Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, the Democratic Party raised $100 million from donors via its primary fundraising platform, ActBlue.
According to a live tracker managed by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project, ActBlue recorded this significant amount over the previous two days, although it is not an official count as it is based on its internal tracking system. This provides an early glimpse into the fundraising efforts just ahead of any formal disclosures that will be made public later.
On Sunday, donations surged with a total of $66.9 million raised for the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single-day fundraising effort for ActBlue in the 2024 election cycle. The previous record for daily donations occurred on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, as noted by Murphy’s tracker.
This influx on Sunday allowed ActBlue to surpass $14 billion in total fundraising since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform established in late 2019, has gathered about $4.3 billion in the same period, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue reported a wave of new small-dollar donors joining the movement, stating, “We’ve seen so many folks saying they made their first-ever donation in the last 24 hours!” in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Following Biden’s announcement and Harris’s endorsement, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new pledges from major donors within 24 hours, as reported by Politico. Additionally, Swing Left, which has launched a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, raised over $160,000 in the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed confidence on Monday in Harris’s campaign being “very well financed,” and mentioned his support for her candidacy. Notably, prominent Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also endorsed Harris.
Biden’s past high points for fundraising included a notable boost after he was decisively defeated by Trump in a debate on June 27, where he and his committees amassed around $28 million within a day. He also raised $19.2 million following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, while Trump and his affiliated groups collected $69 million from May 30 to May 31, leading to a temporary crash of Trump’s campaign website. During that same month, the super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. raised $70 million.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups raised a total of $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups accumulated $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. As of the end of June, Biden’s campaign had $281 million on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.