Jeffrey Katzenberg Calls Joe Biden’s $72 Million Fundraising Total A “Blockbuster” Number, Says POTUS’s Age Is His “Superpower”

Jeffrey Katzenberg said that the “blockbuster” $72 million raised by Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee in the initial quarter of his re-election campaign defies doubts about enthusiasm heading into the next election cycle.

Biden’s campaign announced the figure on Friday.

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“There is no one on Planet Earth who would have predicted you would have had that kind of outpouring of support, particularly this early on,” Katzenberg told Deadline, adding that many pundits underestimated the amount. “The doubters and naysayers could not have gotten it more wrong, at least looked at through the lens of both his grassroots support in this cycle and as major donors in this cycle.”

Long a key fundraiser and donor in Democratic politics, Katzenberg is serving as a Biden campaign co-chair, the only non-elected official with the title in the list announced when the president revealed his re-election bid in April.

Katzenberg declined to talk about the combined WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, saying he did not want to mix his role in the Biden campaign and the current labor tumult. The White House has weighed in, releasing a statement on Thursday affirming that the president “believes all workers – including actors – deserve fair pay and benefits.” Biden also has expressed support for the writers in their walkout.

Campaigns have until Saturday to file their latest quarterly reports, which go into greater detail about who has given to whom, but most of the presidential contenders have released their top-line figures. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, raised less than half of Biden’s total — $35 million in the quarter, the three-month period that ended on June 30.

That said, reporters quickly noted that Biden’s fundraising figure was less than the combined $86 million raised by Barack Obama and the DNC between April and June of 2011, just as his re-election campaign was getting launched.

But Katzenberg noted that back then, Obama had the full three months days of the quarter, while Biden missed nearly an entire month. Biden announced his campaign on April 25, three weeks into the period.

“If you took the same number of days and the rate of raising, he would be closer to $100 million,” Katzenberg said.

He also noted that Biden has $77 million cash on hand — calling it unprecedented for any candidate at this point in the cycle — and had drawn from nearly 400,000 individual donors. He said that 30 percent were first-time donors.

“To raise this amount of money faster than any candidate ever — I think to me is like the first real referendum on the enthusiasm and support for President Biden and the job that he is doing. When you look at sort of the key big numbers here, they are kind of amazing,” Katzenberg said.

Biden trekked to Northern California, Chicago, New York and other places for events in the most recent quarter, but he has yet to come to Los Angeles for a reelection event. Katzenberg said that it will happen “at some point,” but the timing is still up in the air.

“There is no place where I think the support was greater for him than California and I don’t expect this to be any different,” he said.

He said that in contrast to the last presidential cycle, “the amount of time that he can allocate to this is significantly less than he could when he was just a candidate. We’re all mindful of that.”

Much media attention focused on Biden’s age and how that will play out in what is likely to be a rigorous general-election campaign. Attacks on the right frequently ridicule Biden’s missteps, even if GOP front-runner Donald Trump, at 77, is just three years younger than the incumbent president. Few days go by without a poll showing major voter concerns about the 80-year-old president seeking another term, but there’s debate as to how much of a factor that will be when ballots are actually cast.

“It’s more a kind of negative spin that just sort of caught a little bit more velocity early on, and I think people are realizing and recognizing that his age is his superpower,” Katzenberg said. “And he’s started to own this in a really great way, because the success that he has had, and that success in the first two and a half years, is unprecedented for our lifetime, is largely attributable to his knowledge and his experience and his wisdom.” He cited Biden’s trip to Europe this week, arguing that “someone half his age wouldn’t hold up his stamina.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that, as an adviser to Biden and the campaign, Katzenberg recommended that the president embrace his age.

“The skeptics want to keep saying he doesn’t have the vigor and he doesn’t have the same stamina to do the job, and the fact is it is just the opposite of that, and one can see it each and every day out there,” Katzenberg said. “Having the privilege of starting to be exposed to it on a more regular basis, and to see him at work and out campaigning, almost no one can keep up with him and, that age is, as I said, his superpower. It’s working for him.”

The former DreamWorks partner and now co-founder and managing partner of WndrCo, Katzenberg has been a presence at some Biden fund-raising events, and said that he has been available to advise the campaign in areas beyond fundraising. “It’s all a work in progress. We are still in the early days.”

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