A day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million from contributors through ActBlue, their primary fundraising platform.
According to a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy from The Marshall Project, ActBlue recorded this figure within a two-day timeframe. Although the number is not official and is based on cumulative data since 2004, it offers early insights into the group’s fundraising performance prior to mandatory disclosure deadlines.
On Sunday alone, donations reached $66.9 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launch. This marked the largest fundraising day for ActBlue in the 2024 election cycle. The second highest was during the first presidential debate between Biden and Donald Trump on September 30, 2020.
With the recent surge of contributions, ActBlue has now raised a total of $14 billion since its establishment. In contrast, WinRed, its Republican counterpart initiated in late 2019, has gathered around $4.3 billion.
ActBlue noted a significant increase in first-time donors, stating that many individuals expressed they made their initial donations recently. Following Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, gained $150 million in new commitments in just 24 hours. Additionally, Swing Left reported raising over $160,000 in that same period.
On Monday, Evercore founder Roger Altman predicted that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and expressed his support for her. Prominent Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also endorsed Harris.
In previous fundraising events, Biden’s campaigns have seen significant contributions immediately following major debates, including an impressive $28 million raised within a day after his debate loss to Trump in June. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million in the subsequent days, while Trump and his supporters raised $69 million in a similar timeframe, causing his campaign website to briefly crash. In total, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million between April and June, compared to $431.2 million raised by pro-Trump groups. As of the end of June, Biden had $281 million in funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.