hook for earned media and, with some luck, a rally where the ex-president would let the candidate share the stage before talking about how the 2020 election was stolen.

But few Trump-backed Republicans had blockbuster quarters, and most were outraised by other candidates. There was one exception: Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), who for the first time outraised former governor Pat McCrory, $968,000 to $748,000.

No other Trump-backed Senate candidate did so well. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who's lagged former Senate staffer Katie Britt in every quarter, trailed again in Q4, raising a little less than $386,000 while she raised $1.3 million. Brooks raised more from individual donors than a third candidate, Mike Durant, but Durant plowed $4.15 million of his own money into the campaign, letting him outspend both candidates on TV.

In Alaska, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) more than doubled the haul for Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka — a bit less than $1.4 million to Tshibaka's $601,000. In House races, Joe Kent's $306,000 was not far behind Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler's (R-Wash.) $525,000, but no other MAGA challengers matched that. Rep. Peter Meijer and Rep. Fred Upton, two other Michigan Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last year, far outraised their challengers, while Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), whom Trump is endorsing in a member-on-member primary, was outraised by Rep. David B. McKinley (R-W.Va.), a former state party chair.

The most lopsided disadvantage for a MAGA candidate came in Wyoming, where Trump critic-turned-convert Harriet Hageman raised $443,000 in nearly three full months. (She entered the race a few days before the start of the quarter.) Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) raised more money than she ever had — $2.1 million. Cheney ended the year with $4.8 million left to spend, and Hageman entered 2022 with a bit less than $245,000.

The left's challengers are trailing, as usual. After its successful 2020 cycle, the Justice Democrats' model is to endorse a small number of competitive candidates in safely blue districts, help them build campaigns and rush in with independent expenditures if they're needed. The candidates themselves aren't expected to outraise the incumbents — indeed, they've won a lot of races while being outspent.

But when you consider how much money poured into Nina Turner's unsuccessful campaign for a House seat in Ohio last year, it's notable that these JD candidates didn't raise more. Every Justice Democrat challenging an incumbent trailed last quarter, and Tennessee's Odessa Kelly, who raised just $105,000, would have trailed had Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) not decided to retire after a new map made the seat unwinnable for a Democrat. (More about that below.) The picture was a little brighter in other open seats — ones already drawn to be Democratic in 2022 — and Austin city councilman Greg Casar led the other Justice Democrats in fundraising, putting $468,000 together ahead of the March 1 primary.

Donors still love throwing money at safe seats. What do Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have in common? All of them are running in seats drawn to be impossible to lose this year — and all of them raised more than $1 million. The fame-to-donation pipeline remains intact, as does the spigot for candidates running against incumbents whom the most active donors can't stand. That's how Marcus Flowers, a Democrat challenging Greene in a seat the party is not targeting, became one of very few members of his party to raise more than $1 million for the quarter — and $3.2 million so far this cycle.

Reading list

"Republicans lead 2022 money race as both parties hit record levels of cash on hand," by Michael Scherer and Isaac Stanley-Becker

Another look at (Win) Red vs. (Act) Blue.

"How a rogue governor could steal the next presidential election for Trump," by Grace Panetta

The Electoral Count Act goes tick-tick-tick.

"Trump's Texas trip illustrates his upsides and downsides for Republicans and their midterm hopes," by Tyler Pager

Will Jan. 6 prisoner pardons become a GOP candidate litmus test?

"New York Democrats' historic gerrymander was a decade in the making," by Daniel Marans

The long tail of a very good Democratic night in 2018.

"Tim Ryan's plea to Ohio's White working class: Trust Democrats again," by Michael Scherer

The Democrat from Youngstown tries to reverse the party's decline.

"Trump ally pushes Republican Party to expel Cheney, Kinzinger," by Josh Dawsey

This week's RNC meeting and the opening for a purge.

On the trail

Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) take photographs with voters Mason, Ohio, on Jan. 30. (David Weigel/The Washington Post)

MASON, Ohio — On Saturday night, Donald Trump told a Texas rally crowd that people arrested in the Jan. 6 investigation had been "treated so unfairly," and that if he retook the presidency, he might wipe their records clean.

