Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats successfully raised $100 million through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic initiatives, reported this impressive total over the past two days via live tracking by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. While this figure is not official and stems from ActBlue’s extensive tracker of donations since 2004, it offers insight into the party’s fundraising before the required official disclosures.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million marking the largest fundraising day in the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The next highest donation day recently was on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, as recorded by Murphy’s tracker.
As a result of this surge, ActBlue celebrated crossing $14 billion in total cash raised since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican donation platform launched in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion since its founding, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue noted a notable influx of new small-dollar 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!”
In addition to ActBlue, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, received $150 million in new commitments from major contributors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Swing Left, which initiated a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 in the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed on Monday that Harris’s campaign will be “very well financed” and pledged his support. Prominent Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also thrown their backing behind Harris.
Historically, some of Biden’s most lucrative fundraising periods occurred following pivotal moments, such as a significant defeat by Trump during a televised debate on June 27, which netted Biden and his committees about $28 million in just a day. Post-Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts earlier this year, Biden raised $19.2 million in the following days, while Trump and his associates gathered $69 million in the immediate aftermath of his conviction. This increase in donations briefly caused Trump’s campaign website to crash, with an aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raising another $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups raised a total of $332.4 million, whereas pro-Trump groups accumulated $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.