The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  One night in June, Messina wandered all the way across the Floor to Teddy Goff’s office in Digital. It was late and almost everyone else had gone home. “You do understand that if online money doesn’t come in, we don’t have a path to win,” Messina told him. Goff found the conversation frightening. He had been having some trouble managing his staff of two hundred and, distracted by the growing demand for campaign videos and social media content, had been able to raise only a disappointing $15 million a month online. Messina was expecting Digital to hit at least $70 million a month by fall. He had already informed the president that there was no Plan B. The whole campaign strategy depended on moving $65 million from September and October and putting it into June and July to “fill in some blanks” on Romney. They must start harvesting more cash online or they wouldn’t have enough money to run much of a campaign after Labor Day.

  Around the same time, Dan Wagner made a presentation to senior campaign officials about the Cave’s “state prioritization algorithm,” which placed a monetary value on each electoral vote so that the campaign could allocate resources with unprecedented precision. Hundreds of millions of dollars in media buys, staff deployments, candidate travel, and other expenses depended on the modeling being accurate. “If you’re wrong about this, we’re gonna lose,” Axelrod told Wagner, with his usual mixture of wry humor and seriousness. “And a lot of this will be on you.”

  A pair of nerds in their twenties were on the hook for reelecting the president.

  THE LIBERAL BASE of the Democratic Party remained wary, if not of the president himself then of the people around him. While the Washington-based progressive groups had a voice at the secret weekly “Big Table” meetings, local activists did not. In June the White House, through Common Cause, began inviting progressive groups to Washington for issues briefings aimed at getting them energized for the campaign. The sessions didn’t always go well. At a meeting in a town house across the street from the White House, aides laid out the specifics of the Affordable Care Act to a group of 130 party activists from New Jersey, many of whom had worked their hearts out for Obama in neighboring Pennsylvania in 2008. All morning tension grew. The progressive organizations felt they had been waiting forever for marching orders and fresh instructions on how to engage voters. When Jon Carson pointed the group toward a few inadequate websites for more information, an Essex County party organizer named Cary Chevat blew up. “Websites? Are you kidding me?” Since the last campaign, he and his organization had received almost nothing on the president’s accomplishments, only tiresome email solicitations for money. Why had it taken until now, more than two years after passage, to even tell them what was in the health care bill? The head of a local NAACP chapter echoed the complaint—Where’s the material to pass out to our people?—and then the South Jersey Democratic organizers weighed in. For a moment Obama’s progressive allies were in full m partner, Russ Schriefer, wroteh2utiny. Instead of being flattered to get briefings and a special White House tour, the group, like several from other states, left freshly disappointed over having been ignored for three and a half years by what they viewed as an arrogant Obama White House.

  IN 2011 THOSE annoying fundraising emails became a big topic of discussion in Chicago. Teddy Goff and his Digital team thought the videos and fundraising appeals they sent out online had to be creative or they wouldn’t stand a chance. They thought it was lame to ask supporters to retweet links. In 2012 they would learn otherwise. It turned out that predicting from your gut which messages or graphics might connect with voters was a fool’s errand. Intuition gave way to test results. In direct mail, tests are slow and expensive; online, they’re fast and nearly free.

  So Goff and his deputy for online fundraising, Marie Ewald, conducted 240 A/B tests on their donation page. They tested everything they sent as many as eighteen times, from the salutation (“Hey” worked especially well) to the wording of fundraising appeals, the size of the donate buttons on the site, and whether an invitation to dinner at Sarah Jessica Parker’s house with the president (if the entrant won a lottery for supporters who couldn’t afford the $40,000 price tag) should include a reference to Parker as a mother or, in a separate test, Vogue editor Anna Wintour as a cohost. Some on the Email List, mostly women, got a Wintour mention in their invitation; others did not. Wintour’s video invitation ended with her saying archly, “Don’t be late.”

  For a while, yellow backgrounds generated 10 to 20 percent more email responses than white backgrounds. Who knew? The fundraising emails—more than four hundred in all—appeared hour after hour, day after day because they worked. An elaborate “More Emails Test” showed conclusively that the more fundraising emails that went out, the more money came back—simple as that. Even the $3 ask—just enough to cover the credit card processing—helped build lists and increase a sense of ownership on the part of supporters. The growth in the number of people unsubscribing because they couldn’t stand the alarmist emails was much slower than the growth of cash flowing in, and Chicago knew that peeved unsubscribers would end up voting for Obama even if they thought the emails sounded like sketchy pleas from Internet con artists.

  Goff concluded that ignoring the human desire not to be annoying may have been the single greatest conceptual breakthrough of the campaign. It turned out to be worth more than $100 million.

  A critical moment came when Digital tested thirteen varieties of a special message from the president to the Email List, scheduled for June 26, just two days before the Supreme Court ruled on Obamacare. Among the subject lines tested were “Thankful every day,” “Do this for Michelle,” “Would love to meet you,” and “Some scary numbers.” The winner, which netted a projected $1.5 million more than several of the runners-up, was “I will be outspent.” “I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign, if things continue as they have so far,” the president wrote. Obama asked for $3 (more if the recipient had donated before) to fight back against more than $1 billion in ads “trashing me, you and everything we believe in.”

