Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million from donors via their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, the political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, recorded this amount over the past two days, according to a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. While the tally is not official and is based on ActBlue’s own mega-tracker of total donations since 2004, it provides insight into the group’s fundraising performance ahead of any required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the highest single-day fundraising effort in the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The previous record for donations occurred on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump faced off in the first presidential debate, according to Murphy’s tracker.
The boost in donations from Sunday allowed ActBlue to cross a significant milestone, raising a total of $14 billion since its establishment two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, its Republican counterpart that launched in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion according to OpenSecrets.
In a statement on X, formerly Twitter, ActBlue noted an influx of first-time donors in the past 24 hours, expressing excitement about the growing grassroots movement.
Future Forward, a super PAC supportive of Biden, reportedly raised $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Additionally, Swing Left, which began a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, announced it raised over $160,000 within the same time frame.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed confidence in Harris’s campaign, stating it would be “very well financed,” and mentioned his support for her. Notable Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also pledged their backing to Harris.
Biden’s previous significant fundraising successes occurred after he faced a decisive defeat by Donald Trump during a televised debate on June 27, raising around $28 million between that day and June 28, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million in the days after the announcement, while Trump and his associated groups generated $69 million within 24 hours of his conviction. The surge in donations temporarily crashed Trump’s campaign website. An aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups accumulated $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups garnered $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.