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 that 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 — it’s based on ActBlue’s own mega-tracker of total donations raised since 2004 — it provides a glimpse of 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, marking the biggest day for fundraising in the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The second-best day for donations in recent history was on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump met for the first presidential debate, according to Murphy’s tracker.
Thanks to the surge of donations, ActBlue hit $14 billion in cash raised since it began two decades ago. WinRed, its Republican counterpart that launched in late 2019, has raised about $4.3 billion since it began collecting 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 on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It’s so motivating to see new small-dollar donors join the grassroots movement!”
Future Forward, a Biden-aligned super PAC, took in $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and subsequent endorsement of Harris, according to Politico. Swing Left, which launched a fund supporting the eventual Democratic nominee, told the Agence France-Presse it raised more than $160,000 within 24 hours.
Evercore founder Roger Altman stated that 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 days for fundraising came directly after he was soundly defeated by rival and 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.