O’Rourke bests Cruz in Senate race fundraising

Democrat hauls in $2.1 million from 46,574 individual donations.

U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso Democrat who remains largely unknown on the state or national scene, surpassed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the man he hopes to upset in 2018, in fundraising during the second quarter of 2017.

In a Facebook post and video Thursday, O’Rourke said that he raised $2.1 million in April, May and June. He said that the money came from 46,574 individual donations with an average contribution of $44, and that 81 percent of the money came from Texas. In a rarity, O’Rourke doesn’t take any money from political action committees.

The Cruz campaign reported it had raised $1.6 million in the same period, leaving him with $5.7 million cash on hand at the end of June.

O’Rourke, who announced his candidacy at the end of March, raised a little more than $200,000 in the first quarter of the year.

His campaign spent $720,000 in the second quarter and finished with almost $1.9 million in cash at the end of June.

O’Rourke is the only announced Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat.

“I think it was an adequate haul for the first quarter of serious fundraising,” said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. “It will only get him a part of the way down the trail, and it’s a long trail to the end.”

“But the way it was raised was more impressive than what was raised,” Rottinghaus said. “My sense is that the race will cost