AS RECENTLY AS 2004, incumbent presidents could run for reelection with what was known as a “Rose Garden strategy.” This meant that they could use the power of the presidency to shape the news and rarely had to campaign until after Labor Day. Facebook, YouTube, and the rest of the new media order changed that forever. Even if the economy had been better, Obama could never have gotten away with a Rose Garden strategy.
Jimmy Carter attended only four fundraisers when running for reelection in 1980 and Ronald Reagan none in 1984, when wealthy friends and the RNC could handle everything. It helped that every president from Carter to George W. Bush accepted public financing for the fall campaign. Having rejected public financing in both the 2008 and 2012 cycles, Obama had to fundraise like crazy. He attended seventy-two fundraisers in 2011 alone, an average of one every five days before 2012 even began. These under-the-radar political events were no fun for him, and they crowded out presidential duties, but campaigns had become so expensive that he had little choice.
the twentieth century,
Daddy Day Care before getting involved in politics, despaired of getting others in the LGBT community to contribute more. They were still upset about the administration’s not fighting harder against the Defense of Marriage Act and they misunderstood the politics of the government’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy on gays in the military. Obama had finally convinced Congress to end the policy in late 2010, but by then many of his gay and lesbian supporters had turned lukewarm on the president.
The fence-mending wasn’t easy with any constituency. Large numbers of Obama’s 2008 supporters felt they hadn’t been kept in the fold. It wasn’t that they expected an invitation to a state dinner, but they wanted to be armed with facts so that they could at least defend the man they had once been so passionate about. At a 2010 fundraiser Gifford was bombarded with sharp questions, a dramatically different tone than in 2007 and 2008. “Kind of hostile,” an old colleague from 2008 said to him afterward. “That’s what they’re all like now,” Gifford replied.
Fundraising through 2011 remained disappointing. It was both easier and harder financially to have no primary opposition: easier because the burn rate would be reduced and money could be hoarded until the general election; harder because for months it seemed as if there was no contest to get excited about, which made it tougher to put the squeeze on donors. On balance, of course, incumbents do much better when they run unopposed and unite their party early. Ted Kennedy did terrible damage to Carter in 1980 by challenging him for the nomination. The advantage of being renominated without opposition was taken for granted by voters, but not by the Obama campaign.
DAVID BINDER’S FOCUS groups showed that voters liked Obama personally and saw him as different in a good way. They were rooting for him. But they had what Larry Grisolano, the director of Paid Media, who was usually on the other side of the two-way mirror, described as “performance qualms.” They generally thought the president knew what they were going through, but he didn’t talk about their struggles in a way that lit it up for them. And they had no patience for claims that it was “morning in America.” Most respondents in both focus groups and polls remained convinced the country was on the wrong track, a finding that in the past had doomed incumbent presidents.
Stan Greenberg, a former Clinton pollster unaffiliated with the campaign, angered Chicago by publishing the findings of his focus groups, which sent shivers through the Democratic Party. Messina unloaded on him, and he became persona non grata in the Obama camp. But Greenberg, who thought the White House had a “disastrous” message in 2010 that the economy was coming back, was picking up something important. “The Obama campaign kept saying that the ‘foundation’ of its positive message was to talk about job growth,” Greenberg said. “But the more you talk about job growth, the more you piss people [in the focus groups] off. They attack the moderator and say with a lot of heat, ‘You don’t get what’s happening in the economy!’ ” Hearing that, Greenberg thought it was amazing that the president wasn’t trailing by dou the twentieth century,
For all the defensiveness about Greenberg and his sometime partner, James Carville, Chicago got the point that the president had to talk less about macroeconomic policy and more about real people. In one meeting of the high command, Grisolano described the macro approach as the president “looking out over a mass of people and seeing them yearning for 3.5 percent GDP growth.” Everyone laughed and agreed it was a problem.
