Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (12 page)

Plouffe caught the moment accurately. The public was focused on fairness, but voters also were not seeing in Obama the leadership skills or strength to do much about it, given the Republican opposition. It was why he and the others around the president knew that they would have to be on the attack in 2012 in ways they never had to be in 2008.

•   •   •

On September 17, 2011, about a thousand demonstrators converged on Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in New York. It was the first Occupy Wall Street protest, and within weeks it became a movement—the Occupy movement—that spread to more than seventy cities around the country. Occupy was both a viral and a virtual movement that exploded almost overnight, drawing attention to the growing gap between rich and poor and the topic of income inequality, which was rarely addressed by politicians. Because it started in New York, the movement drew a huge amount of media attention. The media also covered it because it appeared to be the left’s answer to the Tea Party movement. There were similarities, certainly, but as time passed it was obvious that there were major differences as well. The Tea Party movement focused on electoral action. The Occupy movement did not. Occupy protesters set up tented encampments in parks and squares around the country, but there was no organized political strategy behind them.

What the Occupy movement did politically was to introduce new shorthand language to frame the debate about income inequality—the gap between the nation’s top 1 percent of income holders and the rest of the population. People rallied under banners and placards that read, “We are the 99 percent.”
One blog, created by a pair
of twenty-somethings, posted photos of people holding up handwritten stories of their struggles, which all ended with the statement, “We are the 99 percent.”
Mother Jones
magazine
tracked down the founders of the site, who
said they had started it in early September and within a month were getting a hundred postings a day, “from the 61-year-old who lost her job and moved in with her kids, to the husband of a college professor on WIC and Medicaid to support an infant daughter, to the 50-something couple living on tossed-out KFC, to a bevy of youths pummeled by student debt and too poor to visit a dentist.”

What it all added up to was a matter of interpretation. After the Arab Spring, some Americans wondered if this would be a homegrown version of a grassroots revolt against the power establishment. Some Democrats embraced the movement. Elizabeth Warren, who had been rejected by Republicans in the Senate to head the new consumer protection bureau created by Obama’s financial regulatory reform legislation and was now running for the Senate in Massachusetts, said, “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.” White House officials maintained some distance from the movement, particularly the most unsavory aspects of it—the vandalism, violence, and breaking of the law. But Obama’s advisers recognized that the movement was helping to reshape the political conversation. “I think it had a significant change in the overall climate in that it reframed the discussion nationally and it did two things,” said Anita Dunn, who served as White House communications director early in Obama’s presidency. “One, it gave people permission to openly discuss something that had not really been openly discussed, which was the growing inequalities and the unfairness. Two, it gave many members of the Democratic Party much more confidence in going to those places in the criticism of the Republican policies.”

Though the president was looking to draw sharp contrasts with the Republicans on values and would make raising taxes on the rich a centerpiece of his message, his advisers feared the Occupy movement put too much focus on pure class division. Obama was sounding more like a populist himself at times. He wanted the rich to pay more in taxes. Many Democrats wanted to hear more of that from the president, but he didn’t exactly want to alienate the rich either. His advisers worried that if they embraced the Occupy rhetoric directly or indirectly, some of the middle-class swing voters they hoped to attract would turn away. “The one fear about Occupy, would they get violent, would this take a turn that would necessarily rebound against us but generally would taint the whole argument about tax fairness? So there was great concern about that,” Plouffe said. When the movement began to fizzle, it was actually to the relief of many in the Obama campaign. But Obama advisers recognized that the movement had some lasting effect. “Occupy had its blazing moment in the sun and then began to peter out, but again, the arguments they were making were in the bloodstream of our politics all through 2012,” Plouffe said.

•   •   •

Obama completed his pivot to the campaign on December 6, 2011, in Osawatomie, Kansas, population 4,600, where he delivered a speech that was the culmination of a year of conflict with congressional Republicans, months of research by his campaign, and the president’s own frustrations with what he had experienced over the previous three years. Piggybacking on Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism theme of a century earlier, Obama drew a line from the economic excesses that had contributed to the collapse in 2008 to the coming election campaign. What had happened then, he said, resulted from “breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility across the system.” The result was widespread economic pain and, ever since, a raging debate about what to do. “Throughout the country, it has sparked protests and political movements—from the Tea Party to the people who have been occupying the streets of New York and other cities,” Obama said. “It’s left Washington in a near-constant state of gridlock. And it’s been the topic of heated and sometimes colorful discussion among the men and women who are running for president. But this isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” He invoked Roosevelt’s epic battle against the trusts at the beginning of the twentieth century. He spoke in concrete terms and pointed fingers at his opponents. Whenever there was an economic challenge, he said, Republicans responded with the same prescription: free markets, fewer regulations, tax cuts, especially for the wealthy. “It’s a simple theory—one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.”

