Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million from their donors through the primary fundraising platform ActBlue.
According to Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project, this amount was logged in the past two days on ActBlue’s live tracker. While the figures are not official since they derive from ActBlue’s own tracker, they offer insight into fundraising efforts weeks ahead of any official reporting.
On Sunday alone, donations reached $66.9 million in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, marking the largest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle for ActBlue. This surpasses previous notable fundraising days, including the second-best, which occurred on September 30, 2020, coinciding with the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, according to Murphy’s records.
As a result of the increased donations on Sunday, ActBlue surpassed $14 billion in total funds raised since its inception two decades ago. In contrast, WinRed, the Republican fundraising counterpart initiated in late 2019, has collected approximately $4.3 billion, as reported by OpenSecrets.
ActBlue expressed enthusiasm over the surge in new contributions, noting many individuals made their first-ever donations in the last 24 hours, a development that they described as energizing for the grassroots movement.
Additionally, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement along with his endorsement of Harris, as reported by Politico. The progressive group Swing Left stated it raised over $160,000 within the same time frame.
Evercore founder Roger Altman expressed his belief that Harris’s campaign will be well-funded and voiced his support. Democratic megadonors George and Alex Soros have also thrown their support behind her.
Historically, Biden has seen significant fundraising boosts after pivotal moments, such as when he raised $28 million shortly after being defeated by Trump in a debate on June 27. Following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Biden raised $19.2 million. Meanwhile, Trump and his affiliates amassed $69 million from the day of his conviction to the following day, leading to a brief crash of Trump’s campaign website due to the influx of donations. His aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that month.
From April to June, pro-Biden efforts gathered $332.4 million, while pro-Trump efforts brought in $431.2 million, according to The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden held $281 million in funding compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.