Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors through their main fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising tool for Democratic groups, reported this amount over the past two days using a live tracker created by Ryan Murphy from The Marshall Project. While this figure is not official and comes from ActBlue’s internal mega-tracker of total donations raised since 2004, it gives an early glimpse of fundraising results ahead of required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, contributors donated $66.9 million for the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single-day fundraising total so far for the 2024 cycle through ActBlue. The previous high for donations occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
As a result of the surge in donations on Sunday, ActBlue surpassed $14 billion in funds raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican counterpart that started in late 2019, has accumulated about $4.3 billion, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue reported an influx of new small-dollar donors, stating, “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, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Additionally, Swing Left, which was established to support the eventual Democratic nominee, announced it raised over $160,000 in the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed on Monday that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and declared his support for her. Democratic mega-donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also thrown their support behind Harris.
Previously, Biden experienced significant fundraising success just after facing off against Trump in a televised debate, where his campaign raised about $28 million in a day. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million, whereas Trump and his associated groups garnered $69 million in the day following his indictment. Trump’s campaign website temporarily crashed due to the influx of donations, and his super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, groups supporting Biden raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump organizations collected $431.2 million. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in available funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.