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

by David Plouffe

  It was against this backdrop that a group of us met with Barack on Sunday, September 14. He was in Chicago for the afternoon and evening, a rarity those days, and asked us to set up a meeting to go over our advertising strategy for the closing weeks. He wanted to get an overview of how we intended to finish up, and in particular he was concerned that our advertising was not communicating clearly or strongly enough his ideas and solutions for the economy.

  Obama did not generally get deeply involved with our advertising, other than rewriting and editing some of the spots he would appear in, and reviewing any negative or contrastive ad. His primary role was to tone them down or ask us to hold off, a role he played when it came to speeches and remarks as well. Barack took seriously the job of tone policeman, and Ax was his partner in this regard. We tried, fairly successfully, to remove the snark from our messaging, to keep the personal out, and to assume that voters were actually hungry to have an adult conversation about the issues. Obama often excised lines he thought were too political, overly simplistic, or intellectually dishonest.

  For instance, we were ferociously attacking McCain’s health care plan, which had at its centerpiece a proposal to begin taxing workers’ health care benefits as income to generate money to cover the uninsured. We started hammering away at this idea in TV and mail, calling it the biggest middle-class tax increase in history. Obama was unhappy when he saw the ads and demanded less drama.

  “I don’t think people will find that charge credible,” he said, “and while I can make the case that it’s true, I think it puts too much spin on the ball. Let’s just lay out his position without feeling the need to scare people with some grandiose political scorecard terminology.” The ads were changed. He did this time and again. If he thought an argument—positive or contrastive—felt like too much of a stretch, he pulled us back.

  Before we jumped into advertising at our meeting, we talked about the strong rumors that a huge investment banking firm was about to go under. Bear Stearns’ collapse had been unfathomable. According to our economic policy staff and outside advisers, losing another pillar of the financial industry could have a calamitous effect on the entire world financial system.

  Obama wanted more ideas about what could be done, so we dispatched our economic team to have more discussions with our outside advisers and to develop a memo looking at options on how the government could play a constructive role in the unfolding financial crisis. Obama had been talking to some of our key advisers, like legendary investor Warren Buffett and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, and he was clearly shaken by what he was hearing.

  “You guys need to understand,” he said gravely at our meeting, “that there’s a possibility we could be dealing with global financial meltdown in the coming weeks. The election will seem almost irrelevant if that happens.”

  Flowing out of the economic discussion into message, I suggested we break convention in terms of our advertising and think about a longer-form address on the economy, perhaps a five-minute spot that we could run in the battlegrounds on TV and the Internet simultaneously.

  “This could be an Oval Office—type address,” I explained, “that would let us demonstrate both our proposed solutions to our economic troubles as well as steadiness and leadership qualities, in ways a thirty-second device just doesn’t allow. And with all the negative ads flying around out there, it’ll probably also be greeted with relief.”

  The airwaves in all our target states were cluttered not just with presidential-race ads, but with those from state and local candidates as well, almost all of them thirty seconds long and most of them negative. I thought that a longer ad like this had a chance of breaking through, and could become a “moment” when even those who did not view the spot would hear about it from their friends and neighbors. The takeaway would be that Obama had both a clear sense of what had gotten the country off track economically as well as concrete ideas to make the economy work again for all Americans, not just the special interests and privileged few.

  It was also clear we were moving from economic slowdown to economic crisis, and that Obama was a master communicator who would be capable of displaying presidential leadership traits in a spot like this. Few in politics could pull off this kind of ad. Certainly, McCain couldn‘t, even if he had the money. He could be very effective in interviews and town halls, but direct-to-camera addresses were not his strength.

  We discussed the idea for the spot at length. “Let’s do it,” Obama said finally. “People are scared, confused, and frustrated. An ad like this won’t change that, but it should give them a strong sense that I have a plan, and hopefully some comfort that I’ll be able to manage us out of this mess.”

  Larry Grisolano and Jim Margolis suggested two-minute ads, which would allow us to run them with a bit more frequency and across a spectrum of programming, coupled with an online component. Using this format could help ensure the ad would not be just a one-hit wonder—we’d have a chance to reach people over about a ten-day period.

  I went back to the office to figure out how to pay for the spots. Ads cost money of course, and two-minute ads would cost a lot. Paying for them would add about $6 million per week to our budget, but we were able to cover most of this through more robust fund-raising than we had anticipated.

  As I’ve said before, money counts, and we were counting on a lot. In June we had based our budgets and planning on raising $350 million for the campaign during the five months of the general election, with an additional $125 million raised through the DNC and state Democratic parties, giving us a global campaign budget of $475 million.

  We projected the campaign cash flow as $50 million per month raised in June, July, and August, and $100 million a month in September and October, after the conventions and VP picks, when people would begin to get engaged at a white-hot level. In all campaigns, more money comes in toward the end of the race, and early planning needs to account for the steep rise. Underestimating can leave you sitting on a pile of money while needed investments are left wanting.

