Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats were able to raise $100 million from supporters through its primary fundraising platform, ActBlue.
According to a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy of The Marshall Project, this amount was gathered over the past two days. Though the tally is not official and comes from ActBlue’s extensive donation records since 2004, it offers insight into the group’s fundraising outcomes just weeks before any official disclosures are due.
On Sunday alone, contributions reached $66.9 million in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single fundraising day of the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The second highest day for donations in recent memory occurred on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump participated in their first presidential debate, as noted by Murphy’s tracker.
Thanks to the substantial donations on Sunday, ActBlue surpassed $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception twenty years ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform that launched in late 2019, has accumulated about $4.3 billion in donations so far, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue reported on social media that many individuals had made their first donations in the last day, expressing excitement over new small-dollar contributors joining the grassroots effort.
Following Biden’s announcement and Harris’s endorsement, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, garnered $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours. Additionally, Swing Left, which supports the eventual Democratic nominee, raised more than $160,000 in the same timeframe, according to Agence France-Presse.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, indicated on Monday that Harris’s campaign will be “very well financed” and expressed his support for her. Prominent Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also shown their backing for Harris.
Previously, Biden’s most successful fundraising days occurred after he was decisively defeated by Trump in a televised debate on June 27, which netted about $28 million from June 27 to June 28. Moreover, Biden raised $19.2 million in the aftermath of Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, while Trump and his affiliated groups amassed $69 million in the day following his conviction. This overwhelming donation influx caused a brief crash of Trump’s campaign website, and an allied PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden organizations raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups collected $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in available funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.