Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats reportedly raised $100 million from donors through ActBlue, their primary fundraising platform. This figure was compiled from a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Though the totals are not formally verified, they reflect the group’s fundraising efforts ahead of the required disclosure deadlines.
On Sunday, donors contributed $66.9 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launch, marking the largest single-day fundraising total for ActBlue in the 2024 election cycle. The second-best day for fundraising recently occurred on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, as per Murphy’s tracker.
The spike in donations on Sunday helped ActBlue surpass $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform launched in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion.
ActBlue highlighted the influx of new small-dollar donors, with many indicating that they made their first contributions in the past 24 hours, describing it as a motivating factor for grassroots support.
Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors shortly after Biden’s announcement endorsing Harris. Swing Left reported raising over $160,000 within the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed confidence in Harris’s campaign financing, noting his support for her. Prominent Democratic donors such as George and Alex Soros have also pledged their backing.
Historically, Biden’s most significant fundraising days followed pivotal moments against Trump, including after a televised debate in June and in response to Trump’s felony convictions, during which Biden’s camps raised millions in brief windows of time. Pro-Biden groups managed to raise a total of $332.4 million from April through June, while pro-Trump factions collected $431.2 million during the same period. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.