"If it requires pardons, we will give them pardons," Trump said.

The next morning, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene landed in southwest Ohio and headed to a rally with J.D. Vance, the "Hillbilly Elegy" author whom she'd just endorsed for U.S. Senate. She'd just talked to Trump, she told a crowd of around 200 voters at a Marriott ballroom here — and she wanted to make sure everyone knew what he'd said about the Jan. 6 prisoners.

"He told them he's going to make sure they're treated right, and he wants to pardon them," she said, to a round of applause. "People should not be treated like political prisoners when they have not even had a day in court."

It's much too early to know whether Trump's float of Jan. 6 pardons becomes a voting issue for Republicans, or a litmus test for candidates. The evidence at one of the first campaign events after Trump's comments was that the pardon idea synced up comfortably with what Republican voters wanted to hear — that their politicians were going to keep defending Trump, and keep questioning the Democrats' narratives.

Greene's visit to Ohio was also a coup for one of the Vance campaign's strategies, to defend the candidate from attacks on his old (and plentiful) anti-Trump quotes by surrounding him with a phalanx of MAGA Republicans. Republicans who'd come to see Vance that day told The Trailer that they were there to see Greene — not just because they admired her, but because they wanted to know what attracted her to Vance.

"He's been getting a lot of bad press," said Dennis Bateman, 70, who said he would likely vote for Vance and was pleased to see him getting a big crowd on a Bengals game day. "I like Marjorie's stances on many different issues — about Jan. 6, and bringing out the truth. She went to the jail. She talked to the prisoners. And the mainstream media, like The Washington Post, won't cover that."

The Georgia Republican was the first member of the House to endorse Trump's idea; other Republicans on Sunday were denouncing it, or ignoring the question, which led to Greene criticizing them. Vance didn't echo Greene on Jan 6., but he denounced the treatment of prisoners, and kicked off his "No BS Tour" by explaining how political elites were making life worse for middle America.

"The idiot leaders of this country decided that we didn't need to make things in this country," Vance told the crowd. "They decided that we could let the communist Chinese make everything we needed. We got cheap plastic garbage, and our middle-class communities would be devastated. And somehow that was going to be a good deal for people in their communities. Was it?"

"No!" shouted the audience.

"That is the game plan, that is the playbook, that the radical left plays every day in this country," said Vance. He sketched out a nightmare vision of what the future could be like for one of his three children. "When he goes to the grocery store, he's buying food grown by the Chinese. When he goes to the pharmacy, he buys medicine made by the Chinese. When he goes to buy a house, he can't do it, because the Chinese already did."

Vance's team-up with Greene clarified what else the MAGA base was interested in, and the questions it had about converts. One of the biggest rounds of applause came when Vance pointed to his campaign manager, Jordan Wiggins, and mentioned that he'd helped elect Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). At one point, Greene was asked politely why she'd picked Vance over the field of Republican candidates, all but one of whom — state Sen. Matt Dolan — had taken Trump's side in every recent argument.

"They knock him down for being a Never-Trumper some years back, but those are the things that don't bother me," Greene explained. "If someone was a Never-Trumper, but then they truly, truly got behind President Trump because of his accomplishments, and they stuck with him, that means a lot to me." That complemented Vance's own description of his journey, now a part of his stump speech.

"I was not a big fan of Donald Trump six or so years ago," Vance said. "You know what? Facts change. I saw the corruption that exists in this country. I saw that Donald Trump was the only person fighting against it. And I've been a huge supporter of Trump over the past several years."

The Trump debate inside the GOP's U.S. Senate primary has been driven, mostly, by the Club for Growth. It endorsed former state treasurer Josh Mandel early in 2021, and put millions behind ads playing Vance's 2016 criticism of Trump — including his admission that he didn't vote for him that year — before pivoting to attack another Republican, Mike Gibbons, whose self-funded ads pushed him ahead of Vance in their polling.

