A day after President Joe Biden announced he would no longer seek re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors through their main fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic groups, reported that this amount was raised over the past two days, according to a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although this total is not official and is based on ActBlue’s internal tracker of total donations since 2004, it offers a glimpse into the group’s fundraising results ahead of any required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single day of fundraising for ActBlue in the 2024 cycle. The second-largest day for donations in recent history was on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
Thanks to the surge in donations Sunday, ActBlue reached a milestone of $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. WinRed, its Republican counterpart launched in late 2019, has raised about $4.3 billion, according to OpenSecrets.
“We’ve seen so many folks saying they made their first-ever donation in the last 24 hours!” ActBlue said in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday afternoon. “It’s so motivating to see new small-dollar donors join the grassroots movement!”
Future Forward, a Biden-aligned super PAC, received $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and his endorsement of Harris, according to Politico. Swing Left, which created a fund supporting the eventual Democratic nominee, told Agence France-Presse it raised more than $160,000 within the same time frame.
Evercore founder Roger Altman expressed on Monday that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and pledged his support to her. Prominent Democratic mega-donors George and Alex Soros have also endorsed Harris.
Previously, Biden’s best days for fundraising came after he faced a significant defeat by rival and former president Donald Trump during a televised debate on June 27. Biden and his committees raised about $28 million between that day and June 28, according to a New York Times analysis.
Biden also raised $19.2 million in the days following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts. Trump and his allied groups raised $69 million from the day he was convicted — May 30 — to May 31, with the influx of donors temporarily crashing Trump’s campaign website. An aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
Between April and June, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups took in $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.