Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not pursue re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million from contributors through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, recorded this impressive total over two days, as tracked by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although this figure is not official and derives from ActBlue’s self-reported statistics since 2004, it offers a glimpse into the group’s fundraising success ahead of formal disclosures.
On Sunday, contributions surged to $66.9 million in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single fundraising day for ActBlue during the 2024 election cycle. The previous high for donations occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
As a result of the Sunday donation influx, ActBlue has now raised a total of $14 billion since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform which began in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue noted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that many new donors reported making their first-ever contributions in the wake of Biden’s announcement. They expressed excitement over the increase in small-dollar donations to the grassroots effort.
Following Biden’s announcement and his endorsement of Harris, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, reportedly secured $150 million in new commitments from major backers within 24 hours. Additionally, the organization Swing Left, which was created to support the eventual Democratic nominee, indicated it raised over $160,000 in the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed confidence in Harris’s campaign financing on Monday, assuring his support. Prominent Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also pledged their backing to Harris.
Previously, Biden experienced significant fundraising moments right after being outperformed by Trump during a televised debate on June 27. Biden and his committees raised about $28 million over the course of June 27 and June 28, according to an analysis from The New York Times.
Furthermore, Biden raised $19.2 million following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, while Trump and his affiliates brought in $69 million from May 30 to May 31 after his legal troubles began, causing a brief crash of his campaign website. In May alone, the super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. raised $70 million.
Between April and June, groups supporting Biden gathered $332.4 million, while those backing Trump totaled $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.