Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee that supports Democratic groups, recorded this total over the past two days, as tracked by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although this amount is not an official figure and is based on ActBlue’s own tracking since 2004, it offers a glimpse into the fundraising activity occurring ahead of official disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launch, marking the highest single-day fundraising total for ActBlue during the 2024 election cycle. The second-highest day for donations recently occurred on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
The influx of donations on Sunday helped ActBlue surpass $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, a similar platform for Republican fundraising that started in late 2019, has collected about $4.3 billion, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue reported a surge of new small-dollar donors, with many claiming it was their first time donating. Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours following Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Additionally, Swing Left, which established a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 in that same 24-hour period.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, stated that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and expressed his support. Democratic major donors George and Alex Soros have also pledged their backing to Harris.
Previously, Biden’s strongest fundraising days occurred right after a televised debate on June 27, where he faced off against Trump. Following that debate, Biden and his committees raised about $28 million within a day. After Trump was charged with 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million in the subsequent days, while Trump’s campaign received $69 million between May 30 and May 31, which even caused a brief outage of his campaign website. The super PAC aligned with Trump, Make America Great Again Inc., raised an additional $70 million that month.
Between April and June, groups supporting Biden raised $332.4 million, whereas pro-Trump entities collected $431.2 million. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million available compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.