Democrats united behind Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s front-runner for the presidential nomination Monday, and their excitement translated into a juggernaut day of fundraising for the party and for Harris’ campaign.
Late Monday night, NBC News projected that Harris had won endorsements from a majority of the Democratic party’s pledged convention delegates. The threshold is 1,976 delegates, and NBC estimates that Harris has the spoken or written backing of 1,992 delegates.
While not yet formally the party’s presumptive nominee, Harris’ position as frontrunner is rock solid, and no potential challengers have signaled they intend to vie for the nomination.
In the hours since President Joe Biden announced that he would end his teetering reelection campaign, Harris and the Democratic party have pulled in roughly $250 million in online donations and major donor commitments.
The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has processed $106 million in contributions to Democratic candidates since Biden dropped out, according to an automated tracker.
It is not clear yet how much of this money was given to House and Senate campaigns and how much went to the former Biden campaign, rebranded overnight as the Harris for President campaign.
In addition to the online donations, a super political action committee that supports the Biden-Harris ticket announced that over the past 24 hours, major donors have made contribution commitments totaling $150 million to the Harris election effort.
The pledges to Future Forward were described to NBC News as coming from donors who had been sitting on the sidelines for the past month, amid concerns about Biden as the nominee.
The pledged donations to Future Forward are just that, however: promises. Until the PAC files mandatory federal campaign finance reports, these numbers cannot be verified.
The historic fundraising numbers are energizing Democrats and breathing new life into their bid to defeat former President Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
Since Sunday, more than 888,000 small-dollar donors have contributed to the Harris campaign, according to a memo late Monday.
Harris’ momentum could be the reason that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who recently switched his political affiliation to Independent, dropped his suggestion that he was open to challenging Harris for the Democratic nomination.
Republicans, meanwhile, are scrambling to retool a Trump campaign that was built to defeat Biden into one capable of defeating a very different candidate.
Trump spent much of the morning attacking Biden, but shifted to attacking Harris in the afternoon.