  _20h2“We can be outspent and still win. But we can’t be outspent 10 to 1 and still win,” Obama emailed, in a classic bit of hype. That level of Republican spending would require super PACs to spend $7 billion or $8 billion, which wasn’t going to happen. Chicago feared that it would fall short of its goal of being the first billion-dollar campaign, but not as far short as it was hinting now. By once again opting out of public financing for the fall campaign, Obama was delivering the coup de grâce to a thirty-five-year tradition of campaign finance reform he claimed to champion. After Labor Day, he, like Romney, who also opted out, would have to depend on private donations, not $91.2 million in taxpayer funds. So poor-mouthing would become a campaign tactic. Messina wanted to get the president’s email out before the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare because he calculated that a positive decision from the Court might return the Democratic base to the sense of complacency that had hampered fundraising all along.

  Messina’s worries proved unfounded. The landmark “I will be outspent” email raised $2.6 million in a single day. Two days later the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and instead of the base assuming Obama needed no help, it was energized to dig deeper. The last seven days of the month brought in $20 million, far surpassing expectations. Goff could breathe easier now. When Sarah Palin spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Chicago raised $9 million in twenty-four hours, a record at the time. That figure was topped five times in 2012, with the biggest haul exceeding $19 million in a single day after the second debate. The Obama campaign went from raising $15 million a month online in the spring to more than $150 million a month online in the fall. Messina said later that starting in late June the graph on online fundraising looked like a hockey stick.

  Digital’s biggest tech innovation was “Quick Donate,” a mobile app that raised an extra $75 million by letting supporters give money with one click instead of filling out a form. Donors who used
Quick Donate gave four times as often and three times as much as those who didn’t. The mobile app led to what the campaign called “drunk donating,” where Obama supporters agitated by polls showing Romney gains impulsively kicked in before they thought better of it.

  Quick Donate was supposed to be a Tech project, but it was engineered by the less experienced code writers inside Digital. This was another example of why tensions between Tech and the other departments hadn’t eased much. Tech had some terrific people but was so focused on trying—and often failing—to build cool new apps that it didn’t give Digital, Field, Finance, and Comm the workaday tools they wanted.

  In June Tech finally came through with Dashboard, which was praised by many field organizers for helping put all of their local efforts at their fingertips. For many Obama volunteers, Dashboard became almost a new social network. It helped tens of thousands tap into the long-delayed Call Tool, which allowed volunteers to join Nurses for Obama, Veterans for Obama, Seniors for Obama, and other subgroups. Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart put Dashboard in the category of Better Late Than Never. By the end of the campaign, the gears of the Chicago machine seemed to mesh. “Even in our most fierce head-butting, we’d all finally get up and say, ‘We’re here for the same reason, right? To reelect the president,’ ” Harper Reed said later. “Then we’d all go out and get a drink.”

  When Dashboard went live, Messina, determined to stay in touch with supporters, sent out a questionnaire to the now 16 million names on the Obama Email List. For t_20h2he Obama field and fundraising operations, the survey was important in making the machine hum for the rest of the campaign. Every answer was a potential mine of data to make the campaign more efficient. Supporters were asked to rate their level of enthusiasm (to prioritize recruitment of volunteers); disclose whether they planned to donate (to determine who should get the hard sell); guess how close the election would be (those saying it wouldn’t be close would get a special message arguing against complacency); and explain “what worries you most about the possibility of Mitt Romney being the next president” (the answers could help tailor attack ads).

  Of course, all the fancy technology meant nothing without enthusiasm on the ground. The basic volunteer work of knocking on doors, calling, texting, and emailing involved a certain irreducible level of drudgery that could only endure if fueled by some passion.

  IN EARLY SUMMER Adam Fetcher, a former spokesman at the Interior Department, was offered a job in Communications in Chicago. He almost didn’t take it. The word in Washington was that Chicago was dysfunctional, with messaging being run from the White House, and that his new boss, Stephanie Cutter, was impossibly overbearing. Upon arriving on the Floor, Fetcher found none of this to be true. He watched in awe as Cutter sliced up Romney every day and concluded that the Ninja was one of the party’s best assets. Chicago stayed on the offensive through the spring and summer and stomped Boston in the 24/7 media wars. Comm had a TV camera and chair installed in the headquarters in April, the better for Cutter, Messina, Axelrod, and others to beam message. It took Boston until September to do the same.

  Chicago had a lot to communicate, most of it negative. In late June the Washington Post published a story by Tom Hamburger outlining how Bain had invested heavily in companies shipping jobs overseas, becoming “pioneers of outsourcing.” It was something the Obama campaign had been holding in reserve, worried that the story would ripen too far in advance of the election. For months Axelrod had known from “oppo” (opposition) research that not only had Bain engaged in outsourcing, but the company sponsored workshops to help companies learn how to outsource. Chicago learned that when Romney was governor, Massachusetts even outsourced the phone bank for the state’s unemployment office. The question now was how well Chicago could exploit all the oppo.