But improving presentation wouldn’t be enough. The biggest thing that voters in polls and focus groups wanted was more concrete action, and this was beyond the president’s control. Americans thought Obama was well-intentioned but couldn’t get Congress to move, and that doing so was a big part of his job. The irony of this finding didn’t ease the pain. In all of the focus groups of 2009 and 2010, the complaint had been the opposite: that the president was doing too much. Now the problem was that he was doing too little.
When that message reached the White House in late 2011, Obama launched his “We Can’t Wait” campaign of executive orders and other action he could take unilaterally. He had done some of this all along, but not enough to leave an impression of continuous activity on behalf of struggling Americans. Whether because he was inexperienced in the mechanics of governing or just leery of exceeding his constitutional authority, he had left a critical policy and political tool on the ground.
8
The Cave
Obama’s reelection campaign was like running for Chicago alderman over and over with the help of nerdy kids who spoke a math language no one else understood. The key was microtargeting, which had first been used in direct-mail campaigns by Karl Rove and others. That word had been in bad odor in recent years thanks to the marketing industry. Microtargeting sounded intrusive, even a little creepy, but it had the potential to return politics to the most local level of all: the individual voter.
After a quarter-century of viewing voters as gross ratings points, target demographics, or plain old constituency groups, the best minds in politics were trying to see them again as ordinary people with their own specific interactions with the American political process. Like the ward heelers of old who knew a lot about their neighbors when they rang their doorbells, Obama field organizers, armed with the fruits of Big Data, could bring a presidential campaign to the front porch as never before. OFA’s aim was to use algorithms to enhance the human (and thus more persuasive) part of politics: face-to-face, friend-to-friend, or at least Facebook friend–to–Facebook friend.
Befitting an intellectual president, the microtargeting revolution in politics began in academia. In 1998 Yale professors Alan Gerber and Don Green performed the first randomized tests that measured which voters responded best to which get-out-the-vote techniques: mail, phone banks, or door knocks from canvassers. Suddenly randomized tests like those used in medical research, complete with control groups and other rigorous empirical standards, were being applied to street-level politicking.
Soon consortiums like the Analyst Institute (which embedded three analysts in the Chicago headquarters) expanded A/B testing from get-out-the-vote efforts to voter registration.I The new analysts did something unheard of by profiling and targeting unlikely voters. That transformed registration from a passive activity—sitting at a folding table in a supermarket parking lot—into something active and much more efficient. In 2012 Chicago sought to extend the modeling to the third and most difficult form of voter contact: persuasion.
Doing so required a big digital upgrade. By 2011 the technology of the 2008 campaign was long obsolete—so old that the original website for volunteers, called MyBO (short for My Barack Obama), had been named after the long-forgotten social network Myspace. In early 2011 Messina set out for the West Coast, where Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, and executives from App">This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly24le, Facebook, Zynga, Microsoft, DreamWorks, and Salesforce all told him he should not just view the campaign as a start-up—he al
ready knew that—but hire much of his digital crew from start-ups that were outside of politics. The digital team assembled in Chicago was in fact three teams—Digital, Tech, and Analytics—with interrelated and often competitive functions. All were headed by soon-to-be-legendary characters within the campaign.
Digital was the domain of Teddy Goff, a boyish twenty-six-year-old gay New Yorker who joined the 2008 campaign fresh out of Yale before landing at Blue State Digital, the pioneering “online engagement” company. Goff, with help from Blue State Digital founder Joe Rospars (who got the whole digital thing going in Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign), managed a staff of two hundred that pumped out thousands of videos, emails, texts, tweets, reddit posts, Facebook messages, and other online offerings, not to mention managing a $109 million digital advertising budget (one-fifth of the campaign’s overall media budget). In early 2011 Goff told his staff that whatever they sent out had better be damn clever or it wouldn’t stand a chance of breaking through the online clutter. Later, when the campaign hung in the balance, he would learn how wrong he’d been on that point.
