Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats successfully raised $100 million through their primary fundraising platform.
According to a real-time tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy from The Marshall Project, ActBlue, a significant fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, recorded this impressive sum over the past two days. While this figure is not official, as it draws from ActBlue’s large-scale tracker of donations since 2004, it highlights the group’s fundraising capabilities ahead of the upcoming required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, supporters contributed $66.9 million for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launch, marking the highest single-day fundraising total for the 2024 election cycle on ActBlue. The previous record for daily donations occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
The recent influx of donations has contributed to ActBlue surpassing a remarkable $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform that began in late 2019, has accumulated approximately $4.3 billion in donations as reported by OpenSecrets.
ActBlue officials noted a significant surge of first-time contributors in the past 24 hours, expressing their enthusiasm on social media about this growing grassroots movement.
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within a day of Biden’s announcement endorsing Harris, according to Politico. Another democratic fundraising group, Swing Left, reported raising over $160,000 within the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed confidence in Harris’s campaign financing on Monday, pledging his support. Prominent Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also expressed their backing for Harris.
In previous fundraising efforts, Biden saw significant contributions immediately following a televised debate defeat to Trump on June 27, where Biden and his committees raised around $28 million in just two days. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million, while Trump and his affiliates garnered $69 million in the days following the conviction, leading to a temporary crash of Trump’s campaign website. During that time, the pro-Trump super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million.
Between April and June, groups supporting Biden raised $332.4 million compared to $431.2 million raised by Trump’s allies, as cited by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million available, while Trump reported $336.2 million.