DEMOCRATS have raised nearly $50m (£38.7m) in donations for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, since President Joe Biden dropped out of the US presidential election.
Progressive donation platform ActBlue said the small-donor numbers marked “the biggest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle.” “Grassroots supporters are energized and enthusiastic about supporting him as the Democratic nominee,” ActBlue said on X.
Donors who had pulled back their money over concerns about Mr. Biden’s age said they now intend to resume their support for the party.
The party raised more than $27.5 million in the first five hours of Harris’ presidential campaign. That amount nearly doubled by the end of the day.
The surge in donations in the past 24 hours is the largest for online contributions to Democrats since 2020, according to the New York Times, when ActBlue raised $73.5 million after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
They are also the third largest in the history of ActBlue, which counts donations given to most Democrats in the House and Senate, as well as nonprofits.
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The new funding marks a significant shift for the Democratic Party, which has seen support from big donors erode after Biden’s poor performance in the June presidential debate against Donald Trump.
Grassroots funding from small donors is also declining, according to Biden campaign insiders quoted in US media.
But after Biden’s announcement that he was stepping down and his endorsement of Harris’ candidacy for the White House, Democrats immediately poured online contributions at a surprising pace.
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Win With Black Women, a group of Black women leaders, held a Zoom call with more than 44,000 participants Sunday night to lend their support to the vice president.
The group said it raised more than $1.5 million in three hours for his presidential campaign.
Joe Cotchett, a San Francisco-based political fundraiser for Democrats, told NBC News that donors are “ready to dig into their pockets now.”
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Among them was Gideon Stein, president of the Moriah Fund and a donor to the party, who told US news media he would resume his funding after previously halting it over concerns about Biden’s electability.
Several high-profile political donors have also shown their support for Ms. Harris as the Democratic nominee.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman called the vice president “the right person at the right time.” “I fully support Kamala Harris and her candidacy for President of the United States in our fight for democracy in November,” he said in a post on X.
Another major political donor, Alexander Soros, son of philanthropist George Soros, said Harris was “the best and most qualified candidate we have.”
But others, like entrepreneur and investor Vinod Khosla, called for an open process at the convention and “not a coronation.” “The key remains who can best defeat Trump above all other priorities,” he wrote in X.
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, a major Democratic donor, previously told the New York Times that Biden should step down as the Democratic nominee. “Democratic delegates need to pick the winners of states,” he wrote in X on Sunday after Biden’s announcement. (BBC/Z-3)
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