Mitch McConnell's Senate Opponent Amy McGrath Raised $2.5 Million in 24 Hours

Democrat Amy McGrath, a retired combat pilot and Marine lieutenant colonel, announced on Tuesday that she's running against Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. In the 24 hours after her announcement, McGrath raised over $2.5 million in donations, trouncing even the first-day totals for some presidential candidates like senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.

In total, she received 69,000 individual donations, with an average contribution of $36, her campaign manager told CNN. A spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee told the New York Times that McGrath's total is likely a Senate campaign record for first-day donations.

With more than two dozen people running for the party's presidential nomination, and several high profile figures like Stacy Abrams of Georgia sitting this election out, the Democrats' prospects gaining seats in the Senate, let alone of taking it back, look slim. McGrath ran for Congress in 2018 against Republican Andy Barr. She managed to raise $8.5 million—$3 million more than her opponent—after her biographical campaign ad went viral but ultimately lost by four percentage points,

Beating McConnell is a long shot, and fundraising alone won't be enough for McGrath to be competitive. In his last reelection in 2014, McConnell spent more than $30 million and he won by 15 percentage points. That's nearly half of Trump's margin of victory in Kentucky (62.5 percent to Hillary Clinton's 32.7), but McConnell could easily benefit from the higher turnout for a presidential election year.

McGrath's debut senate campaign video also went viral when it was released on Tuesday, and in it her messaging explicitly targets McConnell: "Everything that’s wrong in Washington had to start someplace. It started with this man who was elected a lifetime ago, and who has, bit by bit, year by year, turned Washington into something we all despise."

Originally Appeared on GQ