  Early July brought signs that the Obama Communications team was clicking. After Vanity Fair and the AP ran stories raising questions about Romney’s holdings in Swiss bank accounts and funds in the Cayman Islands, all the campaign surrogates seemed to finally get the memo. Democrats of all stripes (including some not terribly fond of Obama) argued on MSNBC, CNN, and even occasionally on Fox that the only reason for a Swiss bank account was to avoid taxes or show preference for a foreign currency, and that George Romney had released twelve years of tax returns, not one. This reflected message discipline usually seen exclusively among Republicans.

  With so much juicy material to work with, Chicago’s media consultants got creative. When Obama sang Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” to Michelle at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, it had looked and sounded cool; when Romney sang “America the Beautiful” to audiences in the primaries, it had looked and sounded uncool. Could the coolnessNational Youth Administrationd,Pa contrast be linked to Romney’s vulnerability on Bain and outsourcing? That thinking led to “Firms,” the toughest and best Obama commercial of the campaign. John Del Cecato, an ad maker with Axelrod’s old firm, cut a spot with Romney’s off-key rendition of the patriotic song illustrated by text about his offshore accounts and outsourcing of jobs and pictures of Mexico, Switzerland, and the Caymans.

  At first the president said “Firms” was too harsh. It went back to focus groups, which again loved it. Obama was still worried about the ad, but when Plouffe and Axelrod pushed hard, he relented. The spot had no sound except Romney singing, the Swiss flag flapping in the wind, and the soft Caribbean waves. It broke through.

  BY JUNE, PEGGY NOONAN, a conservative pundit who normally respected good rhetoric from any source, had given up on Obama as an orator. “Do you remember any phrase or sentence the president has said in a speech or statement the past 31/2 years? One? Anything, in all that talking, that entered your head and stayed there? You do not. He is interesting, his words are not.” Then she offered a brutal summary of Obama’s themes over the previous six months:

  It’s not so bad—this indicator is up, and that one.

  OK, it’s bad, but it could have been worse—my actions kept us from tanking.

  It’s bad, but it’s Bush’s fault.

  It’s bad, but it’s the congressional Republicans’ fault.

  I have made it less bad, and I need more time to make it even less badder.

  Rich people have fancy cars and car elevators, I stand for jalopies and street parking.

  She concluded, “None of it has worked. What does it say of a crisis presidency at a dramatic moment that a president can’t make the case for his own re-election, can’t find his own meaning?”

  But maybe the words the president used on the stump weren’t so important in 2012. At the time Noonan wrote the column, Obama was all but sewing up the election.

  FOR A DECADE, one of the silly frames put on the election was a simple question: Which candidate would you rather have a beer with? The answer was Bush over Gore in 2000, Bush over Kerry in 2004, and Obama and McCain both beer-worthy in 2008. This time Chicago was determined to win the beerfest, so Alyssa Mastromonaco, a deputy White House chief of staff who had determined Obama’s schedule since 2007, made sure that the president visited a bar at least once a week on the campaign trail to hoist one. The White House even arranged for a recipe for homemade brew to be released. Romney, a Mormon, didn’t drink and thus couldn’t compete in this arena, a detail that did not escape Chicago’s attention. In the end, Romney would win the white male beer-drinker vote anyway, but Chicago was determined to hold down his totals.

  This was especially critical in Ohio, which had more blue-collar workers and few the twentieth century, hever Latinos than other battleground states. But a combination of the auto issue and a fired-up African American community kept the polls there remarkably stable. The same was true in Nevada, where the registration efforts of OFA and the unions had dramatically widened the Democrats’ advantage in party identification (and where Romney’s line that housing prices should be allowed to hit “rock bottom” hurt him badly). Field’s third anchor was Iowa. A core of Obama organizers who started there in 2007 had never left.
Organization of early voting was well in hand by the end of July.

  OFA considered early voting especially important because it gave the campaign the chance to win what were called “low-propensity” or “sporadic” voters, registered voters who didn’t make a habit of showing up at the polls. These were the 50 million, more than one-third of the electorate, who mostly went for Obama in 2008 and stayed home in 2010. The Republicans’ base of older, white voters went to the polls more reliably. Bringing sporadic voters into the fold well before Election Day was essential.

  Finding them was the challenge. Analytics and Field concluded that it wasn’t the amount of information on each voter that mattered, but the total number of voters in battleground states about which something important could be noted. Vertica and Votebuilder ended up providing that and working just fine. By summer canvassers had sheets with a little notation next to the names of millions of battleground state voters that read something like this: “Voted in ’08, not ’10. Says she’s concerned about environment.” This indicated the woman was a “sporadic”—she hadn’t voted in 2010—which meant that the Romney campaign and a pollster like Gallup might not score her as a likely voter. But because a door-knocker noted her interest in the environment, she became a prime target for persuasion. If she decided for Obama and needed a babysitter or lift to the polls to vote early, she got one. Banking sporadic voters early—nailing down the 2008 Obama voters who stayed home in 2010—was central to the game plan.