Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would end his re-election campaign, Democrats successfully raised $100 million from supporters through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee designed for Democratic fundraising, reported the amount in just two days via a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. While these figures are unofficial and drawn from ActBlue’s extensive tracking since 2004, they give insight into the group’s fundraising efforts ahead of mandatory disclosures.
On Sunday alone, contributions reached $66.9 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, making it the largest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The previous record for a single day of donations occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
Thanks to this surge in contributions on Sunday, ActBlue has now raised a total of $14 billion since its inception two decades ago. Its Republican counterpart, WinRed, which began operations in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion during the same period, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue highlighted the wave of new small-dollar donors, noting that many individuals made their very first donations in the last 24 hours, calling it a motivating sign for the grassroots movement.
In addition, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within a day of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris, according to Politico. Swing Left, which established a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 within the same timeframe.
On Monday, Evercore founder Roger Altman expressed that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and declared his support for her. Prominent Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also shown their backing for Harris.
Previously, Biden achieved notable fundraising boosts immediately following a debate defeat against Trump on June 27, when Biden and his committees raised around $28 million over the next day. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million in the days afterward, while Trump and his affiliates gathered $69 million from May 30 to May 31, with the rush of donors temporarily crashing Trump’s campaign website. During that month, the super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. raised $70 million.
Between April and June, pro-Biden groups amassed $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 compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.