Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million from contributors through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee focused on fundraising for Democratic initiatives, reported this amount over the past two days, as noted by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although the total is not yet official, as it relies on ActBlue’s internal tracker of fundraising since 2004, it provides insight into the group’s fundraising efforts ahead of required financial disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million for the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest single-day fundraising total in the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. Murphy’s tracker indicates this follows the second largest donation day in recent times, which occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
Thanks to the surge in donations on Sunday, ActBlue has now raised a total of $14 billion since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform started in late 2019, has accumulated approximately $4.3 billion.
ActBlue stated on social media that they had seen a significant number of first-time donors joining the grassroots movement in the last 24 hours, which they described as highly encouraging.
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, received $150 million in new commitments from major donors within a day following Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Swing Left, which formed to support the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 within the same time frame.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed his belief that Harris’s campaign will be “very well financed” and publicly lent his support. Notable Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also shown their backing for Harris.
Previously, Biden saw substantial fundraising success after being outperformed by Trump during a televised debate on June 27, with his team raising around $28 million in the following day. He raised $19.2 million shortly after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, during which Trump and his affiliated groups collected $69 million between May 30 and May 31, causing a temporary crash of his campaign website. The Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC raised an impressive $70 million that month.
Reports indicated that between April and June, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump entities accumulated $431.2 million. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.