Campaign fundraising isn’t everything, but with a long 18 months until the 2022 election, at this point it’s the clearest way to quantify how the cycle is shaping up.

Colorado’s federal candidates — for next year’s Senate race and seven of the eight seats the state will have in the House of Representatives for the 2022 election — filed reports covering the first three months of the year on April 15.

There’s plenty of early insight to glean from the numbers with a couple key provisos. It’s still a long way until any of the contests will be set — most of the candidates so far don’t even have opponents — and since it’s the first election after the decennial census, no one’s even sure what the congressional districts will look like.

On top of that, the state gets an additional House seat, something that hasn’t happened in 20 years, creating openings for an additional crop of candidates.

At this point in the cycle, candidates are trying to re-awaken their donor networks and acquire new small-dollar contributors who can be hit up throughout the campaign for additional bucks, as well as come out strong in an effort to clear the field of weaker competitors.

To no one’s surprise, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, the Democrat running next year for a third term, turned in a report with the heftiest receipts by a wide margin, though his cash on hand lags the total one House incumbent has in the bank and is tied with another’s.

Bennet, who has yet to draw a GOP opponent, raised $1,222,513 in the three-month period and had $1,213,293 left.

The prodigious fundraiser raised substantially less than his former colleague Republican Cory Gardner brought in during the first quarter of 2019, the year before his unsuccessful run for re-election last year.

Gardner, pegged at the time as one of 2020’s two most vulnerable Republican senators, raised $2,002,811 for the equivalent quarter and finished with $3,414,514 in the bank.

No one is contending that Bennet faces the same rocky road that confronted Gardner, though, so he isn’t facing the same pressure to bank millions.

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And even though all the major election forecasters have painted the Senate seat blue at this point, Bennet isn’t guaranteed another term the way senators are in many of the other states on next year’s map.

Fewer than 10 states are considered true Senate battlegrounds in the next election — Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, and possibly Ohio and Florida — with Colorado conspicuously missing from the list for the first time in at least 20 years.

A recent fundraising pitch from the Bennet campaign pointed out that the Colorado Democrat didn’t raise nearly as much as the four Democrats running in top battleground states and — because it was a fundraising pitch — warned that this meant Republicans were sure to sense vulnerability, meaning it was time to send more money.

Of course, the reason Bennet didn’t raise as much money as vulnerable Democrats like Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Georgia’s Raphael Warnock was because his seat isn’t endangered to the same extent.

The 2020 Senate nominees — Gardner and Democrat John Hickenlooper, who unseated the Republican — also reported their fundraising for the quarter. Hickenlooper raised $176,876 and ended the quarter with $1,412,452 in the bank, while Gardner received $20,800 in transfers from the Colorado Trump Victory fund, and finished the quarter with $1,027,364 in the bank.

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The top two House fundraisers in Colorado for the most recent quarter turned out to be U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Republican incumbent in the 3rd Congressional District, and her leading Democratic challenger, state Sen. Kerry Donovan — so far the only congressional race with a full cast of candidates, though there’s still plenty of time for even more to emerge.

Boebert, who spent a little over $2.6 million in last year’s race, reported hauling in $846,156 and had $824,259 on hand, while Donovan raised $643,596 and had $362,544 in the bank.

Donovan, who launched her campaign in early February, raised her total in just 55 days, compared to the 90 days Boebert had, suggesting that there’ll be plenty of money on both sides when the CD3 lines are finalized and the race is engaged.

Three other Democrats running for the nomination also posted fundraising reports, but none came close to Boebert’s or Donovan’s totals.

State Rep. Don Valdez, who ran in CD3 last time but folded his campaign after a few months when it didn’t catch fire, reported raising $67,149 and had $44,271 in the bank.

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Pueblo activist Sol Sandoval, who is pitching herself as the more grassroots, Bernie Sanders-style candidate, raised $45,525 and finished with $20,286. She received $500 and an endorsement from Democrat Diane Mitsch Bush, the former state lawmaker who ran for the seat in 2018 and 2020 but lost both times.

A fifth candidate, Glenwood Springs attorney Colin Wilhelm, raised just $14,369 and reported being about $12,000 in the hole at the end of the quarter.

A favorite of former President Donald Trump, Boebert has turned her national profile and enormous social media following into an avalanche of small-dollar donations, though her equally controversial House colleague, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, managed to raise $3.2 million for the same period.

It wasn’t for lack of trying — nearly every trick in the book — on Boebert’s part.

On two occasions last month, hordes of Boebert’s critics — the technical term is “haters” — managed to make her a top-trending topic on Twitter, though neither reference was flattering.

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Both times when phrases attacking Boebert sailed to the top of the social media site’s traffic report — #LaurenBoebert4Prison and #LaurenBoebertIsSoDumb — the Republican embraced the scorn and, she said, turned it into fundraising bonanzas.

“Lauren Boebert for Prison is the number one hashtag on Twitter right now for one reason,” Boebert tweeted. “The left is TERRIFIED of strong women who don’t buy into their victimhood bullcrap.”

Referencing the other hashtag a couple weeks later, she tweeted: “The left hates women & I’m their top target. As the 2022 cycle heats up, I need your support more than ever. Everyday is a full-scale attack on me! Chip in now!” Another time, she tweeted, “Let’s show them every time they try to take us down, we only get stronger!”

While it’s impossible to verify because of the way small-dollar donations are reported, Boebert claimed that she raised $30,000 one of the times she was trending and $40,000 the other.

Two Democratic incumbents who first won their seats in 2018 came in next, with U.S. Rep. Jason Crow posting $460,648 in receipts and $1,499,212 in the bank — the most of any of Colorado’s 2022 candidates — and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse raising $399,322 and finishing the quarter with $1,212,032 on hand, almost the same as Bennet.

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Both Democrats were House impeachment managers — Crow in early 2020 and Neguse just a couple months ago — putting them in the national spotlight and amping up their fundraising capabilities, though neither faces an announced challenger yet.

By comparison, U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, the five-term Republican unseated by Crow in 2018, raised $269,061 in the equivalent first quarter of 2017 and finished the period with $253,076 on hand.

The other House incumbents — Democrats Diana DeGette and Ed Perlmutter, and Republicans Ken Buck and Doug Lamborn — raised less, though all four finished the quarter with at least a quarter-million dollars in the bank, and Perlmutter boasted just over $1 million.

Lamborn, however, appears not to have put much effort at all into fundraising, posting just $5,235 in contributions, about half from individuals and half from political action committees, and just one of his donors, a retired Colorado Springs resident who chipped in $250, living in Colorado.

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