Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

by Balz, Dan

  The second phase of the project took place in early June. Benenson and business partner Danny Franklin conducted nine focus groups, three in each of the three locations. Each focus group was limited to just three participants and lasted two and a half hours. These “triads,” as they were called, were divided by age and gender: men over fifty or under fifty; women over fifty or under fifty. The sessions allowed for an even deeper conversation about issues the participants had described in their journal entries. “They shared a strong sense that America was changing in a way that was out of their control,” Benenson said. “They felt the old rules of the economy and how you got ahead didn’t apply anymore. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t recognize new rules in the economy. They weren’t sure there were new rules. How to get ahead was more perplexing to them. The ground rules had disappeared and they didn’t know what the new ground rules were.

  “On the broadest scale, they were really struggling to keep what they had. They were more worried about sliding down the economic ladder than moving ahead. All they wanted was to be able to get out what they put in, and they weren’t sure they could.” Benenson said a woman in Denver told them, “As a parent you want things to be better for your children. I know my parents did when I was brought up. I don’t think most kids are going to be able to buy a house. I think it’s going to be really a struggle to be able to do that. So the dream is going to have to be modified. Something is going to have to change dramatically.” A Columbus man said, “I’m sick of debt affecting how much disposable income we have. I just want it all paid off.” One of the most compelling insights was the degree to which the concept of the American dream did not mean as much for younger workers as it did for older ones. “The language around the American dream wasn’t carrying the same resonance,” Benenson said. “Some of the symbols of achieving the American dream were becoming burdens—owning that house with the big mortgage was expensive; owning two cars and more debt; having your kid go to college. The cost and burden of taking out those loans was making a lot of Americans ambivalent. They weren’t sure a college education was worth it.”

  In early June, Benenson’s team produced a forty-five-page document summing up the findings. There were a variety of implications for the campaign. People prized reciprocity—the idea that hard work would be rewarded—but felt it was no longer part of the basic bargain in society. They wanted to be part of something bigger but saw the sense of community slipping away. They put a higher priority on economic security than on taking risks; just maintaining that security was worth celebrating. As he was finishing, Benenson conducted a benchmark survey that reinforced the conclusion that Obama’s message had to be as forward-looking as possible. He had to draw a contrast based on values and visions for the future, not debate what he had done right or wrong. Benenson said, “What we learned in 2011 made us pretty confident that the president’s economic values and vision were a lot more aligned with where swing voters were and where most Americans were than anyone in the Republican field,” Benenson said. “We didn’t have any false sense of confidence. We knew it would be a close race. But we never deviated from that kind of approach and that kind of strategy.”

  • • •

  Throughout the spring and summer of 2011, the campaign also conducted other research projects, including a series of more traditional focus groups, to probe political attitudes about the economy, the president, and the Republicans. David Binder ran the focus groups, as he had done in 2008. Binder was the inexhaustible traveler of the Obama research team, originally recruited by Axelrod and, by the assessment of his colleagues, a gifted moderator. Axelrod especially liked that Binder was not a pollster. Pollsters sometimes came to focus groups with an agenda, to confirm what they found in their polls, and their questions sometimes prodded the participants to confirm the numbers. Binder didn’t mix quantitative and qualitative research. He was there to tease out what people were really thinking. In the early stages, Axelrod wanted Binder to keep the focus as broad as possible, to allow the participants’ true feelings to bubble up naturally. At this stage he did not want a directed conversation about specific issues. The challenge this time was far different from that in Obama’s first campaign. “In ’08 when we do qualitative research, there’s more of the sense of how do we create excitement about this person that’s running? Is he risky, and if so, what can we do to bridge that concern that we’re trying somebody a little bit too new?” Binder said. “That obviously was not the case this time. This time there’s a record to run on that will be attacked, and the methodology’s more along the lines of determining to what degree can people reenlist with the president who has potentially disappointed them. It’s a very different kind of questioning and probing—kind of emotional investigative.”

  Over time, Binder’s research produced three broad findings about how people felt about the president. The first was, predictably, the enormous dissatisfaction with the state of the economy. This overwhelmed everything else. Debt and deficits would later become a bigger concern for many of the people, but through most of 2011 the economy dominated discussions. Anxiety about the economy pervaded the conversations—concerns that jobs were not coming back fast enough, that salaries weren’t going up, that the housing crisis wasn’t over, that people felt underemployed. “It was basically a sense that the country wasn’t moving forward to the degree that they had hoped, and for some people they felt that the president promised better,” said a campaign official.

