Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, the Democratic Party raised $100 million from donors through its primary fundraising platform, ActBlue. This amount was recorded over a two-day period, as documented by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. While this figure isn’t official and is based on ActBlue’s extensive tracking system, it offers insight into the group’s fundraising performance ahead of official disclosures.
On Sunday alone, supporters contributed $66.9 million to the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, making it the most significant single day of fundraising in the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The previous high for donations was on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, as noted by Murphy’s tracker.
With this recent surge, ActBlue has now raised a total of $14 billion since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform that started in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion to date, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue expressed enthusiasm about the influx of donations, stating on social media, “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!”
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, garnered $150 million in new pledges from prominent donors within a day of Biden’s announcement, according to Politico. Swing Left reported raising over $160,000 within 24 hours to support the eventual Democratic nominee.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, remarked that Harris’s campaign will be “very well financed” and affirmed his support. Major Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also committed their backing to Harris.
Previously, Biden achieved significant fundraising success after facing off against Trump during a debate on June 27, where his campaign and affiliated groups raised approximately $28 million in the following days. After Trump was indicted on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million in the immediate aftermath. Trump and his associated groups amassed $69 million in the 24 hours following his indictment on May 30, with one of his campaign sites briefly crashing due to the influx of donors. An aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden organizations raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups raised $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in available funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.