Just a 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 dedicated to fundraising for Democratic groups, recorded this amount over the past two days, according to a live tracker managed by Ryan Murphy at The Marshall Project. While the figure is not yet official, as it relies on ActBlue’s internal mega-tracker of donations since 2004, it provides insights into the group’s fundraising performance ahead of required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donations totaled $66.9 million for the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking a record day for fundraising in the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The previous high for donations in recent times occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, as noted by Murphy’s tracker.
Thanks to this spike in contributions, ActBlue surpassed $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising counterpart established in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion to date, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue noted on X, formerly Twitter, that many individuals reported making their inaugural donations within the last 24 hours, expressing excitement at the influx of new small-dollar donors joining the grassroots movement.
The super PAC Future Forward, aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours following Biden’s announcement and his endorsement of Harris. Additionally, the organization Swing Left, which initiated a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, raised over $160,000 in the same time frame.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, mentioned on Monday that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and expressed his support for her. Prominent Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also pledged their backing to Harris.
Previously, Biden’s most successful fundraising days were immediately following his defeat by Donald Trump during a televised debate on June 27, when he and his committees raised around $28 million within a day. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million, while Trump and his affiliated groups garnered $69 million between May 30 and 31, which led to a temporary outage of Trump’s campaign website. The super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. raised $70 million that same month.
From April to June, groups supporting Biden raised $332.4 million, whereas pro-Trump groups received $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in cash on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.