Be very quiet and listen closely.

Do you hear it?

That’s the sound of James Carville screaming, knowing that his party is about to blow tens of millions of dollars again on a slate of no-hope candidates.

There are three ways to make a fundraising splash while running for office. One: Be on the ballot in an important battleground race. Two: Say things that make your base feel tingly inside. Three: Run against a candidate from the other party whom your party despises.

On rare occasions, a candidate will check all three of those boxes. And when they do, they end up being able to print their own money — even though they’re headed for all but certain defeat. For the second time in four years, Beto O’Rourke has caught fundraising lightning in a bottle.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke raised a staggering $27.6 million from late February through June, outraising Republican incumbent Greg Abbott and setting a new record for campaign fundraising in Texas.

O’Rourke’s campaign announced the haul Friday morning, and Abbott’s followed with the announcement that he raised $24.9 million over the same period. O’Rourke’s $27.6 million is the most a candidate for state office in Texas has ever raised in a reporting period…

O’Rourke’s $27.6 million haul is historic. For comparison, Abbott is the strongest fundraiser the state has seen in modern times, and his best reporting periods until now have not cracked $20 million in contributions.

Beto has checked all three boxes. His gun-grabbing rhetoric provides liberals with the requisite tingles and lefties have come to despise Abbott for the culture-war brand he’s built over the last several years. Texas also happens to be at the center of the two hottest cultural disputes in America. One is gun control, which came to a head after the Uvalde massacre; the other is abortion, which was effectively banned after six weeks in Texas last year under the state’s novel law creating civil liability for providers. O’Rourke is in the eye of that storm in a state which Dems have dreamed of flipping for decades. They’re showering him with cash to try to make it happen. And as I say, not for the first time.

But he’s going to lose anyway, almost certainly. A longtime incumbent with Abbott’s name recognition and considerable war chest (he has far more cash on hand than O’Rourke even now) simply isn’t beatable in a national environment as pro-Republican as this one. Barring a catastrophe like the Texas power grid going down this summer, the best Beto can hope for is a respectable loss a la his defeat at the hands of Ted Cruz in 2018. He’s hanging in there in polling, trailing by single digits, but he has yet to top 45 percent in any survey. It’s just not happening.

He’ll make a fantastic DNC chair sometime in the near future, though.

Over in Georgia, Stacey Abrams has two of the three boxes checked. Her base doesn’t despise Brian Kemp the way it despises Abbott, as Kemp’s claim to fame is standing up to Trump and certifying Biden’s victory in his home state in 2020. But Abrams is a progressive rock star in her own right, having become the party’s most prominent advocate nationally for voting rights. Unsurprisingly, not only is she outraising the incumbent Kemp, she’s vastly outraising him among out-of-state donors. In state, the story is different:

Abrams’ fundraising profile — which consists of huge backing from wealthy coastal Democrats and a massive base of small-dollar support — is more typical of a leading national candidate than a gubernatorial contender.

Driving the news: Abrams’ campaign and leadership committee have reported receiving about $7 million from Georgia donors, or just over 14% of the nearly $50 million they’ve combined to raise this cycle.

Incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s campaign and leadership committee have brought in more than $27 million from in-state donors, or nearly 84% of their almost $33 million total since Kemp began fundraising in 2019.

Abrams’s haul from Georgians is likely better than those numbers indicate since she’s also received $6.7 million from donors who’ve kicked in less than $100 each. Information on where they reside doesn’t need to be reported; doubtless some are from her home state. But despite her financial advantages, she’s also a likely loser this fall. Apart from a couple of encouraging polls from Quinnipiac, she’s stalled out at around 45 percent, some five to seven points behind Kemp. Kemp is at the peak of his political powers in Georgia at the moment too, having routed Trump’s candidate in the gubernatorial primary. Something extremely weird would need to happen for Abrams to overcome the Biden anchor that’s chained to her ankles and the electorate’s Republican drift generally to nudge past Kemp in the end.

If she ends up losing again, one of the great what-ifs of modern American politics will be her decision not to run for Senate in 2020 so that she could take a second crack at Kemp amid a red wave in 2022 instead. I don’t know where she goes politically if she loses statewide a second time. It’ll be a long wait until a Senate seat in Georgia is up again.

O’Rourke and Abrams aren’t the only candidates on whom Dems are wasting their money, by the way. Val Demings hauled in more than $12 million in the second quarter for her Senate race against Marco Rubio in Florida even though she’s probably no more likely to win there than Beto is to defeat Abbott. Rubio has become a hate object for the left due to his timidity about crossing Trump, though, and Demings is the lucky beneficiary. Her donors would be better off pulling the plug on her and redirecting their money to Tim Ryan in Ohio, who raised a “mere” $9 million in the second quarter for his race against J.D. Vance. Vance himself raised just $2.3 million, giving Ryan an outside shot at the upset in a state that’s still purple enough to have Sherrod Brown as one of its two senators.

All of that said, Dem donors have been smart about some races. John Fetterman took in more than $12 million last quarter and stands a real chance of winning that Senate seat against a weak candidate in Mehmet Oz. Catherine Cortez Masto outraised her Republican opponent Adam Laxalt by nearly $5 million, giving Dems hope of keeping Nevada blue. And Raphael Warnock hauled in — no typo — $17.2 million, more than $10 million better than Herschel Walker. If Warnock ends up holding that seat in this electoral climate, some Dems are going to start whispering about 2024.