Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats have raised $100 million from donors via their primary fundraising platform, ActBlue. This amount was reported over the last two days according to a live tracker created by Ryan Murphy of The Marshall Project. While this figure isn’t official as it is based on ActBlue’s own tracking mechanism, it offers insight into the fundraising activities before the required disclosures are published.
On Sunday alone, donors provided $66.9 million to support the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest fundraising day so far in the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The previous highest single-day donations occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, as noted by Murphy’s data.
As a result of this surge in donations, ActBlue reached a significant milestone, amassing $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception over 20 years ago. In contrast, WinRed, its Republican counterpart established in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion to date.
ActBlue expressed enthusiasm over the influx of new small-dollar donors, stating on X, previously known as Twitter, that many individuals made their first contributions in the last 24 hours, energizing the grassroots movement.
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within a day of Biden’s announcement and his endorsement of Harris. Meanwhile, Swing Left reported raising over $160,000 in the same timeframe to support the eventual Democratic nominee.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, commented that Harris’s campaign is likely to be well-funded and voiced his support for her. Notable Democratic donors, George and Alex Soros, have also pledged their backing to Harris.
Biden’s fundraising successes historically have often followed significant political events. After a challenging public debate against Trump on June 27, Biden and his committees garnered around $28 million in donations in the following days, according to an analysis by a major news outlet.
In the days following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million, while Trump and his associated groups reported raising $69 million from May 30 to May 31. The surge in donations caused a brief outage on Trump’s campaign website, and his affiliated super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
Between April and June, pro-Biden groups accumulated $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups raised $431.2 million. By the end of June, Biden’s campaign had $281 million available compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.