Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not 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 this amount over just two days, as per a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy of The Marshall Project. While the figure is unofficial and based on ActBlue’s long-term donation totals since 2004, it offers insight into the group’s fundraising outcomes prior to any required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launch, achieving the highest fundraising day for ActBlue in the 2024 election cycle. The previous record for donations was set on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump faced off in the first presidential debate.
As a result of the donation surge on Sunday, ActBlue reached a milestone of $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, a Republican counterpart that began operating in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue reported seeing a notable increase in first-time donors after the recent fundraising push, expressing enthusiasm at the influx of new small-dollar contributors joining the grassroots efforts.
Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, gathered $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris, as reported by Politico. Additionally, Swing Left, which has created a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, claimed to have raised over $160,000 within the same time frame.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, stated 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.
Biden previously achieved record fundraising days following significant events. For example, after a televised debate on June 27, where he faced Trump, Biden raised about $28 million in the following days. Similarly, Biden raised $19.2 million after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, while Trump and his affiliates raised $69 million in the immediate aftermath, briefly causing Trump’s campaign website to crash. In total, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million between April and June, compared to $431.2 million for pro-Trump groups, with Biden ending June with $281 million on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.