The goal of the Kansas speech was to anchor Obama in a mission to rebuild the economy by rebuilding a stronger middle class. “It was a chance for him to say to the country, ‘Here is where we are. Here’s where we stand and here’s where we need to go,’” Grisolano said. The speech was not overly prescriptive. Obama would wait until his 2012 State of the Union address for that. Instead he hoped to convey a sense of his values and to challenge those of the Republican Party, based on all that the campaign had learned through the year. David Nakamura of the
Washington Post
said the president had “laid out, in his sharpest language yet, the economic and social arguments” destined to be used against the Republicans in 2012. The headline in the
New York Times
read, “Obama Sounds a Populist Call on G.O.P. Turf.” “Obama Says Middle-Class Faces a ‘Make or Break’ Moment,” the
Kansas City Star
headline said.

A transition that began with the shellacking in 2010 and built on the disappointment and frustration over the year’s conflict with Republicans in Congress was now done. The Osawatomie speech was the most important of the year for the president, as it laid out the themes for the reelection campaign more robustly than at any time during the fall. The Republicans were just a month away from the first votes in their nomination battle. Obama served notice that he would be ready for Mitt Romney or whoever emerged as their nominee.

•   •   •

A month before Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Nate Silver, the baseball statistician turned political prognosticator, wrote an article in the
New York Times Magazine
that carried the headline, “Is Obama Toast?” The headline was more provocative than Silver’s careful analysis. He noted that incumbents are almost always favored for reelection; six of the previous eight presidents who had run a second time had won a second term. But he pointed out that the debt ceiling fight had proved to be a perfect storm of trouble for the president. The outcome had offended Obama’s liberal base, frustrated swing voters, and potentially imperiled the already fragile economy, which of course was the worst danger of all. “
Obama has gone from a modest favorite
to win re-election to, probably, a slight underdog,” Silver wrote. He sketched out a series of scenarios, depending on the state of the economy and Obama’s potential opponent, Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. Against Romney, with a stagnant economy, the president was a clear underdog. Even with an improving economy, it was no better than a 60 percent probability that he would win.

Obama’s advisers well understood the situation. They could see the president’s strong points and knew there were certain arguments Republicans might use against him that would not fly with the swing voters they were hoping to woo back to his side. Swing voters in the Obama focus groups rejected the charge being leveled by Romney and the Republicans that the president had made a bad economy worse. They thought that was nonsense. “The great vulnerability for us,” a campaign official said, “was what they said at the end of the sentence—‘I just don’t know if he can turn it around’—which was Romney’s great strength, which then became the foundation for our attacks on him to take away that strength.”

Building the Army

T
he campaign never stopped building. From the moment Obama took the oath of office on January 20, 2009, and every day thereafter, his team was always at work preparing for the coming campaign. Everyone said Obama’s 2008 operation had rewritten the book on organizing, and in some ways that was accurate. But 2008 was just a beginning, a small first step toward what Obama’s team envisioned when they began planning the reelection campaign. In one of their first conversations about the reelection, Messina said he told the president that the reason they could not rerun 2008 was because so much had changed in just two years. Technology had leapfrogged forward, with new devices, new platforms, and vastly more opportunities to exploit social media. And Obama was now an incumbent with a record. The whole campaign would have to be different. The president sent Messina off to Chicago, far away from the hothouse of Washington and Beltway chatter, to use 2011 to build the foundation and reassemble the army from 2008. As the Republican candidates were gearing up and then battling each other through the summer and fall of 2011, Messina and his colleagues were investing enormous amounts of time, money, and creative energy in the development of what resembled a high-tech political start-up whose main purpose was to put more people on the streets in 2012, armed with more information about the voters they were contacting, than any campaign had ever attempted.

In campaigns, the people who design the overall strategy or make the ads or take the polls or appear as talking heads on television become the political celebrities, instantly visible, nationally famous, and highly acclaimed. But for sheer esprit de corps, little tops the people who regard field operations as the soul of a campaign. The word “field” carries special meaning. It is a point of pride, a badge of honor, among those who spend their days thinking about nothing other than how to identify, locate, motivate, register, cajole, persuade, mobilize, and ultimately turn out the voters their candidate will need to win an election. These campaign workers often began their careers working in a remote office in a state with an early primary or caucus—the kids who
organized Iowa for Obama in 2007. They moved from one state to the next, gaining expertise and greater responsibility. They became experts on the minutiae of politics—key counties in key states, swing precincts, voting histories, demographics of the electorate, turnout models, ratios of staff to volunteers to voters, door knocks, telephone calls, mail drops, contacts of any kind and which work better than others. Over time, some would take on responsibility for a state. Others would eventually move to headquarters to help oversee a handful of smaller states or several battlegrounds. At the top of the pyramid were leaders who oversaw the extraordinarily complex and ever-shifting matrix of data and people that was all aimed at a single target: maximizing the vote by election day.

