President Biden’s exit from the presidential race brought a surge of new donors to the Democratic campaign. They tended to be younger, and from areas with slightly higher proportions of Black and college-educated residents.
The Times’s analysis is based on Federal Election Commission filings from the Democratic fund-raising platform ActBlue, with the names, addresses and ZIP codes of people who gave to the Harris for President campaign, the Harris Action Fund and the Harris Victory Fund (known as Biden for President, the Biden Action Fund and the Biden Victory Fund before July 21) online.
A donor was determined to be a prior Biden donor if a donation from their unique combination of first name, last name and ZIP code had been made from April 25, 2023, when the Biden campaign was announced, to July 20, 2024.
In the analyses of age and gender, this data was combined with voter registration records obtained from each state and provided by L2, a nonpartisan voter data vendor. These databases combine data on all registered voters. Records were matched by each donor’s first name, last name and ZIP code, plus address in many cases. Around 70 percent of donors from the F.E.C. filing could be matched to the voter file.
In the analyses of income, education level and race, records were matched with demographics for ZIP code tabulation areas from the census bureau’s 2022 five-year American Community Survey, using data files from Social Explorer.
The numbers cited here are estimates that could be affected by out-of-date voter registration records, duplicate names in the same ZIP code or other factors.
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