Thursday, 28 Mar 2024

Democrats shatter the ActBlue site’s donation records in the hours after Ginsburg’s death.

Democratic donors gave more money online in the 9 p.m. hour after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died — $6.2 million — than in any other single hour since ActBlue, the donation-processing site, was launched 16 years ago.

Then donors broke the site’s record again in the 10 p.m. hour when donors gave another $6.3 million — more than $100,000 per minute.

The unprecedented outpouring shows the power of a looming Supreme Court confirmation fight to motivate Democratic donors. The previous biggest hour saw $4.3 million in donations processed on Aug. 20, according to an ActBlue spokesperson, the final night of last month’s convention, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke.

Hours after Justice Ginsburg’s death, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, pledged that whomever President Trump picks to replace her would receive a confirmation vote. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” he said in a statement.

“The conventional wisdom is that the Supreme Court only motivates Republicans, but these fund-raising totals demonstrate that that has changed,” said Tommy Vietor, a founder of the progressive Crooked Media group and a veteran of the Obama administration.

While ActBlue does not show where donations go in real time, Democratic donors flooded into at least one page dedicated to key Senate races, called Get Mitch or Die Trying. The page, created by Crooked Media, raised more than $3 million in about three hours, dividing the proceeds between 13 different Democrats running for Senate this year.

Supreme Court confirmation fights have led to big swells of donations before. The Senate hearings and votes on Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in 2018 drove record donations into the campaign coffers of then-Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, a centrist Democrat who raised $12.4 million in the first half of October after she announced she would oppose his nomination. She was defeated in her re-election bid the next month.

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