At the Obama campaign, Messina was in overall charge of building the ground operation, but a team of experienced professionals backed him up. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon had started out the 2008 campaign running John Edwards’s operation in Iowa but was brought into the Obama operation after Edwards quit the race. She became an instant star and, after the election, moved to the Democratic National Committee as executive director. She oversaw the continuation of the Obama field operation, now renamed Organizing for America, and began investing millions of dollars and countless hours on technology and analytics that would eventually migrate to the reelection campaign. When Obama set up shop in Chicago in early 2011, she became deputy campaign manager in charge of all field operations. Three other veterans of 2008 were also part of the core team. Jeremy Bird, a former divinity student at Harvard, had managed the South Carolina operation for Obama during the primaries, and his success there not just in helping win the state but also in creating a model for organizing helped elevate him to national field director for 2012. He shared an office with Mitch Stewart, one of the campaign’s most highly regarded organizers in 2008, a strategist who had taken on the task of winning Virginia. In 2012, he would serve as director of the battleground states. Every day Bird and Stewart focused on one number: 270—the electoral votes needed to reelect the president. Buffy Wicks had worked for Howard Dean in 2004 and came to the Obama campaign in 2008 after working on the grassroots project called Wake Up Wal-Mart. In 2012, she became director of Project Vote, a newly created unit in the campaign that was designed to focus on the electorate by demographic groups rather than as individual voters.

The first steps toward building the reelection operation were taken in the months after Obama’s 2008 victory. Campaign staffers did a series of after-action reports. “We did very detailed postmortem where we looked at all kinds of numbers, looking at the general stuff like the number of door knocks we made, phone calls we made, number of voters that we registered,” Stewart said. “But then we broke it down by field organizer, we broke it down then by
volunteer. We looked at the best way or the best examples in states of what their volunteer organization looked like.” The project produced a thick three-ring binder that ran to nearly five hundred pages and was filled with recommendations for how to strengthen what was already considered a state-of-the-art field operation. Another early step was the decision to expand massively the investment in technology, digital, and particularly analytics—the top priority of Dillon while at the DNC. “A lot of what we built on the campaign was built on top of or came from the work that we did in ’09 and ’10,” she said.

The 2012 campaign had, as do most now, a digital director in Teddy Goff. But they also had a chief technology officer, Harper Reed, who had never done politics before but was a genius at building the tools Messina and company wanted. Michael Slaby was named chief innovation officer. Rounding out the team was Dan Wagner, who was in charge of the analytics operation, which would become one of the most important additions to presidential campaign operations. Wagner had started in Iowa in 2007 and quickly showed off his expertise in data mining and analytics. The work of his team, which operated out of a windowless area of headquarters known as the Cave, would become an integral part of almost everything else the campaign did. The campaign hired software engineers and data experts and number crunchers and digital designers and video producers by the score—hundreds of them—who filled back sections of the vast open room resembling a brokerage house trading floor or a tech start-up that occupied the sixth floor of One Prudential Plaza overlooking Millennium Park in Chicago.

No campaign had ever invested so heavily in technology and analytics, and no campaign had ever had such stated ambitions. “Technology was another big lesson learned from 2008, and leap of faith and labor of love and angst-ridden entity and all the other things that you can imagine, because we were building things in-house mostly with people that had not done campaign work before,” Dillon later told me. “The deadlines and breaking and testing—is it going to work, what do we do?—but we set this course. Some stuff didn’t work, but the things that needed to work did. They held up, they load-tested, and there’s probably nothing that Jim and myself were more involved in. . . . At the end of the day it was certainly worth it, because you can’t customize our stuff, and so we just couldn’t buy off the shelf for anything and you know that, and fortunately we had enough time to kind of build the stuff. I don’t know who else will ever have the luxury of doing that again.”

•   •   •

Messina and Dillon had a vision of what they wanted, based on the changing landscape of technology. Messina was as data driven as any presidential campaign manager in modern times, and Dillon had concentrated her efforts
while at the DNC on starting work on the programs that would make Obama’s groundbreaking 2008 campaign look old-fashioned in comparison. They wanted to be able to measure everything, and they wanted all the data the campaign accumulated about voters to be integrated. The campaign had a voter list and a donor list and volunteer lists and other lists, but what they wanted was the ability to link all the contacts each person had with the campaign into one vast database. “There’s always been two campaigns since the Internet was invented, the campaign online and the campaign on the doors,” Messina told me. “What I wanted was, I didn’t care where you organized, what time you organized, how you organized, as long as I could track it, I can measure it, and I can encourage you to do more of it. So what I said to them was I want all of our data together, I want for the first time to treat [a voter] like a voter and not like a number, because right now you’re just a voter number, your voter ID number in your state, your FEC number for how much you contribute, your census data, whatever we know about you from commercial vendors. But we don’t treat [a voter] like a person.” It took the technology team nearly a year, but what they produced was software that allowed all of the campaign’s lists to talk to one another. The technology team named it Narwhal, after a whale of amazing strength that lives in the Arctic but is rarely seen. Harper Reed described Narwhal as the software platform for everything else the campaign wanted to do and build, “much like the piping of a building or the foundation of a building . . . the stuff that makes it so we’re structurally sound.”

