Just one day after President Joe Biden announced that he would not pursue re-election, Democrats raised an impressive $100 million from donors through ActBlue, their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, reported that this substantial amount was collected over a two-day period. This information was shared via a live tracker managed by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although the figure is not officially confirmed, being based on ActBlue’s tracking of total donations since its inception in 2004, it offers insight into the organization’s funding activities before any formal disclosures are released.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to kick off Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the highest single-day fundraising total in the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The previous record for donations in recent history was on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
With this boost in donations, ActBlue reached a significant milestone of $14 billion raised since its launch two decades ago. In comparison, its Republican counterpart, WinRed, which began in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue heralded the influx of contributions, stating on X, formerly Twitter, that many individuals reported making their first-ever donations over the past 24 hours. The platform expressed excitement about the growing grassroots movement of new small-dollar donors.
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, received $150 million in new commitments from major donors within a day of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Another group, Swing Left, reported raising over $160,000 in just 24 hours in support of the upcoming Democratic nominee.
Evercore founder Roger Altman expressed confidence in Harris’s campaign, stating it will be “very well financed” and announced his support for her candidacy. Major Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also thrown their support behind Harris.
Previously, Biden experienced significant fundraising success after a televised debate defeat against Trump on June 27, resulting in approximately $28 million raised in the following days. He also raised $19.2 million after Trump faced 34 felony counts. Trump and his affiliated groups garnered $69 million in a day following his conviction, causing a brief outage of his campaign website. His aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups collected $332.4 million, while pro-Trump organizations raised $431.2 million. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in available funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.