Eight influential Republican senators jumped on board former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina's California Senate campaign Thursday, a day after she officially launched her bid.

Those endorsing Fiorina included Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Assistant Minority Leader Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.; 2008 presidential nominee John McCain, R-Calif.; Tom Coburn, R-Okla.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; and Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe. All cited her experience as a business leader.

In his statement, McCain praised Fiorina's service as an adviser during his presidential bid. "I benefited from her no-nonsense way of getting things done when she served on my campaign last year," he said.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, is expected to formally launch her long-awaited Republian campaign against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer sometime this week. She has public appearances scheduled Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, though the campaign is not disclosing at what event, specifically, she will make her announcement.

Her main rival for the GOP nomination, state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, is hoping for a big announcement of his own. The DeVore campaign is hyping a conference call slated for Tuesday night hosted by the Senate Conservative Fund political action committee and featuring the PAC's chairman, Sen. Jim DeMint , R-S.C., and Erick Erickson, editor of the influential conservative blog RedState.com.

A release touting the conference call, which is being held to discuss the state of play in the 2010 Senate races, promises that "Sen. DeMint will announce at least one major SCF endorsement at the end of the call." The DeVore campaign is leaving the strong impression that it could be him.

Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., endorsed a second candidate in another GOP Senate primary, picking Rep. Todd Tiahrt over Rep. Jerry Moran in Kansas' open-seat Senate race.

Moran and Tiahrt are in a competitive race for the GOP nomination -- the winner of that contest in August 2010 is expected to be the next senator from Kansas.

Inhofe announced last week that he was backing former House Speaker Marco Rubio over Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida's GOP Senate primary.

"There is a real battle going on in Washington, a philosophical battle between [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and her Washington liberals, who want to tax and spend this country into deeper recession and mind-numbing debt and a group of conservatives who believe we must stop bailing out Wall Street and start investing again in Main Street," Inhofe said. "Todd Tiahrt is one of those conservatives."

The first campaign finance report filed by Colorado Republican Jane Norton, a former lieutenant governor who is running for the Senate in 2010, reads like a Who's Who of GOP officeholders past and present, strategists and lobbyists.

Prominent Republicans in Colorado and Washington, D.C., helped Norton raise $510,000 in less than one month as an active candidate for the seat Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet is defending.

That is more money raised to date by any of the other Colorado Republican candidates for Senate, some of whom have been campaigning for months. One of them, Aurora city councilman Ryan Frazier, raised just $71,000 in this year's third quarter and dropped out of the Senate race last week to run instead for a House seat in suburban Denver.

Back from another trip to the Senate's public records office, which is busy processing the dozens of campaign finance reports that senators and candidates had to mail by a July 15 deadline.

Most of the reports, which cover receipts and expenditures for the second quarter of 2009 and often run into the hundreds of pages, aren't yet available for viewing. (Unfortunately, the Senate doesn't mandate electronic filing of campaign finance reports). But here are some useful nuggets of information from campaign reports I did view earlier today.

Alabama: Talk about low overhead. Republican Sen. Richard C. Shelby, a shoo-in to win a fifth term in 2010, raised $1.4 million and spent just $96,000 doing so. That's less than 7 percent of his second-quarter receipts. Even at this early stage, most campaigns spend a larger percentage of their receipts on fundraising and staff expenses. (For example, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid raised $3.3 million and spent $976,000, or about 30 percent.) Shelby has a whopping $14.8 million cash-on-hand as July began.

Republican Michael Mahaffey once lost a very close open-seat House race to Democrat Leonard L. Boswell in Iowa's 3rd District, and he has been waiting patiently for the right opportunity to pursue a rematch.

Very patiently.

Mahaffey, who lost an open-seat race to Boswell in 1996, told CQ Politics that he is thinking of giving it another go next year -- 14 years after their original showdown.

Mahaffey said he plans to make a decision about the 2010 race by Labor Day.

In a sign of Republican concern over Sen. Richard Burr's re-election chances, Burr's friend and Senate colleague, John McCain, is now running Google ads pumping the North Carolina freshman.

As first spotted by the Charlotte News and Observer, a Google search of "Richard Burr" brings up a sponsored link from McCain's Country First political action committee -- "Richard Burr NC Senator," it reads, followed by "Join John McCain's Country First to Support Candidates like Burr!"

The link leads to the PAC's Supported Candidates page.

The Alaska Democrat who almost toppled Rep. Don Young last year is gearing up for another statewide race -- against Gov. Sarah Palin, if she chooses to run for re-election.

"My sights are now on the governor's race," Ethan Berkowitz, a former leader of the Democratic minority in the state House, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

In 2008, Republican Young defeated Berkowitz by a 5 percentage-point margin -- a difference of 16,379 votes -- after easily topping his 2006 Democratic opponent by nearly 17 points and nearly 40,000 votes, and winning a landslide victory as recently as 2004 by nearly 50 points and 150,000 votes.

Two years before his 2008 House race, Berkowitz ran for lieutenant governor; the Republican ticket of Palin for governor and Sean Parnell for lieutenant governor defeated the Democratic ticket of former Gov. Tony Knowles and Berkowitz, 48.3 percent to 41 percent.