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Democrats Raised More Than $46 Million Following RBG's Death

A pillow with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's likeness on it sits on a couch inside the office of ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising platform, in Somerville, Mass.
Boston Globe
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Boston Globe via Getty Images
A pillow with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's likeness on it sits on a couch inside the office of ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising platform, in Somerville, Mass.

In politics, money can be a pretty good stand-in for enthusiasm. And the donations pouring in to the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue since Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death indicate there is a lot of energy and money on the left.

According to the constantly-ticking tracker on ActBlue's website, in the hours from 9 p.m. ET, when the news of Ginsburg's death became widely known, to Saturday afternoon, more than $46 million was donated to Democratic candidates and causes. The number keeps rising by thousands every second.

The death of the iconic justice could change the ideological balance of the court and raises the already high stakes in the race for president and U.S. Senate. Traditionally, the courts have been a powerful motivator for conservative voters, especially white evangelical Christians. The question now is whether that dynamic will change in 2020 because the vacancy left by Ginsburg is so significant for those on the left.

The Trump campaign, Republican National Committee and the congressional campaign committees did not immediately respond to requests for comparable fundraising data.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. Keith has chronicled the Trump administration from day one, putting this unorthodox presidency in context for NPR listeners, from early morning tweets to executive orders and investigations. She covered the final two years of the Obama presidency, and during the 2016 presidential campaign she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents' Association.