Just a day after President Joe Biden announced he would not pursue re-election, Democrats raised $100 million from donors via their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising site for Democratic organizations, noted this amount was gathered over the past two days, as observed by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. While this total is unofficial and comes from ActBlue’s own tracker of donations since 2004, it offers insight into the group’s fundraising performance ahead of the required disclosures.
On Sunday alone, contributors provided $66.9 million to launch Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the highest fundraising day of the 2024 election cycle for ActBlue. The previous top day for donations was on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
Sunday’s boost in donations helped ActBlue reach a milestone of $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform launched in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue stated on social media that many individuals reported making their first donation in the last 24 hours, expressing enthusiasm over new small-dollar donors joining the grassroots fundraising effort.
Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours following Biden’s announcement and Harris’s endorsement, as reported by Politico. Swing Left, which started a fund to support the eventual Democratic nominee, indicated it raised more than $160,000 within the same timeframe.
Roger Altman, founder of Evercore, expressed on Monday that Harris’s campaign will be well-funded and pledged his support. Democratic heavyweights George and Alex Soros have also shown their support for Harris.
Previously, Biden experienced significant fundraising immediately after a debate loss to Donald Trump on June 27, bringing in roughly $28 million between that day and June 28, as per a New York Times analysis.
After Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million in the subsequent days, while Trump and his affiliated groups amassed $69 million from May 30 to May 31, leading to a temporary crash of Trump’s campaign website. His aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden organizations raised $332.4 million, while pro-Trump groups gathered $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in funds compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.