  The second finding was that people had not given up on Obama. Their initial buy-in on his character had not been compromised. They knew his biography. They admired his family. They remembered that each night when he was in Washington he had dinner with his wife and daughters in the White House residence. To some extent the groups were skewed; Obama haters were never included in the groups, so the full fury of anti-Obama sentiment that had fueled the Republican victory was missing from these groups. But those voters were already lost to the president. The question was how many of his 2008 supporters were in danger of defecting. What Binder found was that while there was anxiety about the president and his record, there was almost always the thread in the conversations that voters remained open to him. “They wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt,” Binder said. “And part of that was only because they felt he was trying. And when we asked, ‘Well, what have you seen to indicate that he’s trying?’ then they would—even though they’d just [finished] bad-mouthing Obamacare—they said, ‘Well, he’s trying to do something about health care.’ So you find all this conflict, internal conflict among the voters.”

  But if Obama’s 2008 supporters still gave him the benefit of the doubt, they nonetheless had serious reservations about him. His heart may have been in the right place, they said, but was he up to the job? That was the most troublesome finding. Voters questioned whether he really understood how to get the economy moving. They worried that he did not have policies that would work. They feared that the problems were bigger than he was—which was such a profound change from the way they had viewed him in 2008, when they saw him as a transformational figure who was going to be able to radically change Washington. They did not see him as weak—the killing of Osama bin Laden had helped remove that issue from the election—so much as they sensed that he lacked the experience to make Washington work. They recognized, particularly after the debt ceiling fight, that he faced stubborn opposition from the Republicans, that the Republicans were more to blame for the standoff than was the president. But they wanted a president capable of finding a way around that obstacle. “We heard that quite a bit, that he didn’t have enough experience to know how to deal with the job,” one campaign official said. “And a lot of it I think was you have to knock heads together with Congress, and Obama didn’t seem to know how to do that. . . . People brought up Lyndon Johnson, which was interesting. You don’t expect a focus group to say he needs to be more like LBJ, especially given the age group here. But it was amazing,
some people saying LBJ had it, he knew how to twist an arm in a way to get what he wanted. And Obama doesn’t seem to do that.” Another campaign official said, “I’ve never had so many damned references to Lyndon Johnson in my life. All the bloody time. It became like an inside joke, how many times is LBJ going to come up? We were trying to find a way to use Republican obstruction as more of a weapon and people would concede it. ‘Yeah, they’re horrible, they’re terrible, but he’s the president, he should be able to figure out a way to get around it. It’s your problem. You’re the one who wanted the job.’”

  “People thought the president was doing a pretty good job under the circumstances,” Grisolano added. “They were angry about the economy but fair-minded about what he walked into. But they didn’t feel they had a sense of the bigger picture. Where was he driving, where was he taking the country, how are we going to get there?” The president’s advisers concluded that he would make the campaign less about the state of the economy and all about who would look after the interests of the middle class during a time of economic transition. “The beauty of this framework was that it helped us slip the noose on the economy,” Grisolano said. “We knew the Republican message was, ‘The economy sucks, Obama’s responsible, fire him.’ By going to the issue of which candidate could be trusted with the country’s long-term economic future, we kind of sidestepped the . . . ‘throw the bums out’ thinking.”

  • • •

  Preparation for the attacks on Mitt Romney also began early. The Democratic National Committee had done some of the initial work before the Obama team decamped for Chicago. Once settled in their new offices, the campaign’s opposition research team, led by Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean, dug into the former Massachusetts governor’s record. Every Friday, the campaign’s different department heads met with Messina to rate the Republican challengers. Romney began as number one and never slipped lower, even when others were ahead of him in the polls. Their reasoning was that Romney had run for president before, could raise the money needed to wage a long campaign, and was running against an improbable group of rivals. As someone with extensive business experience, Romney fit Axelrod’s long-held belief that in times of stress or dissatisfaction, voters look for a remedy, not a replica. “He seemed the most distinct from Obama, the solid businessman, no gloss,” Axelrod said. Certainly Romney had flaws, and the campaign was looking to exploit them. And they knew that after 2010 the nomination battle would push him to the right. Axelrod said he told the president after the midterms that the seeds had been planted for his reelection, “because the gravitational pull in the Republican Party was now so far to the right that anybody who was going to be the nominee had to go through that tollbooth and they would have to pay a very high toll.”

  By the fall of 2011, Obama’s advisers began to worry that Romney was successfully avoiding attacks from his Republican rivals. Plouffe was concerned that the likely challenger’s image was too positive. The team decided they couldn’t wait for one of the Republicans to do it. If they wanted their likely opponent framed up for the general election, they would have to take on the job themselves. On October 30, 2011, Plouffe went after Romney on NBC’s Meet the Press. “He has no core,” Plouffe said. “I can tell you one thing working a few steps down from the president, what you need in that office is conviction. You need to have a true compass, and you have got to be willing to make tough calls. You get the sense with Mitt Romney that if he thought it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he’d say it.” The Democratic National Committee released an online video attack with the same theme. “From the creator of ‘I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake,’ comes the story of two men trapped in one body: Mitt versus Mitt,” the narrator said. Using footage of Romney taking positions on both sides of different issues, the narrator added, “Two Mitts, willing to say anything.”