A few days earlier, Mandel earned some free media by debating Morgan Harper, an Ohio Democrat running against Rep. Tim Ryan (D) for the party's U.S. Senate nomination. Mandel frequently invoked Trump, saying, as he says across the state, that the 2020 election had been stolen from him; Harper repeatedly ribbed him for bringing up the ex-president at all.

"He needs to get the endorsement from Donald Trump to be able to make it through the Republican primary," Harper said, dismissively. "He will do whatever is necessary, as a mini-Trump to continue to spread lies."

Mandel, who thanked Harper for debating him, did not take that as a cue to stop talking about Trump.

"The same people in Ohio who were trying to stop Trump," said Mandel, "are trying to stop me."

Ad watch

Mike Gibbons, "Rand Paul Endorsed." The Kentucky senator weighed in on Ohio's U.S. Senate race last May, endorsing Gibbons over the field. Since then, Paul has confronted Anthony S. Fauci in a series of HELP hearings, driving the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to anger as he accuses him of smears and coverups. That's dramatically enhanced his image with conservative voters, and the Fauci battles are Paul's example of what Gibbons could help him do in Washington: "I know that Mike Gibbons will join me in demanding that Fauci is immediately fired and removed from office."

Mooney for Congress, "David McKinley Betrayed West Virginia." The May 2 primary between Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) and Rep. David B. McKinley (R-W.Va.) continues to focus on Trump — he endorsed Mooney, while McKinley voted for both the bipartisan infrastructure package and the creation of a Jan. 6 commission. "He betrayed you," sums up a narrator, portraying Mooney with Trump and promoting the endorsement.

Jim Pillen for Governor, "Stand for America." Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) has endorsed Pillen to succeed him, but there's a lot going on in this ad to separate the candidate from the Republican establishment. He denounces the "crazy" behavior in Washington, promising to keep it out of Nebraska. "If you love America, they hate you," he says. "If you support the police, they call you racist. And if you think boys and girls should use separate bathrooms, heaven help you."

Friends of Heidi St. John, "Portland Joe the Bernie Bro." Former Green Beret Joe Kent hasn't yet consolidated the conservative vote in Washington's 3rd District, where he's trying to make the runoff with the support of Donald Trump, against incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump. Like a number of nationalist conservatives, he's said that the left is right on trade. St. John uses that against him, citing a December tweet from Kent about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) striking with Kellogg workers. "Bernie is right," he wrote. "We must protect US workers from having their jobs taken from them." St. John combines that with an attack on Kent's Oregon roots ("Portland Democrat") and images of him with long hair and a beard, portraying Kent as a sort of MAGA-Manchurian candidate.

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Poll watch

Florida elections (Suffolk, 500 likely voters)

Governor
Ron DeSantis (R): 49%
Charlie Crist (D): 43%

Ron DeSantis (R): 51%
Nikki Fried (D): 40%

Senate
Marco Rubio (R): 49%
Val Demings (D): 41%

There's a lot more in this poll, including the year's thirstiest survey question: Whether Florida Democrats would vote for Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton in a 2024 primary. The sample size of 164 is too small to be useful, but the fact that the question's been forced, and that Biden trails Clinton, is notable. Florida is one of just five states where Biden ran slightly behind Clinton's 2016 vote share, and Biden's approval rating is 39 percent. Rep. Charlie Crist and Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried both pick up a very small number of voters who disapprove of Biden, as does Demings; Republicans don't win all 59 percent of voters who say the country's on the wrong track. The results are leads for the GOP candidates in every race, with the weakest Republican tested being Florida's adopted president, Donald Trump. In an early trial heat, he leads Biden by just 3 points, identical to his 2020 win margin; DeSantis leads by 7.