  We had raised roughly $150 million in the summer months, right on schedule. Despite that, there was a raft of stories suggesting we were falling short of our finance goals and that perhaps we had made a mistake getting out of the federal system—our advantage over McCain might be smaller than anticipated. I have no idea where these stories came from. The few people who actually knew our budget and cash situation weren’t talking, and in any case, they certainly didn’t feel this way.

  But as annoying as it was to read, I welcomed the stories. They would incentivize our donors and raisers to dig even deeper and make sure we had the resources to fund our muscular plan in all the states. We still needed to have great performance from our fund-raisers and large check writers. To this end, we had events scheduled all over the country with top-level surrogates, Biden, and a few marquee events with Obama.

  But to reach the stratospheric number of $100 million in both of the last months—which would obliterate the previous monthly historical fund-raising record of $55 million we had set in February—we would need a massive performance from our existing grassroots donors, as well as to continually add new donors every day at an appropriate rate. We’d need to average at least $3 million and ten thousand new donors per day to make the math work.

  As we reached the midpoint of September, it was clear that this was happening. We were way ahead of schedule (thank you, Sarah Palin). Soon we would blow past $100 million, and seeing this gave me the confidence to increase our communications spending. (The organization spending in the states had been locked in early at a high level, so most of any additional spending would go to advertising.)

  Ultimately we raised a mind-blowing $150 million in September. We added over 2.3 million people to our list that month thanks to an aggressive advertising effort by our new media team, leaving us with over 11 million listed supporters by the end of the month. Our return on Internet advertising was unbelievable. Each dollar invested in list growth retur
ned several times that—immediately. Over time, as these new recruits gave more money (and time), the return grew even greater. This result was highly unusual. Customarily, organizations are paying several dollars just to get someone to sign up on their list, only to see many people decline to take the next step of involvement, like contributing. Our numbers were another example of our enthusiasm gap and the extraordinarily important dividends that the gap was producing.

  A total of over 3.1 million supporters had contributed by this point. Aside from the historic volume, the ratio of names on our list to actual donors is remarkable. About 30 percent of the people on our list had contributed, many multiple times. And almost all had volunteered.

  These were not casual relationships, which was why we put such a premium on growing the list. With ratios of activism this high, both in time and money, getting people to join our list was akin to striking gold. So we mined everywhere we could—online and off—simply to build the list.

  We had built an online fund-raising apparatus that grew consistently through the campaign, but the dam really broke in September, when we raised more than $100 million of our $150 million online. We sent out roughly ten fund-raising e-mails in September, increasing our ratio as we got closer to the election and time was running out; either we met our budgets or we would have to cut back, so the finance e-mails had an urgent tone.

  On the days we directly asked for money, the contributions spiked. But even on days when we did not, the latent contribution level would often be over $1 million, sometimes $2 million. Much of this came from people—inspired by who knows what conversation, news report, or blog post—who simply came to our site unprompted and made a contribution, whether it be their first or tenth. Whenever I checked our fund-raising performance online, it was like watching a volcano erupt. There were times when we were raising $250,000, $300,000, even $500,000 an hour. It was remarkable, and critical. Every additional dime was being funneled into the battleground states.

  By fall our campaign had really become an example in the art of the possible. The volume and passion of our volunteers meant we could do just about everything we wanted to on the ground. Register voters? Check. Try to talk to every sporadic-voting Democrat in a state? Check. Have multiple conversations, person to person, with target independents and Republicans? Check. It was a luxury few campaigns have. But our supporters and organizers constantly revised upward the capacity of our local organizations in terms of voter contact and vote goals.

  We were also beginning to realize a similar dynamic on the advertising side, having gained the financial capacity to employ just about every tool at our disposal: we even ran ads on evangelical radio just to try to hold the McCain margin. The messaging was consistent throughout our ads, but the emphasis and focus of the issues discussed could be tailored closely to individual demographics. Our spots for those under thirty were very aspirational, a call to action, focusing on issues like Iraq and the environment, and calling on younger voters to get involved in shaping the future. A senior spot might focus on making sure we had economic, tax, and health care policies that would lift lower- and middle-income seniors.

  It was quite an arsenal, and married to our ground forces, unprecedented in politics. I often repeated this point to younger staffers who were in their first or second campaign. “You are going to be completely spoiled,” I told them. “Almost all campaigns never have enough money or people to do what they’d like. And most decision making around resources is of the cutting variety—you’re falling short of your budget, so what gets axed? Not this campaign. It’s like fantasy camp for political operatives, so relish it because you may never see it again.”

