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

by Balz, Dan

  Ohio was critical to Romney, and yet into the early fall his campaign advertising was hit or miss in the state. In September, Rob Portman began to analyze where the campaign was spending its money. He was shocked to see that Romney was not running ads in secondary markets that were critical to Bush’s success in 2004. He learned that for months Romney had not been on the radio in rural areas that were vital to his turnout operation. Portman, supported by state director Scott Jennings, became a fierce advocate for a new approach in Ohio. The candidate had to spend more time in the state, and his campaign had to spend more money in more places on TV ads, they told Boston.

  But lack of money wasn’t the only problem with Romney’s advertising. His ad buying was a source of consternation inside the campaign. Late in the race, when Romney’s senior advisers learned to their dismay that radio ads they thought were running in rural areas in western Ohio were not actually on the air, there was a major blowup. Romney also was paying significantly more for his ads than Obama, which meant that even if the money spent had been equal, Obama would have run many more ads. Politico reported that Romney was paying two, three, even five times more than the Obama campaign to place a thirty-second ad in the same time slot. Obama paid $1,200 for an ad during the Emmy awards. For the same program, Romney paid $3,600. Obama had thirty people working on placing the ads, and they got lower rates in part because they negotiated station by station rather than buying what are called lock-in rates. Obama’s team had tapped into a huge dump of data to help guide their ad-buying strategy: the click-by-click habits of individual viewers, with a firewall to protect privacy, gleaned from the information contained in set-top boxes on people’s TVs. With those data, Obama’s ad buyers dramatically expanded the number of cable networks where they placed ads, beyond the traditional handful of networks campaigns had been using. Romney’s team never caught up, and by the end of the campaign, frustrations with the ad-buying strategy were legion.

  After Portman’s complaints, Boston responded. Advertising increased, as did Romney’s time in the state. After the Denver debate, enthusiasm surged and the size of Romney’s crowds increased dramatically. But if the first debate changed the psychology of the campaign, it had not changed the underlying arithmetic in Ohio or other battlegrounds. Romney was still trailing and saddled with an image problem. Geoff Garin, who was working with Priorities USA, the pro-Obama super PAC, said he did a focus group in suburban Cleveland shortly after the second debate. The participants were Obama voters from 2008 who were not yet back in his column. Garin asked them about ads. Of all the scores they had seen, were there any they remembered? They responded by talking about Priorities USA’s infamous “Stage” ad, in which a worker who had been asked to build a stage used to announce the closing of his plant said he felt like he had built his own coffin. Priorities USA had not run the ad in Ohio for seven weeks and yet the participants could cite specific details. The ad was sixty seconds long and costly to put on television. Garin earlier had recommended against running it anymore because of the cost. After the focus group, he e-mailed: “I think we cannot afford not to run it again.”

  Romney’s advisers were putting on a brave face in Ohio, hoping that the enthusiasm they were seeing at their rallies meant a surge in turnout. But they were still trailing narrowly and were still perplexed about the bailout. The question was whether to take it on directly or avoid turning over the hornet’s nest. Portman had been urging the campaign for some time to deal with the bailout. The campaign produced a series of scripts for commercials, but the policy shop, which had signed off on the questionable ad accusing Obama of gutting the work requirement in the welfare law, would not approve any of them.

  In late October, the campaign seized on a Bloomberg News story that said Chrysler was planning to shift production of Jeeps from the United States to China. Romney mentioned it at a rally in tiny Defiance, Ohio. The initial Bloomberg story, however, was incorrect, and Chrysler officials immediately denied it. They were planning to produce Jeeps in China for the overseas market, not take jobs out of the United States. Romney’s campaign cut an ad—the most controversial of his campaign and one that was the subject of great debate inside the campaign. The ad was carefully and narrowly written. The key sentences were “Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.” Though the words were literally accurate (and approved by the policy department), the impression left was totally misleading. The ad exploded in the campaign’s face. Sergio Marchionne, Chrysler’s chairman, issued this statement: “I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China. . . . Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand. It is inaccurate to suggest anything different.” A General Motors spokesman offered a more caustic response: “We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.” Newspapers around the state hammered Romney for the ad. Commentators condemned him for playing fast and loose with the facts. When that happened, the Romney campaign, whose style was never to show weakness or admit error, refused to back away. His advisers were sick and tired of being preached at by a media establishment they believed had treated their candidate unfairly.

