Just one day after President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million from donors via ActBlue, their primary fundraising platform.
According to a live tracker run by Ryan Murphy of The Marshall Project, this impressive amount was collected over just two days. While this figure is not official and is based on ActBlue’s own large-scale tracker of donations since its inception in 2004, it offers insight into the fundraising results just weeks before any mandated disclosures are due.
On Sunday alone, contributions reached $66.9 million for the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single-day fundraising total in the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. For context, the previous high for daily donations occurred on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
With this notable influx of donations, ActBlue has now raised a total of $14 billion since its establishment two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform that started in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion, as reported by OpenSecrets.
ActBlue noted on X (formerly Twitter) that many individuals made their first-ever donations in the past 24 hours, stating it was encouraging to witness new small-dollar donors joining the grassroots movement.
In addition, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from significant donors within a day of Biden’s announcement and his endorsement of Harris, according to Politico. Swing Left, which supports the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 within 24 hours.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed on Monday that he believes Harris’s campaign will be “very well financed” and offered his support. Prominent Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also shown their backing for Harris.
Previously, Biden experienced significant fundraising success right after he faced a defeat by Donald Trump in a televised debate on June 27, raising about $28 million from that day until the following day, according to a New York Times analysis.
Biden also saw a boost of $19.2 million following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, while Trump and his allied groups raised $69 million from May 30 to May 31 after his indictment, which temporarily crashed his campaign website. The super PAC associated with Trump, Make America Great Again Inc., raised an impressive $70 million that month.
Between April and June, groups supporting Biden raised $332.4 million, while those backing Trump brought in $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in his campaign account compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.