Former US vice president Joe Biden raised US$6.3 million in the 24 hours since announcing his presidential campaign, a haul that topped all of his rivals in the Democratic race.
Biden’s campaign on Friday said that more than 96,000 people sent money with an average contribution amount of US$41.
Of those who contributed online, 97 percent gave less than US$200, it said.
Most of the top candidates have been touting their first-day contributions as a show of their support from voters. The biggest previous totals came from former US representative Beto O’Rourke, who totaled US$6.1 million, and US Senator Bernie Sanders, who took in US$5.9 million.
After months of preparation and speculation, Biden formally announced his campaign on Thursday and started out with a lead in most polls, followed closely by Sanders.
First-day fundraising has become an important benchmark for the top-tier candidates.
Biden’s total might help quiet doubters in the party who questioned his ability to raise money and sustain his front-runner status over the 10 months until the first actual nominating contest.
Biden’s haul is all earmarked for the nomination race, campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo said.
Ducklo said on Twitter that 65,000 donations were new donors whose names were not on the campaign’s e-mail lists.
Within 90 minutes of Biden announcing his candidacy by video, the campaign received contributions from all 50 US states, Ducklo said.
Like most of his rivals, Biden took a pledge to refuse contributions from corporate political action committees and registered lobbyists.
Sanders and US Senator Elizabeth Warren have vowed not to attend big-dollar fundraisers, where donors who can write bigger checks have a chance to interact directly with candidates.
Biden, 76, on Thursday night attended a fundraiser in Philadelphia hosted by Comcast Corp executive David Cohen and his wife, Rhonda, and has an event planned on May 8 in Los Angeles with former Google chairman Eric Schmidt, movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Rufus Gifford, who served as finance director of former US president Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, among the organizers.
However, with such a wide field vying for support among donors, both big and small, it could be difficult for Biden to build the kind of financial advantage that normally goes with being an early front-runner.
Many big donors are waiting for the field to eventually shrink before committing to a candidate.
Katzenberg, among the earliest Hollywood heavyweights to back Obama in 2007, gave US$2,800 apiece to three White House hopefuls during the first quarter of this year: US senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Biden’s late entry into the race has given his opponents a leg-up in assembling the war chests they would need heading into next year’s compressed primary schedule, with just four weeks separating the Iowa caucuses in early February next year and the multistate Super Tuesday contests.
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