Bernie Sanders raised $6.4 million in the 24 hours since the polls closed in New Hampshire, his campaign said Wednesday.
The large haul, which bests the $3 million he raised after his narrow loss to Hillary Clinton in Iowa, is further evidence of the digital fundraising juggernaut his campaign has built.
The Sanders campaign said Wednesday that $2.6 million of that haul had been raised in just the four-and-a-half hours after he was declared the winner in New Hampshire.
Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver sent an email earlier Wednesday setting a goal of $6 million, then sent a second appeal a little before 8 p.m. Wednesday pushing the new goal to $7 million.
“Well, you already crushed that goal in just a couple hours,” Weaver wrote. “So, in the spirit of this campaign, we’re going to reach for a bigger but difficult goal — raising $7 million by the end of the day today.”
In the midst of his campaign speech Tuesday night, Sanders held an instant fundraiser, asking supporters while his speech was being carried live on-air to donate at his website. The burst of donations that followed spurred complaints that ActBlue, which processes Sanders donations, was crashing.
ActBlue executive director Erin Hill wrote in a blog post Wednesday afternoon that the site saw a peak of 26,000 contributions in 15 minutes Tuesday night and the spike contributed to a problem for some donors.
“We did hit one bump late yesterday though,” Hill wrote. “Last night’s spontaneous fundraiser (the one that raised $5.2 million in less than a day) broke our external processor’s response systems.”
But the Sanders campaign and ActBlue both said the service never went down.
The Sanders campaign said the average donation made after his New Hampshire win was $34, just a bit more than the average donation of $27 he has been touting for weeks.
