by Balz, Dan
CHAPTER 6
Building the Army
The 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.
Teddy Goff told my colleague Aaron Blake, “For people who allowed us, we were able to say to them, ‘All right, you just watched a video about registering to vote. Don’t just share it with all your friends on Facebook. We’ve run a match, and here are your ten friends on Facebook who we think may not be registered to vote and live in Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Florida.’” This was especially helpful in trying to reach voters under age thirty. On Obama’s target lists, the voter file contained no good contact information for half of those young voters—they didn’t have landlines, and no other information was available. But Goff said 85 percent of that group were on Facebook and could be reached by a friend of a friend. Reed described another example. Someone interested in health care might click on an ad on Facebook, and up would pop an infographic on health care. At the end of it, there would be a “share” button, and if the person clicked on it, up popped names of friends the person could share the information with. The campaign knew from its own database which of those friends were most likely to respond to information about health care. “We went through and we looked at all those friends and found the ones that were the best matches for that specific piece of content,” Reed said.
Google’s Eric Schmidt said, “If you don’t know anything about campaigns you would assume it’s national, but a successful campaign is highly, highly local, down to the zip code. The revolution in technology is to understand where the undecideds are in this district and how you reach them.” That was what the integration of technology and old-fashioned organizing was designed to do for Obama in 2012.
• • •
At the beginning of the Obama presidency, Organizing for America, the successor to the 2008 campaign organization, was run through the DNC under the supervision of Dillon. Some Democrats hoped it would be the president’s secret weapon in helping to win support for his legislative agenda. The results on that front were mixed, and there were few obvious success stories about its political muscle during the disastrous 2010 elections. The losses in the midterms taught another lesson, Stewart said. “Failure is always a better teacher t
han success, and 2010 was tough,” he told me. “We learned tactically some lessons, but ultimately I think what probably helped us more than anything else is a lot of our volunteers and staff had only been involved in the ’08 campaign, which was a lot of highs, and unless you were very early on in the process like I was, there weren’t a lot of lows. So 2010 was a good learning experience just in that [it showed us] this isn’t all rainbows and bubblegum. I think it actually helped harden some of our volunteers and staff to prepare for 2012.”
What wasn’t seen was all the work that was taking place behind the scenes—work that no Republican presidential candidate would be able to match in 2012, if for no other reason than the amount of time and money and experimentation invested up front by the Obama team. They were able to test and retest everything. Messina said there were other dividends returned by the decision to keep OFA operating between the campaigns. “It kept our super volunteers active in the organization and gave them a reason to talk to their neighbors for two years and continue to grow their ability and talent, and then second, it put a whole bunch of young kids who were kind of the second- and third-level people in the ’08 race in analytics and gave them a home at the DNC, a boss in Jen O’Malley [Dillon], and a patron at the White House.”
Dan Wagner had come to the DNC after the 2008 election to expand what was initially a tiny analytics operation. David Plouffe had seen the potential for analytics during 2008, and Dillon was a big believer in it as well. In early 2010, others on the Obama team had an epiphany about the value of analytics. It came just before the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy. Many Democrats were still in denial about the direction of the race, incredulous that a little-known Republican state senator named Scott Brown could have enough momentum to defeat Democratic attorney general Martha Coakley. Wagner, who was operating with the analytics team out of the DNC, analyzed the numbers and concluded that Brown was going to win. He delivered his conclusions and the data to Messina. “He said, ‘We’re going to lose, and here’s why we’re going to lose,’ and it happened almost exactly like that,” Messina said. “That’s when we first started saying this model can really be something.” Later that year, according to Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab, they began modeling seventy-four Senate and House races and pegged the outcomes with extraordinary accuracy.