The next goal was to build a program that would allow everyone—campaign staffers in Chicago, state directors and their staff in the battlegrounds, field organizers, volunteers going door to door or volunteers at home—to communicate simply and seamlessly. The Obama team wanted something that allowed the staff field organizers in the Des Moines or Columbus or Fairfax offices to have access to all the information the campaign had about the voters for whom they were responsible. They wanted volunteer leaders to have access online as well. And if someone didn’t want to knock on doors, the campaign wanted them to be able to organize from home, but have the data about the voters with whom they were communicating integrated into the main hub of information. That brought about the creation of Dashboard, which Messina later said was the hardest thing the campaign did but which became the central online organizing vehicle. It was enormously complicated to develop, made all the more difficult because the engineers who were building it had never worked on campaigns and did not instinctively understand the work of field organizers. Some of them were sent out to the states briefly as organizers to better understand the needs of those on the front lines.

“Dashboard is what we needed to communicate,” Dillon said. “It was all
about the users, so if the users didn’t have a good experience there was no point in it. . . . That’s why it was the Holy Grail.” Reed described it as a way to bring the field office to the Internet. “When you walk into a field office, you have many opportunities,” he said. “We’ll hand you a call sheet. You can make calls. You can knock on doors, and they’ll have these stacks there for you. They’ll say, ‘Harper, you’ve knocked on fifty doors. That’s great. Here’s how you compare to the rest of them.’ But it’s all very offline. It’s all very ad hoc and it’s not very modern. And so what we set out to do was create that offline field experience online.” Reed said near the end of the campaign they received an e-mail from a wounded Afghanistan war veteran who was in a hospital. He was logging into Dashboard and participating in the organizing effort the way any other volunteer walking precincts was doing. Reed was blown away by the message. He said, “I could have quit that day and I would have been satisfied with my role.”

The Obama leadership not only wanted all the lists to be able to talk to one another, they also wanted people to be able to organize their friends and families. This was taking a concept introduced in 2004 by Bush’s reelection team—the notion that voters are more likely to listen to people they know than to paid callers or strangers knocking on their door—and updating it to take advantage of new technology, namely the explosion of social media. All current campaigns learn from the best of previous campaigns. Bush’s 2004 campaign had taken lessons from the Democrats in 2000, whose ground game was judged superior to the Republicans’ despite the loss. Messina was repaying the favor, hoping to make another significant leap into the future of organizing based on some of what Bush had done, at the expense of the 2012 Republican nominee.

Early in 2011, some of the Obama team visited Facebook, where executives were encouraging them to spend some of the campaign’s advertising dollars with them. “We started saying, ‘Okay, that’s nice if we just advertise,’” Messina said. “But what if we could build a piece of software that tracked all this and allowed you to match your friends on Facebook with our lists and we said to you, ‘Okay [so-and-so] is a friend of yours, we think he’s unregistered, why don’t you go get him to register? Or [so-and-so] is a friend of yours, we think he’s undecided. Why don’t you get him to be decided?’ And we only gave you a discrete number of friends. That turned out to be millions of dollars and a year of our lives. It was incredibly complex to do.”

But the third piece of this puzzle provided the campaign with another treasure trove of information and an organizing tool unlike anything available in the past. It took months and months to solve this, but it was a huge breakthrough to the campaign team. If a person signed on to Dashboard through his or her Facebook identity, the campaign could, with permission, gain access to that person’s Facebook friends. The Obama team called this “Targeted Sharing.” They knew
from other research that people who pay less attention to politics were more likely to listen to a message from a friend than from someone in the campaign. What the campaign could do was supply people with information about their friends based on data the campaign had independently gathered on those people. They knew who was and wasn’t registered to vote. They knew which of these friends had a low propensity to vote. They knew who was solid for Obama and who needed more persuasion—and a gentle or not-so-gentle nudge to go out and vote. Instead of asking someone to send out a message to all of his or her Facebook friends, the Obama campaign could present a handpicked list of the three or four or five people the campaign believed would most benefit from personal encouragement.