The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory

by David Plouffe

  Obama initially embraced this approach. As some public poll numbers showed California tightening, though, he raised a question about our time allocation, for which I was responsible. He called me from California, where he was spending only half a day before the 5th. “Are you sure we should not come back to California?” he asked. “You have me going to Idaho, but in California for only half a day. If we win California, we could finish this thing off and it seems like we might want to hit more media markets than just two.”

  I was already getting this question internally, so I was well prepared. “First, we do not think we can win California,” I told him. “Yes, it is closing, but over a third of the voters voted early by mail in the previous weeks. And even though we ran an exhaustive early-ballot program, these votes were mostly cast after New Hampshire, when Hillary was riding high. We think she won that portion of the vote convincingly.” I could almost hear him thinking along with me. “So while it’s conceivable we could win Election Day voting,” I continued, “we’ll still lose overall. Moving your vote share from forty-three percent to forty-six percent doesn’t alter the delegate math very much. And a trip to Idaho or other small states has an outsized reward—you dominate media coverage for days. We just get more bang for a buck going to Idaho than California.”

  “Okay,” he replied without hesitating, “that make sense.” And that was that. If he thought you made a reasoned argument, he accepted it, even if he had started on the opposite side of the fence. Our schedule that week was a whirlwind. Obama campaigned in Alabama, Missouri (twice), Arizona, New Mexico, California, Idaho, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, Georgia, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Delaware. We even thought of going to Alaska but couldn’t pull it off, and we were scheduled to go to Utah but had to cancel when the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints passed away.

  Idaho and Delaware are terrific examples of our approach. We expected to win Idaho comfortably—the Clinton campaign was largely writing it off—and thought a visit there could potentially push our winning margin so high that we could net over ten delegates, a real blowout in such a low-delegate state. With that in mind, we did an event in Boise at 8:00 on the Saturday morning before Super Tuesday. It was hardly the ideal time of day to fill a big basketball arena, but fill it we did and then some: over thirteen thousand people showed up. This was well over half the number of people who ended up attending the caucuses statewide. Our press coverage lasted for five days.

  Delaware offered a more geographically strategic target. We knew we had to get some visibility in South Jersey because there was a healthy delegate yield. But rather than hold an event in New Jersey, we decided to go to Delaware, where we would still get voluminous Philadelphia TV coverage (South Jersey is also part of this market) but would again have an outsized impact in a small state. The rally in Delaware was on Super Bowl Sunday and drew the biggest crowd in Delaware political history. As in Idaho, a healthy percentage of the ultimate electorate attended our event—we reached our target audience with the most direct and effective communication possible.

  I am a Delaware native and my parents and two of my siblings live in Wilmington. Before the rally, Obama graciously took photos with a large collection of Plouffes, including my young son, who was in town while my wife worked on the Delaware primary. This was the first time my son had met Senator Obama.

  I called him from Chicago as he left the rally for the Wilmington airport, asked him how the event had gone, and started to fill him on the latest numbers. He cut me off with a laugh. “Plouffe, man, I just met your family,” he said. “Let’s talk about that. Leave the politics aside for a minute.”

  “Right,” I said. “Of course. How are they?”

  He filled me in on the bonding experience he and my son had shared over SpongeBob SquarePants and said that my parents seemed like nice, grounded people. “I see where you get that level head and common sense.”

  I appreciated his graciousness and his real interest in them. Ours is a close family, but I saw my parents only twice in twenty-four months and most of my siblings only once, fleetingly. It was nice to have our worlds collide, if only momentarily.

  Every day, Jeff Berman, Jon Carson, and I adjusted our projections for each of the states based on new field data and polling information. Right after South Carolina, our projections suggested Hillary would net one hundred more delegates than we would on February 5. We could survive that, but it meant that our best-case scenario at the end of the primaries in early June would be a pledged-delegate lead for Obama of only fifty or so. As the days passed in this period, our projections kept improving, until we finally had some scenarios that had us netting delegates on February 5. It was astonishing movement after essentially one week and spoke to the huge and surprising momentum that both our South Carolina win and the Kennedy endorsement provided, as well as the power of our financial and organizational strength across Super Tuesday and the fact that Clinton had not yet sealed the deal with more than half of the primary electorate in the majority of states.

  The projections kept getting rosier because in the large states where we expected Clinton to win, we were having success eating away at her margin of victory. “Unless something really surprising happens, we will at worst break even,” declared Berman, who was not one to engage in hyperbole. “It’s amazing. Every hour, I update the delegate projections based on polling and voter-contact reports and they seem to get more positive.”

  To our amazement, other than Colorado, the Clinton campaign was essentially ceding caucus states. We also thought that in Georgia, a big primary state with a lot of delegates, we could produce a much bigger margin than she would get in places like California. All we could surmise is that they really thought the outcome on February 5 would be so decisive in their favor that they did not have to worry about each and every delegate in all the states. Of course, that’s exactly what we were doing. And when it all shook out, one of us would be right and one of us would be wrong; we’d know soon enough who was which.

