Updated: Senate Candidates Release Second Quarter Fundraising Numbers

Republican U.S. Senate candidates Christopher Shays and Linda McMahon have released some of their fundraising numbers for the second quarter of this year.

In an email Friday, Shays’ campaign said it had raised $530,811 from 1,262 donors in the second quarter. That total is Shays’ largest quarterly haul of the campaign.

Spokeswoman Amanda Bergen said the campaign had $326,773 in cash on hand at the end of the reporting period. The campaign did not immediately say how much Shays has received from political action committees, or PACs.

But even with the best-yet quarterly numbers, Shays faces an uphill battle against Republican rival Linda McMahon, who is contributing substantially to her own campaign, as she did in her 2010 bid for the Senate. Previous federal filings show McMahon lent her campaign about $1.4 million in the first quarter of this year.

Bergen said the Shays’ campaign had never expected to keep pace with McMahon’s campaign funding.

“We’ve known from the beginning that we couldn’t compete with her money,” she said. “This is about who is the better candidate.”

McMahon spokesman Tim Murtaugh said Friday the campaign had raised $144,000 from 1,508 individual donors in the second quarter. Murtaugh declined to say how much cash the campaign has on hand or how much of her own money McMahon put toward her Senate bid this quarter, saying those numbers would be included in a federal campaign filing that is due Sunday.

On the Democratic side of the Senate race, Susan Bysiewicz’s campaign manager, Jonathan Ducote, said Friday afternoon that her campaign had raised more than $355,000 for the second quarter and $2.3 million overall. He could not immediately say how many individual donors Bysiewicz had or how much cash the campaign had on hand, but said the campaign has enough money to keep airing television ads until the Aug. 14 primary. The campaign has released two such ads in recent weeks.

“From the beginning, we’ve said we’ll have the resources we need to communicate,” Ducote said. “We’re going to be doing that right up until election day. We’re very much where we wanted to be at this point in the cycle.”

All federal candidates are to turn in quarterly campaign finance reports that are due Sunday.

Chris Murphy released his fundraising numbers earlier this week, showing that he raised about $1.2 million in the quarter.