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

by David Plouffe

  After the debate, Obama peeled off to head back to Memphis, but Ax and I called to congratulate him as we headed to the Oxford airport. For Obama, he was pretty charged up. “See, I told you guys you had nothing to worry about,” he said.

  I laughed. “Well, that doesn’t mean we’ve set a precedent and will be cutting prep down to two days,” I warned him. “Though I know a night of ESPN is probably the best reward you could get for winning the debate.”

  Obama chuckled. “That’s right. But we only have two more debates. Let’s leave nothing on the table. I can handle myself, but make sure you guys have Joe ready to go.”

  Biden’s debate with Palin was coming up the next week.

  Alyssa had arranged to have burgers and beers on the plane for the ride home. It was the best meal I’d had in an awfully long time.

  We planned to have Biden prep in a battleground state as well, but he asked if he could prep in Delaware so he could be closer to his family—his son Beau, Delaware’s attorney general and a member of the Guard, was deploying to Iraq shortly, and his mother-in-law was still ill. Of course we agreed.

  Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan spent three days in Delaware with us, playing Palin, and she nailed the role perfectly. We assumed Palin would be a very effective debater with great one-liners, and that she would benefit from absurdly low expectations. We knew from reviewing her Alaska debates that she could hold her own, but given the blowback from the Couric interview and the high stakes of this particular matchup, just about everyone else was expecting Biden to wipe the floor with her. We had our work cut out for us managing these expectations.

  On debate night, we landed in St. Louis to news that relegated the upcoming face-off to the backseat, at least for me. The press was reporting, without confirmation, that the McCain campaign was pulling out of Michigan.

  I couldn’t believe it. Recently we had opened up a slight lead in Michigan, in the mid- to high single digits. McCain had strong history in the state, and given that we had not campaigned there in the primary, it felt gratifying to be out in front, though our lead was hardly insurmountable. It remained a state in which we’d have to devote significant resources to walk away with a win.

  But if McCain abandoned Michigan, it would have a powerful domino effect on the race. Ceding those seventeen electoral votes meant they really had to run the table, and made winning Pennsylvania—the last big Kerry state they were targeting—close to a necessity. Upon hearing the news, I hunted down Ax, who was talking to some international reporter—he had a hard time turning down any interview request—and pulled him aside. “This can’t be true,” I said.

  “Michigan?” he guessed.

  I nodded. “It makes zero sense strategically for them to do this. Is it some sort of head fake—get us to pull out ourselves and then jump back in with massive force?”

  Ax laughed and put a hand on my shoulder. “Plouffe, can’t you just accept some good news? I agree it’s stupid but it sure looks like the real deal.” He glanced around to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “And anyway, I think a head fake might be beyond this gang.”

  Within the hour, the McCain camp confirmed it: they were suspending their campaign in Michigan, which for all intents and purposes meant they were waving the white flag. They said they needed to make hard decisions about resource allocation as Election Day drew closer and now thought Michigan was a less likely bet than Pennsylvania.

  I was dumbfounded. We were playing electoral chess and these guys had handed over their queen. I understood making hard fish-or-cut-bait decisions on states that weren’t realistically attainable; we had done so in Georgia and North Dakota. But those states were reaches for us, at the periphery of our strategy. Michigan had been ground zero in their efforts to win a big Kerry state so they could afford to lose a few Bush states and still reach 270 electoral votes.

  This announcement was the most significant strategic moment of the general election to date. Our puzzle started to look almost complete, while theirs had just been given a swift kick and the pieces had scattered all over the map. I found this turn of events far more important to our chances than anything that would happen in the debate that night.

  When I discussed it with Obama, he asked what I thought our new approach to Michigan should be. “I wouldn’t change anything right away,” I told him, “though let’s not send you in again unless they reverse course. If, in the next few days, they are visibly pulling back, we should scale back our advertising and also maybe send some of our staff there to other states like Indiana.”

  He agreed but wanted to be cautious. “Just don’t pull everything down too quickly. Let’s make sure we’re in the clear so we don’t have to scramble back and redo everything we just disassembled.”

  McCain never reengaged in Michigan. His pulling out dominated the news in the Wolverine state for days and killed his numbers. We jumped to a nearly twenty-point lead in just a few days as a result of his decision.

  Obama moved our discussion to the debate. “How’s Joe going to do tonight?”

  “He’s in good shape for the most part,” I replied, “but I’ll be nervous until the debate is over—just like I am when you’re up there.”

  “Thanks for that,” Obama said sarcastically. “Should I call him and wish him luck or will that make him nervous?” I thought Biden would appreciate a pep talk and said so.

  Our stomachs were in knots in the moments before the debate started, knowing that Biden would be graded on a tough curve. Even if he gave a stellar debate performance, the GOP ticket would still get credit for a great night if Palin made no unforced errors. But Biden was better than we could have hoped. He stayed relentlessly on message, proving a fiercely effective advocate for Obama on both economic and international matters, and a piercing critic on the merits of McCain’s policies. He never took Palin’s bait and never engaged with her directly—he kept the focus squarely on Obama and McCain and their differences in agenda and leadership. Most important, perhaps, he demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that he was prepared to be president.

