Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not be running for re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million from donors utilizing their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, the political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, recorded this amount over a span of two days, as reported by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. While this total is not official and is derived from ActBlue’s comprehensive donation tracker established in 2004, it offers insight into the group’s fundraising performance ahead of the required financial disclosures.
On Sunday alone, $66.9 million was contributed to mark the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, representing the most significant single-day fundraising effort of the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The previous peak for donations occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
Thanks to this surge in contributions on Sunday, ActBlue reached an impressive milestone of $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform launched in late 2019, has gathered around $4.3 billion, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue expressed enthusiasm over the influx of donations, stating, “We’ve seen so many folks saying they made their first ever donation in the last 24 hours!” in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter. The organization emphasized the motivating effect of new small-dollar donors joining the grassroots movement.
Furthermore, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors shortly after Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris, as reported by Politico. Swing Left, which established a fund to support the upcoming Democratic nominee, also noted a gain of over $160,000 in the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, remarked on Monday that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and pledged his support. Prominent Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also voiced their backing for Harris.
Previously, Biden’s strongest fundraising days occurred shortly after he faced a significant defeat against Trump during a televised debate on June 27, raising about $28 million in that brief period. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges, Biden raised $19.2 million, while Trump and his affiliated groups collected $69 million in just two days after his conviction.
In a broader context, from April to June, pro-Biden organizations amassed $332.4 million, whereas pro-Trump groups raised $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million available compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.