If racism was involved in the GOP-backed bills, it was a secondary factor. The new laws also discriminated against students, the elderly, and anyone who didn’t drive.
FLORIDA WAS TYPICAL of what happened behind closed Republican doors. On New Year’s Day 2011, Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell IV, the attorney responsible for the notorious list of purged “felons” in 2000, called a meeting with several political consultants and state officials. Jim Greer, the state party chairman, soon to plead guilty in a corruption scandal, said later that Mitchell’s meeting disturbed him. “I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting,” Greer testified in a deposition. Republicans charged that the accusations were concocted to bolster the defense in his case, but three other former GOP officials backed Greer up in interviews with the Palm Beach Post and the Tampa Bay Times.
At the New Year’s Day meeting, Mitchell, who had been elevated to general counsel to the Florida GOP, took on the assignment of writing the vote fraud bill to be introduced in Tallahassee. Passed in May 2011, the radical overhaul of election laws cut early voting days from fourteen to eight, made it more difficult to change registration to a different county (affecting African Americans, who move more often than other voters), and placed crippling restrictions on voter-registration efforts. Florida’s new law effectively ended all voter-registration drives, an activity the League of Women Voters had undertaken in the state for nearly a century. The statute required voter-registration volunteers to go to the county office and take an oath agreeing to be personally liable for thousands of dollars in fines if they didn’t deliver completed forms without the slightest error within forty-eight hours, among other restrictions.
Republicans in Michigan went even further, requiring that voter-registration volunteers attend training sessions but providing no funds or other provisions for such training—a state-sanctioned Catch-22. The League of Women Voters had no choice but to suspend its operations in Florida and Michigan and join with Rock the Vote and other organizations to file suit.
In Ohio, where control of state government had also moved to the Republicans, the aim was to reverse the conditions that existed in 2008. That year John McCain polled 263,000 more votes on Election Day than Obama but lost the state by 4.6 points. The difference was early voting, which Obama won overwhelmingly. In a new tradition called “Souls to the Polls,” more than 119,000 African American Obama supporters were bused directly from church to polling places on the Sunday before the 2008 election. Like the Florida statute, Ohio’s new law, signed by Republican Governor John Kasich, ended that practice. The bill was so sweeping that the Obama campaign calculated it would put them at a crippling 400,000-vote disadvantage in 2012.
Fortunately for Obama, Ohio state law allowed for a petition campaign to place a repeal measure on the state ballot in November 2012. If such a repeal initiative were put before the voters, it would mean that the new election law would not be in effect for the presidential election. But the 231,000 signatures necessary for a ballot initiative wouldn’t be easy to obtain, especially with Ohio unions and other Democratic allies busy tPension Benefit Guaranty Corporationvrying to repeal Governor Kasich’s union-busting bill. For much of 2011 it wasn’t clear whether Ohio would even be in play for the Democrats in the presidential election.
Ohio’s secretary of state, Jon Husted, a Republican and ALEC alumnus elected in 2010, used every lever he had to reduce turnout. Under Ohio law, county boards of elections are evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, with the secretary of state empowered to break the tie on rules governing elections. In urban Democratic counties, Husted broke the tie in favor of shorter voting hours, even though he knew that this would lead to more long lines like those Ohio experienced in 2004. The racial disparities in Ohio were disturbing. In 2010, according to a lawsuit, 94 percent of new African American voters were challenged at the polls, compared to 16 percent of new white voters.
Normally the legislative process is excruciatingly slow. But not this time. It seemed as though every week in 2011 and early 2012 brought word of another Republican-controlled state moving to restrict voting. Iowa’s new Republican governor, Terry Branstad, took executive action that made it difficult for anyone with a criminal record to have his or her voting rights restored. Wisconsin and New Hampshire passed restrictive voter ID laws that made it harder for students who didn’t have a driver’s license to vote. William O’Brien, New Hampshire’s Republican speaker of the house, explained the logic of the bill to a Tea Party audience. “Voting as a liberal, that’s what kids do,” O’Brien said. “They just vote their feelings and they’re taking away the town’s ability to govern themselves, it’s not fair.”
