Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats raised $100 million through their main fundraising platform, ActBlue, which supports Democratic groups.
According to a live tracker managed by Ryan Murphy from The Marshall Project, this amount was collected over a two-day period. While this total is not officially verified, it reflects ActBlue’s ongoing fundraising efforts since 2004, offering insights into the group’s financial performance ahead of mandatory financial disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the highest single-day fundraising total for the 2024 election cycle on ActBlue. This surpassed the previous record set on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
The influx of donations allowed ActBlue to surpass $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the fundraising platform for Republicans that was established in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion, as reported by OpenSecrets.
ActBlue shared on Monday that many donors reported making their first contributions in the last 24 hours, expressing excitement about the new small-dollar donors joining the grassroots movement.
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors shortly after Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Another group, Swing Left, reported raising over $160,000 within the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, stated on Monday that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and expressed his support for her. Prominent Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also pledged their backing to Harris.
Earlier in his campaign, Biden experienced significant fundraising boosts following critical moments, such as after a debate loss to Trump on June 27, which yielded nearly $28 million in donations. Furthermore, Biden raised $19.2 million in the days following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts. Trump and his supporters raised $69 million between his conviction date of May 30 and May 31, which caused a brief crash of his campaign website. The aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million in that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups accumulated $332.4 million in funds, while pro-Trump factions garnered $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.