Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, the Democratic Party raised $100 million from donors via its primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, reported this figure over the past two days using a live tracker managed by Ryan Murphy at The Marshall Project. While this amount is unofficial, as it comes from ActBlue’s own extensive tracking of donations since 2004, it offers insight into the group’s fundraising performance ahead of upcoming disclosure deadlines.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million to kick off Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, making it the largest single-day fundraising event for the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The previous notable single-day fundraising was on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
With the influx of donations this Sunday, ActBlue has now raised a total of $14 billion since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, its Republican counterpart, WinRed, which began operations in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, that many individuals reported making their first donations in the last 24 hours, adding excitement about the influx of new small-dollar donors supporting the grassroots movement.
Additionally, 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. Meanwhile, Swing Left, which has established a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 in the same time frame.
On Monday, Evercore founder Roger Altman expressed confidence that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and affirmed his support for her. Prominent Democratic donors, including George and Alex Soros, have also extended their backing to Harris.
Previously, Biden’s top fundraising days came shortly after he faced off against Trump during a televised debate on June 27, raising about $28 million within 24 hours. He also collected $19.2 million following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in late May, while Trump and his affiliated entities raised $69 million in the immediate aftermath of that conviction. Trump’s campaign website briefly crashed due to the surge in donations. The associated super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month as well.
From April to June, groups supporting Biden raised a total of $332.4 million, while groups supporting Trump collected $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.