Colorado’s secretary of state, Scott Gessler, a Republican, was determined to outdo Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who helped Bush win Florida in 2000. Gessler didn’t have a Republican governor and legislature to help him suppress Democratic turnout, so he acted unilaterally by making a list of what he considered suspicious voters, then mailing threatening letters to thousands of Coloradans, most with Latino surnames, whom he wrongly accused of being noncitizens. He estimated that 11,805 noncitizens were registered to vote but later admitted that the number was less than two hundred and only thirty-five of them may have voted. Gessler also refused to send mail-in ballots to residents of the heavily Democratic Pueblo and Denver counties, whom he considered “inactive voters” because they hadn’t voted in 2010—the midterm election that many 2008 Obama voters sat out.
In 2012, Gessler spoke on a panel at CPAC where he accused Democrats of subjecting ineligible voters to the risk of criminal prosecution by registering them, a questionable appearance for a sitting secretary of state duty bound to be a neutral supervisor of state elections. Soon it came out that Gessler had billed the state for travel to a meeting of the National Republican Lawyers Association and to the Republican National Convention with the explanation that he was discussing Colorado voter fraud there.
Pennsylvania’s bill had a bring-me-the-witch’s-broomstick quality. It required state department of transportation photo IDs; photo IDs issued by counties, cities, or regional transportation authorities were not valid. As in several other states, the new law disallowed student IDs unless they contained an expiration date, which few of Pennsylvania’s colleges provided on the cards; this meant that students must go to their school’s bursar’s office for a new card before they could vote, which would dramatically reduce youth turnout, as intended. Republicans claimed the law was aim the twentieth century, mo small ed only at increasing efficiency and ballot security, but when it was signed in early 2012, the Pennsylvania house majority leader, Mike Turzai, let the cat out of the bag at a Republican State Committee meeting about the party’s legislative accomplishments. “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done,” Turzai told the applauding crowd.
The Republican secretary of state assured the public that 99 percent of registered voters already had the proper state-issued photo ID. But it turned out that 750,000 registered voters lacked a driver’s license and were thus in danger of losing their right to vote. Even if that number was inflated, as the Obama team thought, the new law made voting a hassle for between 5 and 10 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate. Obama eventually had two hundred paid staff on the ground in Pennsylvania, and the Obama campaign thought it could keep the state blue even if the new law stood. Some Pennsylvania Democrats weren’t so sure.
By mid-2012 nineteen states had approved new legislation restricting voting, including seven of the nine battleground states in the general election. The total number of electoral votes potentially affected, 212, was more than three-quarters of the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.
FOR MONTHS THE GOP’s effort to suppress the vote had the wind at its back. Opinion polls showed overwhelming public support for requiring photo IDs in order to cast ballots. It wasn
’t long before Tea Party activists in several states decided that they wanted in on voter-suppression efforts. A Texas Tea Party group called King Street Patriots, funded by the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, began in 2010 to use new software to check voter registration lists against driver’s licenses and other records. In Houston they descended on African American precincts to challenge voters who had changed addresses or had typos in their voter files. In 2011 the group renamed itself True the Vote and launched chapters in thirty states. Republican secretaries of state from around the country attended their forums. In the recall election of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, True the Vote volunteers used bogus identity checks to slow down student voting at Lawrenny doubt about
7
The New Chicago Machine
“Chicago,” as the Obama campaign headquarters came to be known, always thought the 2012 election would be close. David Axelrod, back in his hometown to begin strategizing, predicted the game would be won in the last seconds by the field goal team.
On paper, the 2011 odds on Obama’s reelection weren’t good. Both public and private polls showed overwhelmingly that the economy was the number one issue for voters and that Americans consistently gave one GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, much higher marks than the president on handling it. Unemployment in 2011 was 8.9 percent. It would have to come down a point or so for Obama to be reelected.