  He also showed us he was a clutch player; onstage that night, he gave a terrific answer to the Iraq-funding question that he had struggled with all through the practice sessions without nailing. He now made the point that McCain, too, had voted against the bill because it contained a timeline for withdrawal, and keeping the focus on the two presidential candidates’ big differences on Iraq. It was a near-perfect response.

  Palin had no major unforced errors, and, as we had assumed would be the case, she was judged by many voters to have exceeded expectations. She came across as likable, but by all polling accounts, Biden won the debate hands down. Palin had done nothing to alleviate the deeper concerns voters had about her. They still couldn’t see her as president, which reflected much more poorly on McCain than on her.

  During the postdebate spin session, I was repeating an answer for the fifth time to another group of reporters when one of our advance staff grabbed me and said Biden wanted a word before he left. I navigated the back alleys and corridors to his motorcade, where he was waiting for me. He opened up his arms and shrugged, making a “Well, how did I do?” expression. I gave him a big smile and thumbs-up and then a big hug, telling him he couldn’t have done any better. He had given the whole campaign a boost. “You know, I just got dialed in up there,” he said. “All the practice helped, but you never can know. But honestly, when it started, I just had fun. I feel so good about Barack and what we’re trying to do that it’s an easy case to make.”

  I told him the hard part was over—now he could just head out to the trail for a month and pound our message home.

  As he turned away from me, I witnessed a classic Biden moment. Frank Greer, a legendary Democratic media consultant, was helping us by volunteering as our stage manager at all four debates. Frank had a full head of thick gray hair, and as the folically challenged Biden grabbed him to thank him on the way out, he said, “Man, Frank, if I only had yo
ur hair I could have been the number one guy on this ticket!” And with that, our vice presidential nominee triumphantly entered his motorcade for the drive to the airport.

  Ax and I once again headed together to the airfield for a quick flight to Chicago. I had told Alyssa that the burgers her team procured for the last flight brought us good karma; we needed them again. The burgers on this flight, however, were colder than the beer and had the consistency of hockey pucks. Still, as we climbed into the night with two debates down and two wins under our belt, they couldn’t have tasted better.

  The news from the states was even better than the outcomes of the first two debates.

  One month from Election Day, the race had finally broken open a bit. This was especially important because in many key battleground states—North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, to name a few—early voting would begin in earnest in the next two-week window. Where the race stood at that point would be reflected in the early votes, and over 50 percent of the total vote in many of these states would come in early. We did not know it at the time, but 30 percent of the total national vote would be cast before the polls opened on Election Day, through mail ballots or in-person early voting.

  All our indicators told us we were in strong shape, though by no means out of the woods. We led comfortably in every Kerry state, by at least mid-high single digits. We had comfortable leads in Nevada, New Mexico, and Iowa, and small but meaningful leads in Colorado, New Hampshire, and Virginia. The race was a dead-heat in Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, and we trailed narrowly in Montana and Missouri.

  If we lost all toss-ups in this scenario, and won those in which we had either comfortable or smaller but meaningful leads, we would end up with 295 electoral votes. I looked at that as our base number. McCain needed to figure out a way to peel off at least 27 electoral votes. Even if the race turned against us toward the end, in those states where we had banked a huge number of votes early, the math got awfully hard for McCain.

  For this reason, and also because we were so dependent on first-time and sporadic voters, we mustered an intense effort toward executing early vote. This effort consisted of radio ads reminding people of early vote and explaining how it worked; a fusillade of Internet ads to push the concept; repeated e-mail and text messaging to people on our list from these states; and a blizzard of door-knocks and phone calls to remind voters person-to-person about early vote. We also tried to make sure all our volunteers voted early so that they would be freed up to help on Election Day.

  Some in political circles argue that the early vote doesn’t matter—that the people who go to the effort to vote early are committed voters who will almost certainly show up on Election Day. We fervently believed that if a hurdle presented itself on Election Day—a family issue; a work emergency; transportation problems—nonhabitual voters are the most likely people to throw in the towel on making it to the polls. These are the folks we relentlessly encouraged to vote early and the yardstick to which we paid closest attention— not how many early votes we were getting, but whose. Were enough first-time voters voting early? How about African American sporadic voters? In addition to allowing us to make sure we were voting large numbers of our most questionable turnout targets, it also gave us a window into overall changes in turnout from previous elections, which helped us determine whether we were really changing the electorate.

  Jon Carson crunched numbers all day every day as reports from the states came in, and then summarized the trends for me, Jen O‘Malley, our regional staff (who worked with a certain number of states out of HQ), and a handful of others in the campaign, so we could make adjustments, correct problems, or seize opportunities.

