Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, the Democratic Party raised $100 million from donors via its primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising tool for Democratic organizations, reported this total over a two-day span through a live tracker operated by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although the total is not official as it is derived from ActBlue’s own extensive tracker of donations since 2004, it offers insight into recent fundraising results ahead of formal disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donations surged to $66.9 million for the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single-day fundraising for the 2024 cycle recorded by ActBlue. The second-highest day for donations occurred on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump participated in the first presidential debate.
Due to the influx of contributions on Sunday, ActBlue reached a significant milestone of $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform that started in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion since its launch.
ActBlue expressed its excitement on social media, noting, “We’ve seen so many folks saying they made their first ever donation in the last 24 hours! It’s so motivating to see new small-dollar donors join the grassroots movement!”
Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, received $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and Harris’s endorsement, as reported by Politico. Furthermore, Swing Left, which created a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, stated it raised over $160,000 within the same time frame.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, commented on Monday that Harris’s campaign will be “very well financed” and expressed his support for her. Major Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also publicly supported Harris’s candidacy.
In previous fundraising efforts, Biden’s most profitable days occurred right after he faced off against former President Donald Trump during a debate on June 27, when he raised about $28 million from June 27 to June 28, according to a New York Times analysis. Following Trump’s indictment on 34 felony counts, Biden’s campaign garnered $19.2 million, while Trump and his aligned groups raised $69 million from May 30 to May 31. This influx of donations nearly resulted in a crash of Trump’s campaign website.
Between April and June, pro-Biden campaigns amassed $332.4 million, whereas pro-Trump groups secured $431.2 million. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million available compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.