Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats raised $100 million through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee that supports Democratic groups, reported this figure over the last two days via a live tracker created by Ryan Murphy from The Marshall Project. While this amount is not officially confirmed and is based on ActBlue’s extensive donation record since 2004, it highlights the fundraising activities just weeks before formal disclosures are due.
On Sunday alone, donors provided $66.9 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest fundraising day in the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The second largest donation day in recent memory occurred on September 30, 2020, when Biden and Trump participated in their first presidential debate, according to Murphy’s data.
With this recent flood of donations, ActBlue reached a milestone of $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the fundraising platform for Republicans that started in late 2019, has raised about $4.3 billion to date, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue expressed enthusiasm on social media 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!”
In addition, the super PAC Future Forward, aligned with Biden, announced it received $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Swing Left, which has launched a fund to support the Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 in the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, stated on Monday that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and publicly declared his support for her. Democratic mega-donors George and Alex Soros have also shown their backing for Harris.
Previously, Biden’s strongest fundraising days followed his defeat by Trump during a televised debate on June 27, when Biden and his committees raised about $28 million in a single day. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million in the subsequent days, while Trump and his affiliated groups garnered $69 million within the two days after his conviction, causing a temporary crash of his campaign website. The super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. also raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups raised a total of $332.4 million, while pro-Trump entities collected $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million available compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.