  We were able to game these contests so efficiently because we were fortunate enough to have recruited a Super Tuesday dream team, headed up by Berman and Carson. Berman was an old delegate hand. Every four years he would try to take leave from his law firm and work on a primary campaign, and in 2008 he found ours. Delegate experts are like typewriter repairmen—a scarce and dying breed. I had worked closely with Berman on the Gephardt campaign and was impressed with his mastery of the proportional delegate allocation rules. In most states delegates are awarded through a blend of congressional district and statewide results. A true delegate focus required mounting many mini-campaigns; this way, even if you lost a state’s popular vote, you could grab an extra delegate here and there by overperforming in a congressional district or two, minimizing your opponent’s delegate yield and possibly even wiping it out completely. Berman had an encyclopedic knowledge of the demographics and past voting histories of the nation’s congressional districts. Coupled with my work managing House races throughout the country, the two of us could really go district by district, assessing strengths and weaknesses to determine which ones provided opportunity to us and where we might be in danger. Carson was an experienced operative who had worked throughout the country and was a fanatical believer in the value of organizing—a rarity in modern politics. Back at the start of the campaign, he had set up our Illinois operation to send supporters in that state over the border into Iowa to volunteer and make calls to other early states. Seeing his bang-up job there, Steve Hildebrand and I had decided to ask him to head up our February 5 team. The choice was clearly paying off. Carson had done a great job determining what type of operation to put in place in each state, in consultation first with me and then with Berman for a delegate scrub. Compared with the four early states, our operations in these states were sparse, practically living off the land, but Carson got the most out of them. Watching our projections of Hillary’s diminishing delegate pile, we could see h
is ragtag army was running circles around the competition.

  One thing Carson, Berman, and I followed carefully was the battle between the candidates’ home states. New York had a whopping seventy-nine more delegates at stake than Illinois, but we were organizing aggressively in New York and were now on the air with TV ads, solely for the purpose of trying to keep Hillary’s net delegate number down. We thought that we would likely get to 40 percent in her state and she would not surpass 35 percent in ours. If that happened, we would net more delegates out of Illinois than she would out of New York. Call us stats nerds if you will, but in our world of delegate machinations, this was seismic and sexy stuff. I walked around day after day holding our latest delegate prediction spreadsheet in my hand—it was my bible.

  The landslide margins in the caucus states, Illinois, and Georgia, if produced, would yield delegate allocations of about two to one in these states, meaning we could net more delegates from victories in smaller states than Clinton would from her bigger state victories.

  We invited many of our big national donors and local elected officials to our election night event in Chicago at the Hyatt. The hotel was connected by underground tunnels to our HQ, and all the reporters who were traveling with us were in town, so throughout the night as results came in I made frequent trips to the press room in the hotel’s bowels to put our interpretation on the numbers.

  It was clear from the reporters’ questions and the general tenor of the TV chatter that the initial press coverage was going to be challenging for us. First, there was a smattering of public polls suggesting that New Jersey, California, and Massachusetts were all going to be very close. Some poll analysis even left the impression that we might produce upsets in these states. This wasn’t our view. Barring an Obama tidal wave, we didn’t think we had a chance to win any of them and were simply hoping to hold down her margins.

  The exit polls also were horribly off. They had us tied in Massachusetts and leading in New Jersey, and generally were too rosy for us everywhere, which had become a common phenomenon. One theory was that our supporters were more enthusiastic about their selection than Clinton’s and were more willing to talk to the exit poll workers, skewing the results.

  Regardless, over the course of the primaries, the average margin of error on exit polls was eight points. They were meaningless.

  But now the press spent a couple of hours marinating in these very positive numbers. So, perversely, Clinton ended up benefiting simply from beating the bogus exit polls. Talk about a clusterfuck to the White House.

  It was a night of peaks and valleys as we traded wins. Many of Hillary’s big victories came at the beginning of the night, when she held off the threat in states like Massachusetts and New Jersey, winning by bigger margins than predicted by some pundits and a few public (and clearly flawed!) polls. So the early part of the coverage had a very positive Clinton slant to it.

  Primaries also report much more quickly than caucuses, meaning a lot of our better news would be aired much later, in some cases after midnight. I kept telling our press staff not to get too wound up about the coverage—what mattered was where the numbers stood at the end of the night. If they turned out as positive as we thought they might, even the most unsophisticated reporters would get their import.

  As the night dragged on, what we had hoped could happen began to play out. We won some close primary contests that were important, less from a delegate perspective than from the demonstration of broad electoral viability: battleground state Missouri, Connecticut in Clinton’s backyard, and my home state of Delaware, where my wife and family were hooting and hollering as the win was broadcast.

