Running against Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her home district in San Francisco is as close to a political suicide mission as a Republican can undertake — but unlike her underfunded predecessors, GOP nominee Dana Walsh won’t lack for money.

Walsh, an interior designer and member of the San Francisco GOP central committee, had raised $363,871 as of June 30, according to CQ MoneyLine. Her campaign had $45,168 on hand, with the report showing that most of the money raised went toward the cost of setting up a national direct-mail fundraising operation.

Her campaign consultant, California GOP veteran Harvey Hukari, said the campaign aims to raise almost $1 million before the Nov. 4 election in California’s 8th District. With that money, he estimated Walsh will have enough money to run a direct-mail and cable TV ad campaign.

Such a big dollar figure represents a major change for a GOP nominee against Pelosi, who since her first election to the House in 1987 has been re-elected to 10 full terms with an average of 81 percent of the vote.

Pelosi’s 2006 GOP opponent, Mike DeNunzio, reported raising $149,842 for his campaign against the Democrat; he received 10.7 percent of the vote.

A complicating factor in November could be the potential candidacy of anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who has to collect more than 10,000 voters’ signatures by Aug. 8 to win a place on the ballot as an independent. Her second-quarter report was not available from the Federal Election Commission.

The high profiles of Pelosi and Sheehan have helped Walsh raise funds, according to Walsh and Hukari. “I’m running against two of the most dangerous women in America,’’ Walsh says on her campaign Web site.

Pelosi, long one of the House’s most prodigious fundraisers, reported that her Nancy Pelosi for Congress campaign took in $2.4 million through June 30. It had $455,138 on hand. Some $1.4 million of the money raised was donated by the Speaker to Democrats seeking House seats.

Walsh said she knows the odds against her are long. “It’s a two-party system. Someone has to run,’’ she said.

She describes herself as a San Francisco Republican of libertarian bent on some issues. But her platform calls for no pullout from Iraq, a halt to illegal immigration and energy independence, which she says should include allowing oil drilling on Alaska’s North Slope — all unpopular positions in the district.

The 8th Congressional District, which includes most of San Francisco, is home to many wealthy GOP contributors, but with Democrats enjoying a 6-to-1 registration edge over Republicans and the Speaker as a neighbor, many have shied away from the Walsh campaign, Hukari said.

According to a CQ MoneyLine analysis of contributors who identified where they lived, the second-quarter campaign finance reports showed that 27 percent of Walsh’s money came from within California.

That analysis also showed Pelosi receiving 47 percent of her campaign contributions from within California; much of that money came from within San Francisco.