The Vulnerable Villains of Congress
New fundraising numbers suggest that extreme Republican incumbents and moderate Democratic challengers may expand the battlefield
Every cycle, there are a handful of races that move across the board. After starting off or near the edge of the board, the fundamentals begin to shift, and the races start to gain more attention. We saw this in 2022 in districts like CO-03 (where Lauren Boebert nearly lost what was once seen as a “safe” seat) and in 2024 in districts like PA-10 and WI-03 (where extremist incumbents Scott Perry and Derrick Van Orden nearly lost to moderate challengers).
Florida’s 7th and Tennessee’s 5th are not supposed to be competitive. They voted for Trump by double digits, they were uncompetitive in 2024, and they started the 2026 cycle rated Solid Republican by the ratings agencies. But the incumbents in both districts, Cory Mills in FL-07 and Andy Ogles in TN-05, are exactly the type of candidates who put these districts on the map. Mills and Ogles are polarizing, baggage-heavy, and far from the low-drama incumbents (how many of these guys have you heard of seriously?) that keep these seats “safe.”
Now the fundraising reports are starting to reflect that and people are paying attention.
We’ve been hammering these districts for literally years (literally!) and this week we were excited to see The New York Times feature the races, particularly Tennessee’s 5th:
That Mr. Ogles’s seat is even in the conversation is an indication of the political shape Republicans find themselves in as they approach the midterm elections. Anger over President Trump’s war in Iran, spiking gas prices and persistent affordability concerns have led to shifts of up to 20 percentage points in recent elections compared with the 2024 election that returned Mr. Trump to the White House.
Tennessee Republicans thought they drew a safe seat during the last redistricting cycle, slicing a Democratic district in Nashville into three districts stretching into rural areas. The Fifth Congressional District now reaches south of even Columbia, a town of nearly 50,000 about 50 miles south of the state capital. Mr. Ogles won it for the first time in 2022, by nearly 14 percentage points. The question is whether Mr. Trump’s 18-point advantage in the district in 2024 is enough to guarantee a win this fall.
What’s raising interest? Fundraising.
In Florida’s 7th, Mills was outraised in Q1 by his top Democratic challenger, Bale Dalton, by a wide margin, roughly $350,000 to just $74,000. Dalton’s continued advantage shows up even more clearly in cash-on-hand. Dalton is sitting on about $460,000, giving him a commanding financial edge over the Mills campaign, which has just $115,000 in the bank and is carrying $2 million in debt.
Mills had flown a bit under the radar, but the recent resignations of Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales may force his misconduct to center stage. Mills is the subject of a wide-ranging House Ethics Committee investigation covering campaign finance violations, misuse of congressional resources, and sexual misconduct. In February 2025, D.C. police responded to a domestic assault report at his residence after a woman showed officers fresh bruises and let them listen to a call where Mills instructed her to lie about the origin. A new Washington Post investigation this week based on body-camera footage and police documents obtained by the paper goes further: officers were preparing to take Mills into custody and had summoned a transport vehicle before a lieutenant intervened and downgraded the incident to a “family disturbance” after the woman appeared to speak with Mills by phone and recant. The responding officer, Richard Mazloom, can be heard on his own body camera telling the alleged victim that his supervisors were “making this into a family disturbance instead of an actual domestic assault.” The next day, police reversed course and sent an arrest warrant to the interim U.S. Attorney, who refused to sign it. A Florida judge then issued a protective order against him last October after a different ex-girlfriend, a sitting Republican state committee member, accused him of threatening to release explicit videos and to harm future boyfriends.
It gets worse. Five veterans who served alongside him, including two of the men he claims to have saved, have disputed the Bronze Star actions in his official biography. Before Congress, he built his fortune selling arms to undisclosed foreign governments and crowd-control munitions used against civilians in Egypt, then moved from a $4.2 million house in Virginia into the 7th district to run for the seat. An Office of Congressional Ethics inquiry found his companies had secured close to $1 million in federal contracts for munitions distributed to prisons since he took office, none of which he properly disclosed on his House financial forms. He was the subject of three separate censure resolutions in 2025, including one filed by fellow Republican Nancy Mace. Welcome has tracked Mills across our Dark MAGA Police Reporting series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).
Tennessee’s 5th is even harder to ignore. Andy Ogles has spent much of his time in office dealing with questions about his background and ethics filings, including scrutiny over discrepancies in his resume and campaign finance reporting. Trump’s DOJ dropped the charges. Like Mills, he’s built a brand that generates attention, but not the kind that typically helps shore up a general election.
And the numbers are worse. Ogles was outraised in Q1 by Democrat Chaz Molder by a wide margin, and the gap shows up clearly in the bank. Molder enters Q2 with more than $1.2 million cash-on-hand. Ogles has about $85,000. That’s a million-dollar advantage in a district that isn’t even supposed to be competitive.
Ogles has built his own opposition research file. Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 has spent the past three years documenting his fabricated resume, including claims to be a trained economist, a law enforcement officer, and an expert in international sex crimes, none of which held up on review. The FBI executed a search warrant on his personal cell phone in August 2024 as part of an ongoing investigation into a $320,000 personal loan he reported making to his 2022 campaign, a figure he later amended down to $20,000 after records indicated he did not have the money to begin with. The House Ethics Committee voted 6-0 in January 2025 to extend its review. His policy record is similarly off the mainstream. He has introduced a resolution to let Trump run for a third term, still denies the 2020 election result, supports overturning the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage, and recently called for a congressional inquiry into Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. Welcome has had Ogles on the competitive radar for some time, and the financial picture is now catching up to the political one.
Of course, finances are only part of the equation, and these gaps do not guarantee success in November. However, both Dalton and Molder are running locally-focused campaigns that can appeal to a large portion of the electorate. This is exactly the kind of setup that turns “safe” races into real ones: incumbents with baggage, challengers who can raise money and appeal to their voters, and early financial gaps that force national groups to at least take a look.
If those conditions hold through the next quarter, these districts won’t stay under the radar for long.