Worse for Obama, the enthusiasm level just wasn’t the same as in 2008. “You’re only the 1965 Rolling Stones once,” Steven Spielberg told Jim Messina. “The second time, it’s, ‘You charge too much for your tickets.’ ” The president himself came up with a homier metaphor one day on Air Force One. The difference between 2008 and 2012, he said, was the difference between a hot romance and being married with two kids and a mortgage. “In 2008 it was ‘cool’ to vote for me,” he told a gay and lesbian fundraiser in 2011. “Now I’m sorta old news.”
Despite the falloff in enthusiasm, Obama thought “the reelect” was more pivotal than his original victory. “This election will probably have the biggest contrast that we’ve seen since the Johnson-Goldwater election [in 1964]—maybe before that,” he said. He saw it less as a struggle between conservatives and liberals than a fight between right-wing extremism and pragmatic centrism.
If Obama and his campaign team faced a daunting economy in 2011, they also enjoyed a luxury: time. While the Republicans bloodied each other with devastating super PAC ads and embarrassing primary debates, Obama had no challengers in the Democratic primaries; no prominent Democrat would dare run against the first black president in a party with a large African American base. That and a proven record of raising prodigious amounts of money would give the Obama team many U.S. District Court Judge leContract with America months to plan, build, and execute.
It was the way Chicago used that time that counted. For generations, all American campaigns had the same basic departments: fundraising, advertising, field, advance, press, operations, volunteers, and some kind of liaison with other party-affiliated organizations. Starting in 2004 with Vermont governor Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, a new section, small at first, was added to a century-old campaign structure: digital. Dean’s campaign chief, Joe Trippi, was the first major strategist who sensed how the new technologies would change politics. But he and his tech wizards were too early. Even the 2008 Obama campaign barely scratched the surface of what could be done online. By 2012 data and technology personnel would account for more than one-third of the Obama campaign’s payroll—a huge bet with an uncertain outcome. In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt was the first presidential candidate to exploit radio and in 1960 Kennedy the first to make full use of TV. Now, if his big plans paid off, Obama would be the first to use sophisticated digital technology to transform campaigns.
The idea was to construct a new kind of political machine. The old machines, like Richard J. Daley’s in Chicago, were run on patronage; Fraser Robinson, Michelle Obama’s father, held a job in the city water department that was dependent on his work during elections in the 1960s and 1970s as a Daley-backed precinct captain in his South Side neighborhood. The grease for the new machine that Obama was building was money, of course, but also data—highly sophisticated analytics of what worked and what failed that could help field, fundraising, communications, and the other traditional elements of a campaign. “What we did was to merge the old and the new—shoe leather with technology,” Axelrod said later. The aim was to erase the barriers between Chicago and the field and allow a presidential campaign to be run as a collection of ward races. “In 2008, you had two campaigns: a grassroots campaign on the ground and then an online campaign, which really didn’t touch,” Messina said. “Now we’re busting down the walls.” Old-fashioned intuition was still valuable, but elegant algorithms were much better. Like Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager portrayed in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, Obama and his team would try to reimagine an old game with new statistics.
Large corporations had already begun moving in this direction, with analytics departments that went beyond the plodding old analysis of sales patterns to sophisticated models integrating huge data sets. Bill Gates liked to say that “measurement” was the most powerful force in the world for improving the quality of life. After the failure to “connect the dots” on terrorists before 9/11, the concept of Big Data was slowly adopted by the government. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg moved aggressively to measure everything, and other cities and states began following suit. Now Big Data would be applied to electing a president.
The focus on rigorous new metrics for performance was the product of a revolution in the business world in the 1980s and 1990s pioneered bd="BE6QS">y advisory companies like Bain Consulting (where Romney then worked) and later advanced by private equity firms like Bain Capital, which Romney founded. The 2012 campaign would feature a former low-level community organizer beating a big-time “numbers guy” at his own Bain Game.
