Just a day after President Joe Biden announced that he would not run for re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million from donors via their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, the political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, recorded this amount over the past two days, as per a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. While this figure is unofficial and comes from ActBlue’s comprehensive donation tracker since 2004, it offers insight into recent fundraising momentum ahead of official disclosures.
On Sunday alone, contributions amounted to $66.9 million to kick off Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the highest single-day fundraising total for ActBlue in the 2024 election cycle. The second-largest fundraising day close to this was on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s data.
The donation influx on Sunday helped ActBlue reach a significant milestone, hitting $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican counterpart launched in late 2019, has amassed around $4.3 billion in funds since it began.
ActBlue noted on X, formerly Twitter, that many new donors reported making their first-ever contributions within the past 24 hours, expressing enthusiasm about the influx of small-dollar donations joining the grassroots movement.
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC supporting Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from prominent donors soon after Biden endorsed Harris. Swing Left, which launched a fund for the Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 within the same 24-hour period.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, stated on Monday that Harris’s campaign is expected to be “very well financed” and has gained the backing of Democratic mega-donors George and Alex Soros.
Previously, Biden saw notable fundraising success after a televised debate against Trump on June 27, 2020, where his campaign raised about $28 million during the following days. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden’s campaign collected $19.2 million, while Trump and his allied groups raised $69 million between May 30 and May 31, even causing a temporary crash on Trump’s campaign website. The aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., also brought in $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden groups raised $332.4 million compared to $431.2 million for pro-Trump groups, as reported by The Financial Times. At the end of June, Biden had $281 million on hand, while Trump had $336.2 million.