Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors via ActBlue, the primary fundraising platform for Democratic organizations. This amount was recorded over a two-day span, as tracked by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although the figure is not official and is derived from ActBlue’s own tracker which has been monitoring total donations since 2004, it gives an insight into the group’s fundraising success ahead of mandatory disclosures.
On Sunday, donors contributed $66.9 million to mark the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, making it the largest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The second-highest fundraising day recently was September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump faced off in their first presidential debate.
Following the boost in donations on Sunday, ActBlue reached a milestone of $14 billion raised since its establishment two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican counterpart created in late 2019, has raised approximately $4.3 billion, according to OpenSecrets.
In a statement on social media platform X, ActBlue expressed enthusiasm about the influx of new 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!”
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within a day of Biden’s announcement and Harris’s endorsement. The organization Swing Left reported raising over $160,000 in the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed his support for Harris, stating her campaign would be “very well financed.” Major Democratic benefactors, George and Alex Soros, have also demonstrated their backing for Harris.
Historically, Biden has seen significant fundraising after high-profile events, including after his loss to Trump in a televised debate on June 27, when he and his committees raised about $28 million. After Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million in the subsequent days, while Trump’s group collected $69 million in the brief period following his conviction on May 30. Trump’s campaign website even experienced a brief crash due to the influx of donations, and his aligned super PAC raised $70 million that month.
Between April and June, pro-Biden groups raised a total of $332.4 million, whereas pro-Trump groups garnered $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in his coffers compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.