Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not pursue re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from supporters through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee that facilitates fundraising for Democratic entities, recorded this impressive sum over a span of two days, according to a real-time tracker managed by Ryan Murphy from The Marshall Project. While this figure is not officially verified, it reflects the group’s fundraising performance prior to scheduled disclosures.
On Sunday, donations surged to $66.9 million for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launch, marking the highest fundraising day of the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The previous highest single-day total occurred on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump faced off in their first presidential debate, as noted by Murphy’s tracker.
With the influx of donations on Sunday, ActBlue also surpassed $14 billion in total cash raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform established in late 2019, has garnered approximately $4.3 billion in the same timeframe.
ActBlue expressed enthusiasm on social media, highlighting a surge of new small-dollar donors contributing for the first time: “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 supporters join the grassroots movement!”
According to Politico, 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 his endorsement of Harris. Meanwhile, Swing Left, which established a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 in the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, stated that Harris’s campaign will be “very well financed” and reiterated his support. Additionally, prominent Democratic donors, George and Alex Soros, have also pledged their backing to Harris.
Previously, Biden experienced significant fundraising success after being soundly challenged by Trump during a televised debate on June 27, raising about $28 million within a day. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden gathered $19.2 million in the days after, while Trump and his affiliated groups raised $69 million from May 30 to May 31, causing a temporary crash of his campaign website. Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., also raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden organizations raised a total of $332.4 million, while their pro-Trump counterparts collected $431.2 million. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in available funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.