A day after President Joe Biden announced he would no longer seek re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors through their main fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic groups, reported this sum over the past two days, as tracked live by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although the tally is not official and based on ActBlue’s mega-tracker of total donations since 2004, it provides insight into the group’s fundraising success weeks before any required disclosures are filed.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking ActBlue’s biggest day for fundraising in the 2024 cycle. The second-largest day for donations in recent history was September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
The surge in donations on Sunday pushed ActBlue past the $14 billion mark in cash raised since its inception two decades ago. Its Republican counterpart, WinRed, which began operations in late 2019, has collected about $4.3 billion in donations, according to OpenSecrets.
“We’ve seen so many folks saying they made their first ever donation in the last 24 hours!” ActBlue said in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday afternoon. “It’s so motivating to see new small-dollar donors join the grassroots movement!”
Future Forward, a Biden-aligned super PAC, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and subsequent endorsement of Harris, as reported by Politico. Swing Left, an organization supporting the eventual Democratic nominee, told Agence France-Presse it raised more than $160,000 within the same timeframe.
Evercore founder Roger Altman on Monday stated that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and pledged his support. Democratic mega-donors George and Alex Soros have also backed Harris.
Previously, Biden’s best fundraising days came after being soundly defeated by rival and former president Donald Trump during a televised debate on June 27. Biden and his committees raised approximately $28 million on June 27 and June 28, according to a New York Times analysis.
Biden also raised $19.2 million in the aftermath of Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts. Trump and his allied groups raised $69 million from May 30, the day he was convicted, to May 31, temporarily crashing Trump’s campaign website. An aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
Between April and June, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups collected $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.