  We won Georgia with almost 70 percent of the vote, producing a bushel full of delegates, and to our great satisfaction, we netted more delegates out of Illinois than Hillary did out of New York.

  And our effort to create some landslides paid off handsomely. The tale of New Jersey and Idaho is my favorite mathematical example from the entire primary.

  New Jersey offered a total of 107 delegates in the primary, Idaho only 18. Hillary won New Jersey comfortably by 10 points but netted only 11 delegates: the delegate margin was 59 to 48. We won Idaho with over 80 percent of the vote, winning 15 of the 18 total delegates, netting 12. The result was we netted 1 more delegate out of tiny Idaho than Hillary did out of big New Jersey. That’s the real story of Super Tuesday.

  We ended up losing California by under 9 points, a result we were very pleased with. Our sense was that we actually won primary day but already faced such a huge deficit in the absentee voting that all we could do was narrow the overall margin. California was the biggest delegate prize of the whole primary, with 370 delegates at stake. Hillary netted 38 as a result of her win. But we netted 38 delegates from our blowout wins in Kansas and Minnesota, erasing her gains in California.

  Though Hillary’s camp achieved their goal of winning the popular vote in big states, we felt we came away from Super Tuesday with a decided advantage. We won 14 of the 22 states to hold contests that day, and netted a total of 15 delegates, besting our rosiest projection. On a day with over 1,600 delegates at stake, a difference of only 15 was essentially a split decision, which for us was an unqualified success. Bullet dodged.

  I was talking to Obama throughout the night, including several times after his evening wrap-up speech. On his drive home during the wee hours, I told him we had just been declared the winner in Missouri. “How come all the states we’re winning are being called after most people have gone to bed?” he joked. It was true—many we won were out west or caucus states, which take longer to count and report. Some, as in Missouri’s case, were just too close to call for hours. “Luckily, we are not in the 1970s anymore,” I told him. “People won’t have to wait until tomorrow night’s evening news to find out what happened. They’ll turn their computers and TVs on in the morning, and see what a terrific night we had.” Even though we had an early start the next day, Obama wanted to stay up until we had a more complete picture of what had actually happened. We last talked about 1:30 a.m., when I told him definitively we would end the day with more delegates. This pleased him, but after having watched a bunch of coverage at home he was still somewhat annoyed at the way the pundits were scoring the day. “These results are better for us than we or anyone expected,” he said. “The question is, will the press cover it that way or will they keep obsessing about California and New Jersey?”

  “I think the numbers here will be hard to ignore,” I replied. “We’ll do a briefing for the press tomorrow and walk through where the race stands, state by state. Then we’ll give them a look ahead at the next eleven contests, which we project winning ten to one, and stress that our delegate lead, which now stands at twenty-eight, should grow significantly.” I rarely defended the press’s coverage of the race, but this was a case in which I thought the enormity of what happened in terms of the broader impact would settle in and be properly captured in the coverage.

  I took a deep breath and offered my summation. “Barack, for the first time I feel confident telling you that if we play our cards right in the coming weeks, you should win the Democratic nomination.”

  He was quiet for a moment before replying. “Tell everybody they did a great job. Talk to you tomorrow morning.”

  Our boiler room team was still gathering final results and crunching numbers straight through until the morning. I stayed at the office until four or so and went home to shower and start work on the outline of my presentation to the press, which would happen in several hours. Looking out over Lake Michigan, I thought that maybe this whole crazy ordeal would be worth it.

  It felt strange to think it, but I knew we should actually win this thing now. And I felt very good about the type of campaign we had run. As I reflected on the Super Tuesday results, I was filled with admiration for our staff and volunteers. They had expertly, creatively, and relentlessly executed our plan. We had outwitted the inevitable Clinton juggernaut. And without our grassroots supporter
s organizing on their own in states like Georgia, Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesota long before the campaign had any official presence on the ground, there is no way we would have prevailed. This was their victory in many ways. These folks believed when very few people did. They saw what was possible, even more quickly and clearly than we did in Chicago. Our campaign was really becoming the art of the possible, lifted by this grassroots movement that was growing like a gathering storm throughout the country. I think even now about people like Cheryl Jewel, an Atlanta housewife new to politics who became involved after watching Obama at an Atlanta rally in April 2007. She dedicated herself to the campaign for the next ten months, getting trained in organizing by our staff and setting up meetings for supporters in her area, to build our campaign list. When campaign staff finally came to town, she became the office manager. And like Jerry Riley, who was not new to political volunteerism; he had worked on tons of local campaigns over the years. He attended Camp Obama, a training program we had established in Chicago and a few other cities, where volunteers from around the country could receive additional training on organizing—how we did it and why we did it. Jerry decided to dedicate himself whole-heartedly to the campaign, becoming known through the volunteer circle as “Mr. Fix-It”—because of his political connections, he was able to get anything that the campaign needed at a moment’s notice (rally permits, sound systems, and so on).