The Kentucky Poll (Mason-Dixon, 625 registered voters)

Gov. Andy Beshear (D)
Approve: 60% (+5 since Feb. 2022)
Disapprove: 32% (-4)

2022 U.S. Senate race
Rand Paul (R): 55%
Charles Booker (D): 39%

December's tornadoes in western Kentucky added to a parade of crises for Andy Beshear, who took office a few months before the first coronavirus case in the United States. Constantly battling with the Republican legislature over their pandemic responses, Beshear has remained popular with non-Democrats; 61 percent of independents and 39 percent of Republicans approve of how he's doing. None of that carries over to the Senate race, where Booker, who narrowly lost a 2020 primary for the commonwealth's other seat, has a free run at the Democratic nomination. Just 5 percent of Republicans favor Booker, whose "hood to the holler" campaign embraces some ideas that Beshear has rejected — like universal health care and a Green New Deal. Beshear is particularly strong in western Kentucky, a GOP stronghold where his family was raised. Beshear's approval rating in the region is above water, at 51 percent; Paul leads Booker there by 32 points.

In the states

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania Democrats voted not to endorse a U.S. Senate candidate on Saturday, letting the four-way primary continue without the party's intervention. The Democrat who'd earned the most votes walked away with nothing; two of his rivals left a suburban Sheraton ballroom declaring victory.

"I definitely wanted to get to the threshold," said Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), after earning 60 percent of the vote from the party's county leaders — short of the 67 percent he needed for an endorsement. "The most important thing here is that every one of the four candidates had the same chance to convince these voters, and we convinced 60 percent of them to commit to us. We blew the other candidates out of the water."

Lamb's opponents had given up on winning the endorsement before the party meeting started, hoping to raise expectations high enough that the congressman would look weak if didn't get it. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who's led in polls and outraised the field, used his endorsement speech to highlight that.

"How do you evaluate the strength of the campaign?" he asked. "How about polls? How about fundraising? How about the number of donors? How about 88 percent of Pennsylvanians?"

Two other Democrats, Montgomery County Commissioner Val Arkoosh and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, came into the weekend as underdogs, and left that way. In round one, Lamb got 147 votes to 64 for Fetterman, 55 for Kenyatta and 17 for Arkoosh — a particularly wan showing for the only candidate from the Philadelphia suburbs. In a second round, Arkoosh was dropped, and Lamb won 169 votes to 64 for Fetterman and 42 for Kenyatta. There was no third round of voting.

Fetterman declined to talk on the record after the vote, while Arkoosh briefly addressed reporters to say that there were months left to campaign. Kenyatta celebrated his third-place showing as "a big coup for our campaign," telling The Trailer that there were three lanes in the race: a "money lane" dominated by Fetterman, a progressive lane he hoped to own and an "establishment lane" that had not delivered for Lamb.

"It had its opportunity today, and somebody who is a master of the inside baseball game wasn't able to pull it off," Kenyatta said.

Winning the endorsement wouldn't have ended the primary; in 2002, the party members endorsed Robert P. Casey Jr. for governor, and primary voters rejected him in favor of former Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, who won and served two terms in Harrisburg.

Michigan. Two-time U.S. Senate candidate John James entered the race for the new 10th Congressional District, a part of Macomb County that he narrowly lost in his 2020 run. In a video and a statement, he updated his outsider argument to the politics of 2022, saying he'd "use my real-world experience as a CEO in supply-chain management to alleviate the supply-chain crisis driving up the price of everything from groceries to medicine."

Connecticut. Republicans welcomed Themis Klarides into the race for U.S. Senate, after the former state House GOP leader dropped her bid for governor to challenge Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). In an interview with the Connecticut Mirror, Klarides said she'd challenge the two-term Democrat over voting "almost 100 percent of the time" with his party.

"I think that partisanship is over," Klarides said. "People are sick of it."

In a late 2020 interview with The Trailer, before taking control of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) singled out Connecticut as a potential target. The party hasn't won a Senate race there since 1982, and didn't seriously challenge Blumenthal six years ago, when its nominee raised and spent less than $400,000. Blumenthal won his first term in 2010, when WWE co-founder Linda McMahon spent more than $50 million and lost, in a nearly ideal year for Republicans.

Wait, what?

