Just one day following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not pursue re-election, Democrats successfully raised $100 million from donors via its primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee that serves Democratic organizations, reported this amount over a two-day span, as noted by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Though this figure is not official and derives from ActBlue’s own comprehensive tracker dating back to 2004, it offers insight into the group’s fundraising performance ahead of formal disclosures.
On Sunday alone, contributors generated $66.9 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The second-highest day for donations occurred on September 30, 2020, when Biden faced Trump in the first presidential debate, according to Murphy’s statistics.
The influx of donations on Sunday propelled ActBlue to surpass $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the fundraising counterpart for Republicans that began in late 2019, has accumulated approximately $4.3 billion.
In a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, ActBlue highlighted a surge of new, small-dollar donors, noting, “We’ve seen so many folks saying they made their first ever donation in the last 24 hours! It’s so motivating to see new small-dollar donors join the grassroots movement!”
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from prominent donors within a day of Biden’s announcement and subsequent endorsement of Harris. Similarly, Swing Left reported raising over $160,000 within 24 hours to support the eventual Democratic nominee.
On Monday, Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed his confidence that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and affirmed his support. Prominent Democratic donors, George and Alex Soros, have also shown their backing for Harris.
Previously, Biden experienced significant fundraising success right after being outperformed by former president Donald Trump in a televised debate on June 27, bringing in about $28 million in the following days, as analyzed by a New York Times report.
Moreover, Biden raised $19.2 million shortly after Trump faced 34 felony counts. Trump’s campaign and affiliated groups raised $69 million from May 30 to May 31 following his conviction, which caused a temporary crash of his campaign website. The super PAC aligned with him, Make America Great Again Inc., collected $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups amassed $332.4 million, while pro-Trump entities received $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.