Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors via their main fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic groups, recorded this sum over the past two days, according to a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although the tally is not official, based on ActBlue’s mega-tracker of total donations since 2004, it offers a glimpse into the group’s fundraising results weeks before any required disclosures are filed.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, making it the biggest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The second-best day for donations in recent history was September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump met for their first presidential debate, according to Murphy’s tracker.
Thanks to the surge of donations Sunday, ActBlue hit $14 billion in cash raised since it began two decades ago. WinRed, its Republican counterpart launched in late 2019, has raised about $4.3 billion during this period, according to OpenSecrets.
“We’ve seen so many folks saying they made their first-ever donation in the last 24 hours!” ActBlue said in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday afternoon. “It’s so motivating to see new small-dollar donors join the grassroots movement!”
Future Forward, a Biden-aligned super PAC, received $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and Harris’s endorsement, Politico reports. Swing Left, which launched a fund supporting the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising more than $160,000 within 24 hours to Agence France-Presse.
Evercore founder Roger Altman on Monday said Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and pledged his support to her. Democratic mega-donors George and Alex Soros have also backed Harris.
Previously, Biden’s best days for fundraising came directly after a significant defeat by former President Donald Trump during a televised debate on June 27. Biden and his committees raised about $28 million between that day and June 28, according to a New York Times analysis.
Biden also raised $19.2 million in the days after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts. Trump and his allied groups raised $69 million from the day he was convicted, May 30, to May 31. The influx of donors briefly crashed Trump’s campaign website. An aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
Between April and June, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups took in $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.