On July 21st, President Biden made history. In response to increasing pressure within his own party, he dropped out of the 2024 Presidential Election.
Shortly after this groundbreaking announcement, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take over the Democratic nomination ahead of the election. In short order, Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, and two things happened. First, a ton of great memes started popping up (exhibit 1 and exhibit 2). Second, and perhaps more importantly, Democrats started to break fundraising records.
These astounding donation figures can best be illustrated by looking at Democrat SuperPAC ActBlue. ActBlue’s homepage has a running total of funds raised since its inception in 2004. There’s also a fantastic Github repo that tracks a snapshot of this amount every 15 minutes, which allows us to look at what kind of donations Democrats saw after Biden dropped out.
Democrats raised $93m in 24 hours
First, we can look at a timeline of the 24 hours after Biden posted his withdrawal statement on Twitter at 1:46pm.
This was a record day
We can also compare the day that Biden dropped out to other “top fundraising days” since the 2020 Election.
I think this one is even more stark. ActBlue raised more money on the day Biden dropped out than the next three best fundraising days combined.
It turns out people were really unenthusiastic about Biden, and him dropping out sparked a ton of excitement for the Democratic cause.
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