AS CHICAGO’S BAIN-STYLE PowerPoint presentations showed, the electoral map favored the president. Jim Messina, was forty-two, and he liked to say that he had forty-two different computer-generated scenarios for how to reach the magic 270 electoral votes. All combinations involved what both parties believed were a handful of battleground states. At first they were Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and North Carolina. (Later New Mexico became solidly blue and North Carolina likely red, and Romney tried to make Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania competitive.) Messina figured the map meant combat in a handful of states, all of which had different rhythms, issues, and convoluted local politics. He compared it to running nine or ten separate gubernatorial races, each analyzed down to the few thousand people who could be mobilized to register and vote for the president. If Obama held Ohio, Florida, and one more state, the Republicans would have to run the table with the rest. But Messina understood that was an awfully big “if.”
The secret was to restore the president’s support in the field. Messina had been a big believer in the ground game since he was a college student knocking on doors in a trailer park in Missoula, Montana. The tall, cherubic-faced Idaho native managed his first campaign, for the mayor of Missoula, at age twenty-one and had been a political operative ever since. Before laboring on the 2008 campaign and as Rahm Emanuel’s deputy in the White House, Messina won his spurs turning mild-mannered Max Baucus into a brawler to save his Senate seat in 2002. This one would be a knife fight too. The two scariest weapons wielded by the other side, the things that kept Messina and his team up at night, were money and voter suppression.
The most logical move would have been to keep Messina in place in the White House, where he could serve as Obama’s political adviser, and have David Plouffe reprise his role as campaign manager in Chicago. But in the Hawaii surf during Christmas in 2010, Obama told Messina, “I’m gonna get rid of you.” The president waited a beat before adding, “I’d like you to move to Chicago.” Plouffe had argued that if he went back
to Chicago to manage the reelect he would run the same campaign he had the previous time, which wasn’t what 2012 required. “You’ve got to run your own campaign,” he instructed Messina. “You won’t be wed to the same decisions I was.” And Messina did have some autonomy; everyone agreed that placing campaign headquarters in Chicago, away from the distractions of Washington, was essential to its success. Even so, Messina was Plouffe’s man, and they often talked several times a day.
David Axelrod, who had been close to Obama since he guided his 2004 campaign for the Senate, would be back in his 2008 job as chief strategist, though Messina was upset that Axelrod, who had sold his old consulting firm, felt it necessary to hire a lawyer to negotiate his compensation. The president told Messina he didn’t want to cheat anyone, but he didn’t want anyone getting rich either. This was an impossible requirement; the Democratic firm GMMB (owned by a dozen longtime operatives) would make a fortune off the ad buys alone. Eventually Messina and Axelrod came to terms and Chicago marveled at the profligacy of the Romney campaign, which was structured in a way that feathered many more nests.
It didn’t take long before Messina told everyone he saw, “If we run the same campaign, we will lose. We will lose badly.” He liked to point out that Twitter didn’t even exist until June 2008 and that Facebook was so small then that only one campaign staffer had been assigned to the twentieth century,
The campaign infrastructure was new. In 2008 the departments weren’t linked; that meant that a supporter who gave money in New Jersey, knocked on doors in neighboring Pennsylvania, and placed telephone calls to Virginia would be in at least three different databases. Now he or she would be in one. The idea this time was that Finance would tell Field about the contribution, and Field could then try to recruit the donor as a volunteer. Or it might work the other way around, with Field telling Finance that a newly registered voter should be hit up for a donation. The key to victory wouldn’t be a single department but an often subtle interaction among all of them: Analytics helping Field with sophisticated modeling of voters and giving Paid (the TV and radio ad makers) algorithms for efficient media buys, or Digital helping Finance with elaborately tested fundraising emails, or Comm (the communications shop) offering a nicely executed rapid response to Digital for social media distribution. This process sounded intuitive, but it had been followed rarely if at all in American campaigns, which were usually jerry-built contraptions that sped through the fog of combat to Election Day.
The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies Page 11