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich recording a paid message about Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.). (Cameo)

Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.) took a hit last month when the House Ethics Committee extended its probe of her 2020 campaign, continuing a messy fight between the congresswoman and a Democrat who claims he was offered a job to keep him from running that year. (Newman very narrowly unseated Daniel Lipinski, a conservative Democrat who'd benefited when previous challengers split their votes.) Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), her opponent in a June 28 primary that forced both Democrats into a new seat, has not weighed in on the investigation.

But Rod Blagojevich has. Last week, a Democratic strategist working against Newman paid the ex-governor $500 to record a Cameo video, asking him to talk about the Newman probe and analyze "how this will play out." Ted Bordelon, who's been working with the pro-Casten PAC 314 Action, was surprised when Blagojevich went for it, putting together a 10-minute video about his own experience as a governor convicted of trying to benefit from a 2008 U.S. Senate appointment, and eventually being pardoned by Donald Trump.

"We don't know all the facts. I know what it's like to be accused of things that aren't true," Blagojevich said in the clip. "I deplore the use of criminal prosecutions for political reasons."

The advice itself wasn't harsh for Newman, but her campaign wasn't thrilled by a scandal-tainted "Trumpocrat" — Blagojevich's description of himself — popping into the race. "We won't let cheap smears distract us from the job at hand," her campaign told The Trailer. "Every day, we are on the ground talking to voters about the issues that matter to them, working hard to reelect progressive leadership in the 6th District."

Dems in disarray

Justice Democrats, founded in 2017 to replace "corporate" incumbents with left-wing challengers, went into 2022 with just six House targets. In just a few days at the end of January, state legislators in Tennessee and New York ripped up two of the districts they were going after — a Nashville-based seat redrawn to be unwinnable for Democrats, and a Manhattan district that lost dozens of left-leaning Brooklyn precincts.

"We always knew that we'd have to navigate redistricting this cycle," said Waleed Shahid, JD's spokesman. "But most progressive primary challengers can't just wait around and not fundraise or raise their name recognition while this all played out over the past year."

In Tennessee, community activist Odessa Kelly announced her campaign nine months ago; the possibility that Republicans would demolish the 5th Congressional District was being floated a few weeks later. Kelly and Justice Democrats set out to unseat Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), one of the House's most conservative Democrats, though his voting record shifted left as the district got safer — a 13-point margin for Barack Obama in 2012 became a 23-point margin for Joe Biden in 2020. By the end of 2021, Kelly had raised a little less than $518,000 and spent a little more than $354,000.

But as Cooper warned they might, the GOP majority in Nashville split it and surrounding Davidson County into three districts — none of them, including the new 5th, competitive for Democrats. Kelly now has a smooth path to the August primary, for the nomination in a seat Biden lost by double digits.

The left's problem in New York wasn't foreshadowed the same way: Democrats in Albany would draw the maps, and the safely blue 12th District would remain unwinnable for Republicans. In 2018 and 2020, challengers led by Suraj Patel gave Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) real scares, and ran far ahead of the 29-year incumbent in the Brooklyn and Queens sections of the seat — Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Long Island City. Maloney held on thanks to landslide support from Democrats in Manhattan.

Those pro-Maloney Democrats remain in the new seat. Most of the anti-Maloney vote was removed, and added to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D-N.Y.) seat, while the seat expanded to take in more of Manhattan, where left-wing challengers have struggled. Another way of reading the new map: Most of the neighborhoods removed had backed Maya Wiley, the Ocasio-Cortez-endorsed left-wing candidate for mayor last year, and most of the precincts added had voted for Kathryn Garcia, the city's former sanitation commissioner.

That made the primary much tougher for Rana Abdelhamid, the Justice Democrats' recruit, who has raised nearly $794,000 since entering the race last April. In a statement, she forged ahead. "We have gained a culturally rich and iconic part of New York City that contains communities and voters that are looking for a change," she said. "We have always run this campaign expecting that the district would be redrawn. We have planned for this, and we are still on track to win."