Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million through their primary fundraising platform.
According to a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project, ActBlue, the political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic groups, recorded this amount over the last two days. While this figure is not officially confirmed and is drawn from ActBlue’s own comprehensive tracker of donations since 2004, it offers insight into the organization’s fundraising capabilities ahead of upcoming required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign attracted $66.9 million in donations, marking the largest single-day fundraising event for ActBlue in the 2024 election cycle. The second-highest day for donations occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
This influx of donations allowed ActBlue to surpass $14 billion in total funds raised since its establishment two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform that began in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion since its launch, as reported by OpenSecrets.
ActBlue noted in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, that many individuals reported making their first-ever donations within the past 24 hours, highlighting a surge of new small-dollar donors joining the grassroots movement.
Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, reportedly garnered $150 million in new commitments from major donors shortly after Biden’s announcement and his endorsement of Harris, as noted by Politico. Additionally, Swing Left, which started a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, raised over $160,000 within the same 24-hour period.
On Monday, Evercore founder Roger Altman expressed confidence in Harris’s campaign, declaring it would be “very well financed” and showing his support for her. Notable Democratic mega-donors, including George and Alex Soros, also endorsed Harris.
Biden previously experienced significant fundraising spikes following his defeat by Trump in a televised debate on June 27, raising around $28 million between that day and June 28, based on a New York Times analysis. Additionally, Biden collected $19.2 million in the days after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, while Trump and his supporters raised $69 million from his conviction date, May 30, to May 31. This surge momentarily caused a crash of Trump’s campaign website, and the aligned super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups collected $332.4 million, whereas pro-Trump groups accrued $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million available compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.