Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not pursue re-election, Democrats were able to raise $100 million from contributors via their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising tool for Democratic organizations, noted that this amount was gathered over the past two days, as reported by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. Although this tally is unofficial and derived from ActBlue’s own donation tracker established in 2004, it gives insight into the fundraising efforts weeks before any formal disclosures are due.
On Sunday alone, donors contributed $66.9 million for the launch of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. The previous record for the second-largest day of donations occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s tracker.
Due to the surge in donations on Sunday, ActBlue reached a staggering total of $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform that started in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion since its launch, as per OpenSecrets.
ActBlue expressed enthusiasm in a statement on X (formerly Twitter), 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, garnered $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement and subsequent endorsement of Harris, according to Politico. Swing Left, which initiated a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 within the same 24-hour period.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, indicated on Monday that Harris’s campaign would be “very well financed” and pledged his support. Notable Democratic mega-donors, George and Alex Soros, have also endorsed Harris.
In prior fundraising efforts, Biden experienced significant donations immediately following his defeat against former President Donald Trump during a televised debate on June 27. Biden and his committees raised around $28 million from that day until June 28, as noted by a New York Times analysis.
Moreover, Biden raised $19.2 million shortly after Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts. In contrast, Trump and his allied committees raised $69 million from May 30 to May 31, following his conviction, which caused a temporary crash of Trump’s campaign website. An associated super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., collected $70 million in that month.
From April through June, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups received $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.