Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors through their main fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a fundraising platform for Democratic groups, reported this amount over the past two days, as indicated by a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy of The Marshall Project. Although the figures are not official, they offer insight into fundraising activity prior to required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, supporters contributed $66.9 million to launch Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the highest single-day fundraising total for ActBlue in the 2024 election cycle. The second-highest donation day recorded recently was September 30, 2020, the date of the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
The inflow of donations on Sunday brought ActBlue’s total fundraising since its inception to $14 billion. In contrast, WinRed, a Republican fundraising platform founded in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion to date.
ActBlue announced on X, formerly Twitter, that many people reported making their first donations in the last 24 hours, calling it “motivating” to see new small-dollar donors joining the grassroots effort.
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors following Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Swing Left, which supports the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 in just 24 hours.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, stated that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and expressed his support. Prominent Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also rallied behind her.
Previously, Biden’s best fundraising efforts occurred after he faced significant defeat against Trump during a televised debate on June 27, where he and his committees raised approximately $28 million in a single day. Biden also collected $19.2 million following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, while Trump and his associated groups amassed $69 million during the same timeframe, briefly causing a crash on his campaign website.
In total, from April to June, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million, compared to pro-Trump groups’ $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million on hand, while Trump held $336.2 million.