  • • •

  When it came time to turn out the vote, the challenger was at a major disadvantage. Obama’s campaign team had been on the ground in Ohio for almost five years. Jeremy Bird had been the Ohio state director in 2008. Pickrell had run Ted Strickland’s campaigns. Greg Schultz, the state director, had been deputy state director in 2008 and had remained in place as state director for Organizing for America until the reelection campaign began. Obama had at least 130 offices around the state, plus five hundred or so staging areas for volunteers working the final days. He had almost seven hundred staffers on the Ohio payroll alone. The only other state that roughly matched that level was Florida, which had eleven more electoral votes. Thousands of volunteers—the Wanda Carters and Carol Mohrs—carried out the duties of contacting the voters. Romney had to build an organization in a matter of months. He had about forty offices and 157 paid staff, though most of those were on the payroll of the Republican National Committee. Scott Jennings said after the election that there was no way the Republicans could overcome Obama’s head start. “Our ground game was as good as it could have possibly been, given the time and resources we had to work with,” he said. “There’s just no substitute for time. Six months . . . wasn’t enough to overcome six years of a constant campaign run by the other side. Truly it is remarkable to see what they did, in the rearview mirror.”

  Beyond the disparity in sheer numbers, the Obama campaign had another advantage. What Messina and Dillon and the field people and the tech people and the analytics people had built over the previous eighteen months provided greater precision in targeting voters. Pickrell told a story about himself that illustrated the disparity between the two campaigns. He was someone who always voted—primary elections and general elections. He was also someone who always voted Democratic. Once during the summer, an Obama volunteer knocked on his door, just to check in and see if he had any questions. The volunteer, of course, did not know that Pickrell was senior strategist for the campaign in Ohio, only that the computers had spit out his name and address as someone who needed one contact but probably nothing after that. Pickrell and his wife later requested absentee ballots. When the ballots arrived, they put them aside on a kitchen table, where they sat for two weeks. The Obama team had a program to monitor absentee ballot returns and to prod people who were slow in turning them back in. “I got thrown back into the database of people who needed to be contacted,” he said. “So one afternoon when my wife was home one of the Obama canvassers knocked on our
door.” The canvasser wanted to remind them to turn in those ballots. Once they did, there were no more contacts. That was the level of efficiency of the Obama organization—targeted and precise. Meanwhile, Pickrell said he received a dozen direct mail pieces from the Romney campaign, a waste of money and effort on the Republicans’ part. “Half of those pieces were about Medicare,” he said. “I did turn forty last year, but I’m not sure I’m a Medicare voter.” He got no direct mail solicitations from the Obama campaign because the database said he didn’t need persuading. The Romney team was proud of what it was doing. In the final weeks, Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director, said Romney’s campaign was getting more data about voters than any previous Republican campaign. Later they learned the scope and sophistication of the Obama campaign. “We didn’t have the number of analytics people they did and couldn’t collect the amount of data they did,” he said. “They took that to another level.”

  The Obama campaign also had tools no previous campaign had to work with. Through modeling, voters were rated on a scale of 1 to 100 on the likelihood they would support Obama. A similar scale was used to predict turnout. So if someone had a high support score and a low turnout score, meaning that person was very likely to support Obama but not so likely to vote, the campaign tried to make sure that that person got registered and then got out and voted, preferably during the period for early voting. Banking those sporadic voters became a top priority. “They were voting because a neighborhood team organizer on the south side of Columbus was chasing them every single day,” Messina said.

  The Obama team had done something similar in 2008 but more experimentally. This time the campaign added a third measure, a persuasion score. This helped weed out people who said they were independent but who really were not. Early in the year the campaign ran a test to see who was most likely to be persuaded by certain messages, based on contacts with half a million people in the battlegrounds. “We were able to refine our model from that to see who were actually the best targets for persuasion work,” Bird said. “And then we really worked those lists from top to bottom rather than what our gut said [about who was undecided and persuadable].” In the final weeks of the campaign, the Obama team focused on voters with persuasion scores of between 40 and 60. Those with higher scores were likely to vote for Obama without needing much persuasion. Those below probably weren’t going to back the president no matter how open they said they were. “In the old days you would say here’s a list of people we think are independents, go to those houses,” Messina said. “But you waste your volunteers’ time all over the place because despite what someone says, there are a very small amount of undecided voters.” By knowing the voters and modeling the electorate, the campaign reduced wasted time on the streets. “You’re a volunteer knocking on doors in Columbus and you are asked to knock on two doors on one street,” he said. “One was to chase an absentee ballot request, the other one was an undecided voter, and you were told what to say.”

