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, recorded this amount 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, as it’s based on ActBlue’s own mega-tracker of total donations since 2004, it gives a glimpse into the group’s fundraising performance 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, marking the most successful fundraising day in the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The second-best day for donations in recent history was on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump faced off in their first presidential debate, according to Murphy’s tracker.
Due to the surge in donations Sunday, ActBlue reached $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception two decades ago. WinRed, its Republican counterpart that started in late 2019, has raised about $4.3 billion since it began accepting donations, 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 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 his endorsement of Harris, Politico reports. Swing Left, which established a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, told Agence France-Presse it raised more than $160,000 within 24 hours.
Evercore founder Roger Altman on Monday said Harris’s campaign will 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 fundraising days came right after he was defeated by former president Donald Trump in a televised debate on June 27. Biden and his committees raised about $28 million between June 27 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 on 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 received $431.2 million, The Financial Times reported. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.