Just one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election, Democrats managed to raise $100 million through their primary fundraising platform.
ActBlue, a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democratic organizations, reported this figure over the past two days, as per a live tracker maintained by Ryan Murphy, a developer at The Marshall Project. While the total is not officially verified, it reflects ActBlue’s fundraising performance in advance of required disclosures due later.
On Sunday, donors contributed an impressive $66.9 million to kick off Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, making it the largest single-day fundraising effort in the 2024 cycle to date for ActBlue. The previous record for donations in recent times had occurred on September 30, 2020, during the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump.
With Sunday’s influx of donations, ActBlue surpassed a total of $14 billion raised since its inception two decades ago. In comparison, WinRed, the Republican fundraising platform that was launched in late 2019, has garnered around $4.3 billion since its establishment, according to OpenSecrets.
ActBlue reported a surge of first-time contributions via a statement on X, formerly Twitter, expressing excitement over the influx of new small-dollar donors joining the grassroots effort.
Following Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris, Future Forward, a super PAC aligned with Biden, secured $150 million in new commitments from major donors within 24 hours, according to Politico. Additionally, the organization Swing Left, which has established a fund in support of the eventual Democratic nominee, reported raising over $160,000 within the same time frame.
On Monday, Evercore founder Roger Altman expressed that Harris’s campaign will be “very well financed” and pledged his support. Prominent Democratic donors George and Alex Soros have also committed their backing to Harris.
Previously, Biden experienced significant fundraising days immediately after being decisively defeated by Trump during a televised debate on June 27, raising about $28 million shortly after. He also raised $19.2 million following Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in May. Meanwhile, Trump and his affiliated groups collected $69 million in the day following his conviction, causing a temporary crash of his campaign website. The super PAC aligned with Trump, Make America Great Again Inc., raised $70 million that same month.
From April to June, pro-Biden organizations were able to raise $332.4 million, while pro-Trump entities attracted $431.2 million, as reported by The Financial Times. By the end of June, Biden had $281 million in cash on hand compared to Trump’s $336.2 million.