Tech was the haven for eccentric code writers and product developers. It was supervised by Michael Slaby and the campaign’s chief technology officer, Harper Reed, a thirty-three-year-old hipster who topped off the usual black rectangular glasses with product-heavy high hair and ear gauges big enough to push a broomstick through. Reed’s ideas on crowdsourcing and cloud computing, respected in the tech world, had helped boost Threadless, a Chicago-based T-shirt design firm, into the web stratosphere. His personal website, which obsessively chronicled not just his exact food intake, weight, and minute-by-minute playlist but the number of steps he took each day, described his activities as “pretty awesome” and bore the legend “Harper Reed: Probably one of the coolest guys ever.” It turned out that not everyone in Chicago thought so.
The third digital kingdom, Analytics, was run by Dan Wagner, twenty-eight, a nerdy University of Chicago econometrics student who had started in the 2008 campaign as a volunteer calling Latino voters. That year he created a “caucus math tool” that let Obama supporters at the Iowa caucuses negotiate with also-ran candidates to deny Hillary Clinton a larger share of delegates. While working at the DNC, his team’s models predicted with uncanny precision just how badly Democrats would lose in 2010, which was one of the only pieces of good news for the party and bolstered the argument for a heavy investment in analytics in the 2012 cycle. Wagner then brought his core of fifteen statisticians with him to Chicago to model everything from how to reach persuadable older white males in southeastern Ohio to why placing ads on reruns of The Andy Griffith Show made sense on some cable systems but not on others. In 2008 Chicago’s Analytics team consisted of six people; in 2012 it boasted fifty-four, with a budget of more than $25 million. That sounded like a lot, but it ended up being only a little more than 2 percent of the $1.2 billion Chicago raised. To build esprit de corps and protect what the campaign considered its nuclear codes, Wagner housed his team in a secret windowless room off the main floor, dubbed “the Cave.”
Located behind an unmarked door, the Cave was off-limits to all noncampaign visitors, though Messina once brought Eric Schmidt in for a look. When Peggy Noonan attacked the campaign in the Wall Street Journal for send Austan Goolsbee earlying out a hiring notice asking for expertise in “predictive modeling/data mining” that “read like politics as done by Martians” (part of a column accusing Obama and his team of bloodlessness), Wagner hung a thirty-foot banner of Mars across the back wall of the Cave.
The Cave was so small that it contained only one proper exit, which meant that the Secret Service wouldn’t let the president inside during his occasional visits to the Chicago headquarters. With only three feet at a long table (and no drawers) allotted for each staffer to set up a laptop, the place could get claustrophobic. Every afternoon at 4:30, the Analytics team, only halfway through its sixteen-hour day, would take a break, close the door, and watch as the Cave was transformed with strobe lights and loud DJ beats into “Club Claster,” named for Wagner’s deputy, Andrew Claster, who voiced a parody of a campaign robo call remixed Gangnam-style. Every Friday at the same hour, Dan Porter, a statistician and professional poker player, held court with an analysis of an episode of Seinfeld and explained to staffers too young to remember the show how it related to something in the campaign. On Halloween, for instance, he wore a David Puddy “magic 8-ball jacket” that he bought on eBay and recounted Elaine’s annoyance with the line “All signs point to yes.”
IT WASN’T LONG before the loose strands of the Obama campaign were brought into a centralized database. With the Cave’s better-integrated information, Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart created a new field structure for volunteers built on the concept of neighborhood teams. In Ohio, for instance, where several paid organizers on the ground never left after 2008, regional field directors quickly established a thousand neighborhood teams to handle eight thousand precincts—more than a year before the election. The campaign adhered to a familiar management principle, that once someone is managing more than ten people, underlings feel like cogs in a wheel. So the Field team created a pecking order of battleground state leadership that contained half a dozen levels of advancement, from “core team member” at the bottom to “state director,” a conventional post, at the top. No one had more than ten people to supervise until the eve of the election, when the volunteers poured in.