  We needed everything to break perfectly to have a chance to win North Carolina, and it appeared that it just might happen. We saw that the African American turnout was ballooning, and turnout in white progressive areas was through the roof as well. Conversely, GOP base turnout looked depressed. We added even more trips from our principals into the state, a decision made easier by McCain’s waiting until far too late to acknowledge the danger he was in, almost stubbornly refusing to spend time or money in North Carolina, despite overwhelming evidence that those fifteen normally reliable Republican electoral votes were in jeopardy. By my calculation there was no way McCain could win the election having lost North Carolina.

  As we began moving deeper into early vote, one number caused alarm. Carson came into my office one afternoon. “I’ve been poring over the early-vote data,” he said, “and we seem to have a problem. Or what could be a problem, I should say. We’re meeting or exceeding our early-vote goals in most demographics across most states. But younger voters—under twenty-five-are off quite a bit.”

  “Let’s move more money and bodies resources to it,” I replied, “and maybe try some different messaging.”

  Carson agreed but also suggested doing some research among this group to try to find out why they were not voting early in great numbers. Did we have a motivation problem, an execution problem, or both?

  I green-lighted the research, which yielded two very illuminating findings. First, many young voters were so excited by this election that they couldn’t envision doing anything besides voting for Barack Obama in person at the polling location. When we raised with them the possibility of long lines, or the potential to free themselves up to volunteer, they simply wouldn’t budge. This was a big moment for them and they felt it would seem bigger if they voted at the polls. In any case, they were still dead-set on participating, which relieved us.

  The second lesson was that there was still some confusion about who was eligible to vote early and how it worked. Armed with these findings, we made sure our communications to younger voters included even more remedial information about the nuts and bolts of early voting. Soon enough, their numbers began to climb. In many states we lowered our expectation for the under—twenty-five early vote (but not for overall turnout), and we eventually hit those numbers in most battlegrounds.

  We prepped for the second debate—a town hall—style event to be held on Tuesday, October 7, in Tennessee—in our newest battleground, North Carolina. We were in Asheville, a beautiful town tucked into the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. This was by far Obama’s favorite prep site—there was a great gym on site, and he enjoyed walking the golf course at dusk with his friend Marty Nesbitt. The comfort resulted in probably our best prep session. Obama was dialed in, his answers were crisp, and he was really looking forward to taking questions from regular Tennessee voters instead of the usual press inquisitors. “I guarantee you these questions will be the best of the three debates,” he told us. “Very little political process, questions about issues grounded in their everyday lives, and questions not designed to make news themselves.”

  McCain was widely known as a master of the town hall format, having received rave reviews for his town hall performances in both the 2000 and 2008 primaries. We aggressively tried to hype this reputation and raise expectations for his performance, an effort that was helped by McCain’s gambit to get us to agree to do a dozen joint town halls in the summer. We called him the best town hall performer in the history of American politics, echoing the 2004 debate run-up when the Bush campaign said John Kerry was the best debater since Cicero.

  Hyperbole aside, we were genuinely concerned about this debate. McCain really was quite good in this format; it brought out his looseness with audiences and his irreverent sense of humor. We assumed he would correct his error of the previous debate and relentlessly portray himself as an advocate for the middle class; after all, the audience would be filled with middle-class Tennessee voters. With this in mind, we tried to find ways to maximize our performance, figuring that McCain would give his best showing yet.

  It was at just this moment that a former radical from Obama’s neighborhood in Chicago made his grand entry onto the general-election stage, complicating the campaign as well as our prep.

  The issue of Bill Ayers had been raised during the pri
mary, most notably during our inglorious debate before the Pennsylvania primary. Since then, conservative groups had begun running low-level TV ads in some battleground markets, slamming Obama for his association with Ayers. These attacks had gained little foothold; there was no context for voters to grasp onto.

  William Ayers had once been a member of the Weather Underground, a 1960s-era radical group that became increasingly violent in its opposition to the Vietnam War. Ayers married Bernardine Dohrn, another member of the group. The Weather Underground’s acts of domestic terrorism took some lives, including that of a New York City policeman. While Dohrn and Ayers were not directly involved in murderous incidents, they were ringleaders of the group, and Dohrn served some prison time for aggravated battery and bail jumping.

  What does all this have to do with Barack Obama? Not much, really. But in politics, tangential associations can cause great damage. Obama’s connections—Wright, Rezko, and other bogeymen for the right—were already a central thrust of our opponent’s campaign.

  By the time Obama met Ayers in the mid-1990s, he was not primarily known as a former radical. He was an education professor at the University of Chicago and deeply involved in school-reform issues. Ayers and Dohrn hosted a neighborhood coffee when Obama was running for state senate the first time—Ayers and Dohrn were both deeply ingrained in the Hyde Park political community—and Obama had also served with Ayers on the board of an education-reform nonprofit.

  Ayers was not involved in Obama’s presidential campaign and had never been a close adviser or political confidant. As Ayers himself put it, “I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better.”

  Five days before the second debate, the New York Times ran a story about Obama and Ayers’s relationship that thrust the issue front and center into the campaign. The story was a green light for the rest of the media, and our opponents, to begin focusing white-hot attention on Ayers and the nature of his involvement with Obama, and, of course, to speculate on what it would mean in the campaign.