Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors through ActBlue, their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee dedicated to fundraising for Democratic organizations, reported this significant amount in a live tracker developed by Ryan Murphy at The Marshall Project. While these figures are not official, they offer insight into the fundraising performance before the required disclosures are submitted.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to kick off Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single-day fundraising total for the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. This surpassed the previous notable day for donations, which was on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump faced each other in their first presidential debate.
With the surge in donations on Sunday, ActBlue reached a milestone of $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican fundraising counterpart that started in late 2019, has accumulated about $4.3 billion according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue announced on X, formerly Twitter, that many new contributors indicated they made their first donations in the past 24 hours, expressing excitement at the growing grassroots movement.
Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within a day of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Swing Left, which has initiated a fund to support the future Democratic nominee, announced it raised over $160,000 within a day.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, stated on Monday that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and expressed his support. Notable Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also shown their backing for Harris.
Biden’s past fundraising peaks occurred shortly after televised debates with Trump. After being defeated by Trump on June 27, Biden and his committees raised approximately $28 million in the following days, as per a New York Times analysis. Additionally, he raised $19.2 million following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, while Trump and affiliated groups generated $69 million in the day following his conviction on May 30, causing a temporary crash of Trump’s campaign website. Trump’s 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 entities collected $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million available compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.