The young paid OFA organizers and their neighborhood team leaders had discretion in handing out titles to volunteers. Many chose to call them “captains”: data captain (in charge of entering voter information into the database), canvass captain (in charge of door-knockers), comfort captain (keeping everyone happy and well-fed). The campaign was creating hundreds of thousands of supporters performing some of the same electoral functions as Michelle Obama’s late father; they were twenty-first-century precinct captains getting out the vote, though without the promise of a job after the election.
Each week the Obama army grew. In the summer of 2011 every battleground state hosted unpaid “summer fellows,” 1,500 in all, who were given training, housing, and a special smartphone. By 2012 the campaign would boast more than three thousand bright and fiercely committed full-time paid organizers in battleground states, a huge advantage on the ground.
The management challenges of ramping up were immense. So when Mobius Executive Leadership, an executive coaching firm that supported Obama, offered each senior campaign official an hour a week of f">Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, ,Paree executive coaching, Messina said yes, though he was worried it would look bad and made everyone sign confidentiality agreements promising they wouldn’t disclose the deal. Some found it only slightly helpful, but Jeremy Bird swore by the secret coaching; he said it helped make his state directors into rational managers and “greatly reduced the number of assholes who often get hired in campaigns just because they’ve been on a winning campaign somewhere before.”
For all the organizational advances, reenergizing the base was tough. For much of 2011, the campaign’s biggest problem was complacency. Bird thought the weak GOP field was dampening enthusiasm among his organizers, who weren’t worried enough about Obama losing. The good news for Chicago was that things were looking better on the left, which went from despair after the 2010 midterms to stronger support when Obama won concessions in the lame duck session. And the stories of union-busting by Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Governor John Kasich in Ohio proved to be powerful motivators for the base.
In mid-2011 Ohio police, firefighters, and other state employees, angry about Kasich-backed law that stripped away collective bargaining rights, amassed enough signatures to get a repeal measure on the November 2011 ballot. Emboldened by that success, Chicago launched a large but low-key project to repeal the voter-suppression bill that had passed early in the year and threatened to make it impossible for Obama to win the state. Messina tried to avoid publicity about OFA’s efforts
, on the theory that knowing it was now harder to register voters and get them to vote might demoralize supporters. Sixteen months later, when a huge backlash against voter suppression erupted, he would learn that the reverse was true.
Bird quietly dispatched several field organizers to Ohio, where they worked with local Obama volunteers to collect more than 300,000 signatures under the radar—an impressive show of strength and useful spring training for the Ohio organization. With the repeal referendum slated to be on the ballot in November 2012, the new Ohio voter law, even if upheld by the voters, would not be in effect in time for the 2012 election.
Nobody noticed, but Chicago had won its first victory.
IN THE SUMMER of 2011 the Obama campaign fell into a funk. The core of the problem was the contrast to 2007, when everyone at the old headquarters (just a block up Michigan Avenue) worked together on a clear plan to win the Iowa caucuses. Even when Obama was running third in Iowa and 30 points behind Hillary Clinton in national polls, OFA that year was on task and confident of victory. This time the early work was equally critical. The refrain around the office was “We can win 2012 in 2011.” But, at first anyway, the atmosphere on the Floor was less feverish and fun than in 2008.
There was an upside to this. Teddy Goff noticed that because working for Obama was less cool this time, those who gravitated to the campaign came for the right reasons. “They were true believers but not Kool-Aid drinkers,” he said later, “people who love Obama but have their heads screwed on straight.”
Between them, the campaign’s Data and Technology departments had to hire several hundred people, for which they received tens of thousands of applications. Goff said he wanted the young recruits in Digital to be so good they could be hired afterward by Nike or Coca-Cola and “not be seen as hippy dippys.” MichaStrangled in the Bathtubvel Slaby and Harper Reed hired geeky geniuses from top tech companies ranging from Google to craigslist.
The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies Page 13
