Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats raised an impressive $100 million through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, reported this figure over the last two days, as indicated by a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy from The Marshall Project. While this tally should not be considered official—since it relies on ActBlue’s own comprehensive tracker of donations since 2004—it provides insight into the group’s fundraising activities ahead of the upcoming disclosure deadlines.
On Sunday alone, contributions reached $66.9 million in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launch, marking it as the most substantial fundraising day in the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. Comparatively, the second-highest fundraising day occurred on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
This recent spike in donations allowed ActBlue to surpass $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, its Republican counterpart, has accumulated roughly $4.3 billion since its establishment in late 2019, according to data from OpenSecrets.
ActBlue expressed enthusiasm on X, formerly known as Twitter, stating, “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!”
Moreover, 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 Harris’s endorsement, as reported by Politico. Meanwhile, Swing Left, which supports the eventual Democratic nominee, raised over $160,000 in just 24 hours, according to Agence France-Presse.
Evercore founder Roger Altman announced on Monday that Harris’s campaign is likely to be “very well financed” and expressed his support for her. Notable Democratic megadonors, George and Alex Soros, have also shown their backing for Harris.
Previously, Biden’s most significant fundraising events occurred shortly after he was soundly defeated by Trump in a televised debate on June 27, when he and his committees raised approximately $28 million in just two days. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million, while Trump and his affiliated groups gathered $69 million from May 30 to May 31, causing a temporary crash of Trump’s campaign website. The super PAC aligned with Trump, Make America Great Again Inc., also raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups amassed $332.4 million, while pro-Trump organizations raised $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.