  Throughout much of the primary, I had continued to draft what we called “State of the Race” memos for the press, our staff, and key political and financial supporters. These offered a look at the race from our strategic perspective, for which as often as not we were being questioned and sometimes ridiculed. When writing the memos, I threw in a predictive component and offered a glimpse into positive numbers or developments we saw happening around the country. We posted them on our website but never distributed them directly to our grassroots supporters.

  As I mentioned earlier, we didn’t originally send these memos out to our whole list because (1) we did not want to be talking incessantly about the inside game, and (2) we thought our supporters on the whole were not interested in inside baseball.

  This assumption couldn’t have been more wrong, and not sending the memos to our grassroots supporters had been a big mistake. What we found when we researched things a bit more was that we were not doing enough internal communication to ensure that our supporters, and even staff, knew exactly what our strategy was and how their efforts fit into the puzzle. We had to fix that for the general election. If our electoral strategy was going to be questioned, I wanted our volunteers and contributors to hear directly from us why we were pursuing this path, so they would spend less time worrying about the pundit chatter and more time simply participating and executing.

  This was a lesson we learned from the primary: even the staunchest supporters will get a bit freaked out if the chattering class is criticizing you. Our supporters wanted desperately to have the hood lifted a bit so they could understand what was really going on.

  So lift it we did. With growing frequency through the fall, we sent out campaign updates to our entire list. More often these updates came in video form, usually from me but from other staff as well. The first couple of videos laying out our general-election strategy were received very well. We shot them on a laptop camera, in my office, with no lighting. Unpolished and unscripted, I liked to say.

  Okay, perhaps they were a bit raw; the clips certainly did not look “presidential.” Seeing the first update, one of our senior staff said, “Plouffe, you look like you’re in a hostage video.”

  We tried the next one with better lighting and an actual high-definition camera. The results looked much more produced. Our supporters hated it. They thought it seemed inauthentic, staged, and less personal. So we went back to the hostage drama.

  We began taping these updates on the fly and tried to send one out at least every seven or ten days. I’d often do them from the road, recording some in the middle of the night from wherever we were doing debate prep to give an even more intimate sense of what we were up to. We mixed in these videos with other types of e-mails. Some shared the content of Obama’s issues and speeches; others asked people to contribute and volunteer, reminded them of deadlines like voter registration and early voting, and addressed issues that were state-specific. With so much coming across the transom, it could have been chaos. But the e-mail program, while perhaps not entirely symphonic, was well conducted.

  We had hired an enormous e-mail team within new media that worked under Rospars’s direction (I assume in future campaigns this department will be called digital strategy, not new media—it’s not new anymore and it’s not just media), and also made sure all the states had their own fully staffed new media and e-mail teams. There were dozens of e-mails a day from the campaign going out in the last sixty days—some high-impact, heavily scrutinized national e-mails, and some very regional ones to a county or two in a battleground state. Coordinating this was a delicate dance, as we tried to get the right sequence of e-mails to the right people while balancing the demands of all the different campaign departments and states. Joe and his team navigated and arbitrated all that; I only weighed in on close calls or politically sensitive problems. Externally, it must have looked like a very smooth, corporate exercise. But like every other part of the campaign, in reality it functioned more like a M.A.S.H. unit day to day, trying to stay on course while negotiating the myriad obstacles, challenges, and opportunities that were dumped into our lap.

  We sent out many updates that revolved around fund-raising, but the most effective video we did wasn’t about raising money—it was about spending it. I wanted to pick one state to demonstrate why our supporters’ dedication
and assistance was so sorely needed, and why if they let up at all, we would lose. For this exercise I chose Florida, and we laid it all out in the video—our statewide budget ($38 million), where we were spending it by category, and how we thought we’d win the state. I covered everything, from turnout and registration to persuasion numbers and targets.

  My overall message was simple: if we spend $34 million instead of $38 million we likely won’t win. And if we fall short on our field metrics, we’ll probably fail as well. Even after all the time and money you have given, I said, and as tough as it was to give, we need more. We built a campaign and a strategy predicated on you—on people. And if you let up now, the whole house of cards could come tumbling down.

  This was not a mere tactic to get more money or volunteer time. It was what we believed. This video message was one of the most effective ones we sent; the response factors we could measure—contributions, spike in volunteer hours—unmistakably bore this out, but we also received a lot of anecdotal feedback from our staff in the states and in conversations our supporters were having with Chris Hughes’s online organizing team. People felt like they were being leveled with, that we were explaining clearly how their time and money was being utilized. And they felt that we valued and needed them.

  Some people questioned the wisdom of such a revealing video. Why would we lay everything out for all to see? From our perspective there wasn’t much downside. McCain’s campaign already knew fairly well what we were up to when it came to the basics—how much we were spending, where we were focusing our time and money organizationally. I’m sure they learned a few details from our presentation, but we thought this was small price to pay for the tradeoff of bolstering our supporters’ trust in the organization.