  Around that time, Bill Clinton met with Messina, Axelrod, and Patrick Gaspard, the former White House political director who was now at the DNC, in Harlem. Be careful here, he told them. You do not want to paint Romney as a flip-flopper. His reasoning was born of his own experience. Republicans had tried the tactic on him and he had learned that people sometimes came to the conclusion that a politician with such a reputation eventually could end up on the right side of an issue. Swing voters, especially, thought that way. If voters thought Romney in the end might do the right thing, they would be more comfortable voting for him, especially if they had real doubts about Obama’s ability to deal with the economy. Clinton told the trio from the Obama campaign that they should hold Romney accountable for the conservative positions he was espousing as a candidate, not provide him with an escape hatch by suggesting he didn’t believe them.

  Clinton’s advice helped refocus the Obama team. Going after him as a flip-flopper might be attractive, but Romney’s real vulnerabilities were the positions he was taking and his record in private industry. Romney was using his business experience as his principal calling card as a candidate, a way to draw contrast with a president who had no private-sector experience. Obama’s team set out to turn it into Romney’s biggest liability. Near the end of 2011, I talked with Axelrod about this. He said, “The two things that concern folks the most are an economy that, not just over the last three years, but over the long term, feels like it’s been rigged against hardworking, responsible everyday people. And politics in which people too often are willing to subjugate fundamental principles to their own ambition. And when you think about the two things that most distress people, you wouldn’t necessarily come up with Mitt Romney as the answer, because he in many ways represents those things in the economy that concern people the most.”

  Obama’s advisers had done their own research on Romney’s vulnerabilities. At first blush, voters saw Romney’s business experience in a generally positive light. They accepted some of the harsher business practices that Bain and other private equity firms engaged in—the downsizing of companies, layoffs, elimination of benefits—as standard operating procedure in a competitive world. They saw Romney’s success as a sign of his toughness, a quality they thought might be useful in a president dealing with such a stubborn economic crisis. Did he break the law? they asked the moderator. The campaign team then decided to ask another series of questions focused not on the legality of what private equity firms did but on the issue of whether it was the right thing to do. It may have been legitimate, but was it right? One Obama adviser told me later, “Once we began introducing that, it allowed us to make the following argument, which was effective: He may get the economy, he may know how to make money, he may have made hundreds of millions for him and his investors. But every time he did, folks like you lost your pensions, lost your jobs, jobs got shipped overseas. And that became the best way for us to define his business experience, his strength, in a way that then served to really hurt him at the same time, to separate technical experience from the values around it.” In October 2011, the campaign had conducted focus groups in three battleground states—Ohio, Florida, and New Hampshire—and had shown participants a famous photo taken of Romney and his partners at Bain as they were forming the company. They were holding dollar bills and smiling broadly, and more bills were stuffed in their pockets and in their mouths and in their shirt collars. After seeing that, Messina said, “People were like, ‘Game over.’”

  CHAPTER 5

  Fall Offensive

  August 2011 was the lowest month of Obama’s presidency, lower even than November 2010, when Democrats lost the House and Senate. At least Obama and his team had seen that coming. August 2011 was worse too than the first month of 2010, when Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts had shocked the Democrats and seemed to signal the death of health care. August 2011 was, in the words of one presidential adviser, “indescribably bad.” It was the low point not only because it brought Obama’s hopes of a grand bargain on the deficit crashing down, but also because the collapse damaged the president almos
t as much as it hurt the Republicans—something White House officials had never anticipated. Obama’s team worried all summer about a possible default. They were, said another senior official in the White House, “scared shitless” that the government would default, with all the consequences for the economy that would bring. They began the negotiations with minimal expectations; mostly they wanted to avoid a catastrophic default. “It wasn’t like this was driven by, ‘Hey, let’s have something here where we’re just dancing with John Boehner and we look like the compromisers and that’ll help us politically,’” Plouffe told me at the time. “That’s not what drove the strategy. What drove the strategy was, ‘Okay, we actually have a chance here to do something meaningful on the debt and the deficit.’” John Boehner’s apparent interest in a grand bargain, which the president believed was genuine, raised expectations that something serious might result. When it came crashing down, the debris hit everyone—including the president. “We knew absolutely that when this fell apart we’d be left holding the bag of shit,” the president’s adviser said. “You just knew you were going to be in terrible shape.”