  No get-out-the-vote operation works precisely as planned—or as described in after-action reports by the winning campaign. It always sounds better than it is. Back at headquarters, the Obama field leaders talked about the precision and sophistication of their ground game. On the streets and in the neighborhoods, it never looks as smooth. Much is left to the volunteers, who may or may not carry out the directives with the rigor that the designers expect. But the payoffs for Obama were real on election day.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Vote

  Just after sunset on October 23, Mitt Romney’s motorcade, red lights flashing in the dark, began the steep and winding climb up the hills west of Denver. It was the day after the last debate and he was coming back to the city where he had jump-started his campaign three weeks earlier. Earlier that day, Romney had flown from Florida to Nevada for a rally in Las Vegas, but the big event of the day was scheduled for early evening in the Denver suburbs. On the way up the hills, he could see lines of cars parked along the road far from the entrance. His destination was the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a spectacular natural setting used for concerts and other big events. That night, blue lights bathed the vertical rock walls flanking the sides of the seating area at the rear of the amphitheater. The Romney campaign’s stylized signature “R” logo was projected in white against the softly glowing backdrop. Five American flags were hanging high up at the back of the big stage, which was decorated in a western, faux-autumn theme with fenceposts, artificial grass, rocks, and shrubs. More than ten thousand people were jammed into the outdoor concert venue, with thousands more turned away. People began arriving long before dark, their cars quickly overflowing the parking lot. After leaving their vehicles along the road, some people hiked straight up the sharp incline rather than follow the twisting pavement. In the center section of the seating area, supporters were given colored T-shirts to create a huge living image of the Colorado flag—big circles of yellow and red against a white rectangular background. Thunderous applause greeted Romney as he came onstage after being introduced by Paul Ryan. “What a place this is!” Romney shouted above the deafening roar. He patted his heart as the applause swept down across him. Spectators enthusiastically smacked red and white thunder sticks. Taylor Havens told a Denver Post videographer, “Red Rocks is on fire because Mitt Romney is here.”

  There had been other moments almost like this since the first debate, rallies where the size and enthusiasm of the crowd told Romney he had lit a spark with his Denver performance. The day after that first debate, he held a huge outdoor rally in Fishersville, Virginia. On his way to the event, Romney’s bus got snarled in traffic. His advisers feared there had been an accident up ahead and wondered if they could find an alternative route. It turned out that thousands of people were trying to get there. They wanted to see Romney, the man who had demolished the president in debate! That was a first for the candidate who had such a tenuous relationship with the Republican base.

  The rally at Red Rocks was a notch above everything that preceded it. Yes, the campaign had put a huge effort into the event and a film crew was there to shoot it for commercials. But even accounting for the extra effort by the advance team, the whole scene at Red Rocks—the crowd, the cheers, the energy, the noise, the sense of possibility—looked and felt different. Even the jaded press corps traveling with Romney, by now weary from long days, short nights, endless rallies, and repetitious speeches, took notice. Romney pointed to the debates as the turnaround moment. “They have supercharged our campaign,” he exclaimed. Republicans were now embracing Romney in ways they never had before, and his campaign believed that the burst of energy from the first debate had turned into lasting momentum. After Red Rocks, they began to believe not just that the challenger could win, but that he would win.

  Reporters had seized on the new narrative in the days after Denver. The story was all about a changed race. Down and almost out in September, Romney was now on the comeback, and that story line colored interpretations of everything. Small changes in the polls were interpreted as big signs of the momentum shift. Not that anyone was calling Romney the likely winner, but the media’s hunger for a compelling story down to the last day of the campaign affected the broad sweep of the reporting and analysis. Polls added to the confusion. A Gallup poll in mid-October found the president leading among female voters by a single point in swing states. That was an astonishing result, one that ran counter to everything political strategists knew about the voting patterns of the electorate. But it was something new to talk about, and for a few days cable TV ran with it. Commentators struggled to find an explanation, because there was none—nor was there any other evidence to back it up. Public polls in Ohio tightened, though they still showed the president with a lead of several points. In Florida, a public poll taken immediately after the first debate showed Romney leading by seven points. It was an outlier but it captured the theme of the moment. In Virginia, the public polls in October, with a few exceptions, showed Romney now leading narrow
ly, after he had trailed throughout the month of September.

  Many Americans are skeptical of polls. How could a sample of a thousand or fifteen hundred people speak for a nation? But as the 2012 campaign unfolded, polls became yet another point of contention in the battle between red and blue America. Never had partisanship so colored interpretations. Party loyalists picked polls that reinforced their biases. That was particularly true of conservatives, who weren’t buying the evidence of an Obama lead in the preponderance of polls and who deeply distrusted the mainstream media. A new Web site, Unskewedpolls.com, sprang up to challenge data by the mainstream media, particularly any survey in which Democrats significantly outnumbered Republicans. Conservatives claimed the polls showing a sizable Democratic edge in turnout were more evidence of the media’s liberal bias and favoritism toward Obama, however methodologically sound they appeared. Gallup’s tracking poll consistently showed Romney doing better than did almost all other polls, which gave the poll doubters all the justification and evidence they needed that the media was anti-Romney.