The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Kriegel walked into the bathroom and stared at the toilet. Because he was the kind of person who counted everything, he knew that he had vomited exactly six times in his life. Now he prepared for a seventh. “I thought I was going to be living in Mitt Romney Land,” he remembered. But the seventh didn’t come. Gathering control, he returned to the Cave and made an executive decision: He would not tell Wagner or other higher-ups. He lived with the news for an excruciating hour until his team recognized that because poll watchers in black precincts used fewer handhelds to file their reports identifying which Obama supporters voted, the data flow had been “chunky” and thus wrongly modeled. The president was winning after all, though only by 1 percent, a smaller margin than expected.

  For much of the day, Obama’s GOTV operations went smoothly. Harper Reed’s October dry runs always said the same thing: onv, code-named “Game Day,” had made sure the servers and other Election Day systems could handle any data load. But local election officials in many states had not made proper preparations for the volume of voters, in some cases withholding additional voting booths from Democratic precincts while Republican areas had plenty. In midafternoon reports began filtering in of long lines at polling places in urban regions of battleground states. Thousands of Obama volunteers were mobilized to remind those in line that all of them would get to vote—no matter how long it took—and to provide food, water, and any other assistance needed, in some cases even picking up their neighbors’ kids at school and babysitting them until their parents had a chance to vote.

  IF GORDON HAD glitches, ORCA was a fiasco. Romney’s poll watcher tracking system launched with no significant user testing and little more than a prayer that the system wouldn’t crash. The sixty-page ORCA packets for poll workers had been emailed from Boston at 4 p.m. on the day before the election—much too late, considering the possibility of error and the difficulty that poll watchers (many of them elderly) would have printing out and absorbing such a long document. Sure enough, large numbers of packets contained a crucial typo: A duplicate reminder to bring a folding chair to the polling site for a long day of sitting accidentally replaced essential information on where to obtain the poll watching certificate that most states required. This meant that thousands of would-be Romney poll watchers wouldn’t be using those folding chairs because they wouldn’t be allowed to sit at the polling sites in the first place. They went home angry and called headquarters.

  By midmorning on Election Day, Boston and the regional Romney “victory centers” were besieged by calls, few of which were answered by anything but a useless recording. Volunteers at the polls were supposed to report voter information on their mobile phones, but the instructions described the designated website as an app by mistake, causing further frustration. By midday the ORCA system automatically interpreted the high traffic on its server as an attack by hackers, and by midafternoon it crashed. Thousands of Romney poll watchers—an important link in the campaign’s GOTV operations and its internal source of reporting returns—spent the day in a state of confusion. No one thought the failure of ORCA cost Romney the election, but Dan Centinello became Boston’s favorite punching bag and ORCA the symbol of a campaign badly outgunned on every front of the new digital politics.

  Romney was disturbed to learn that one of his computer systems had crashed, but he remained confident of victory—so confident that he didn’t bother to prepare a concession speech (a contingency plan undertaken by Obama in both 2008 and 2012). The only pessimist in the high command was Dan Senor, who was also, not coincidentally, the only one forced to leave the bubble and deal with Hurricane Sandy. The week before, after evacuating his young family from their Tribeca apartment, he looked out his window at flooded lower Manhattan and it hit him: The president was acting like a president and they were going to lose. He kept his feelings mostly to himself.

  Most of the Romney team was confident, even optimistic, with some already measuring the drapes in the West Wing. Major party nominees almost always prepare for a transition to the presidency in secret, but over the summer Romney had decided to be open partner, Russ Schriefer, S,Pa about it. He told former Utah governor Mike Leavitt to begin collecting résumés. The campaign invited dozens of candidates for jobs in a Romney administration to Boston for Election Night, where they joined donors and hung around the TD Garden convention center waiting for the victory party.

  OBAMA HAD A ritual of playing basketball every Election Day. The one time he didn’t play, on the day of the 2008 New Hampshire primary, he lost to Hillary Clinton. This time the game, at the Attack Gym on Chicago’s West Side, included retired Chicago Bulls stars Scottie Pippin, Jeff Sanders, and Randy Brown. The president sank a couple of shots early on, and his team, which conveniently included Pippin, won easily. All players on both sides wore the same number and words on their blue-and-white jerseys: 4 More Years.

  The exit polls looked good, but when the early votes, which were counted first, were tallied in Hamilton County, Ohio (the Cincinnati area), just after 8 p.m., the Boiler Room knew for sure that Obama would be reelected. The model that Analytics built said that Obama would carry 56.4 percent of the early votes there. He ended up with 57 percent, a remarkably close projection. The Cave had overestimated the number of undecided voters and predicted Colorado to be a point closer than it turned out to be. Otherwise, its track record was impressive. In Florida the statewide early voting model would be off by a mere 0.3 percent out of 4.4 million early votes cast.

  The election was over before anyone expected. At 11:12, when NBC News was the first to project Obama the winner, the president and his family were watching the returns in his suite at the Fairmont Hotel. Valerie Jarrett exclaimed, “You won!”

  Obama still wasn’t smiling. “I’ll believe it when Fox calls it,” the president said. Four and a half minutes later Fox did.

  Obama was happier than in 2008. He felt the stakes had been higher this time than when he ran against McCain and the affirmation more satisfying. His close friends liked to think of it as the ultimate positive job evaluation—a validation of what he was doing for the country.

  Over at the Prudential Building, a brief silence descended on the seventh floor when NBC News called the race. Then the place erupted, with people crying and hugging and jumping around in their special blue Obama-Biden Boiler Room T-shirts. Almost the entire group had been with Obama four years earlier, and everyone agreed that the mood was different this time. In 2008 they felt euphoria; in 2012, release. Afterward several remembered that someone came in playing bagpipes. The sound was appropriate—celebratory but deeper and more resonant than blasting rock and roll. Teddy Goff’s people tweeted a Pete Souza shot of the president and first lady hugging on an airport tarmac. It was retweeted 817,159 times, beating the all-time record set by Justin Bieber.

  By the time Axelrod, Plouffe, Messina, Pfeiffer, and others arrived at the Fairmont a boisterous celebration was under way. Marty Nesbitt and Anita Blanchard’s young kids made so much noise that Obama had to hold his hand over one ear to talk on the phone, but he was loving every minute of it. He hugged each key member of the team, thanked them effusively, and told several, “This one actually means more to me than 2008.” It meant more, he said, because the public had made what he considered an educated judgment of him and what he had done.

  In 2008 the victory celebration was in Grant Park partner, Russ Schriefer, record early. This time the crowds gathered at McCormick Place, the Chicago convention center not far from Obama’s home. Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours” played on the sound track as the president strode to the stage and told the world, “We are an American family, and we rise and fall together as one nation.”

  WITHOUT ORCA, its internal system for reporting voting patterns, Romney and his team were flying blind, reduced to watching CNN and relying on leaks of network exit polls. When those polls in the early afternoon showed a close race in Florida, a state Romney expected to carry comfortably, Stuart Stevens a
nd company knew things were worse than they had anticipated, though they didn’t know how much worse. Hope died hard. It wasn’t until 5 p.m., when exit polls showed Virginia trending for Obama, that Spencer Zwick began to think his boss might lose. North Carolina, which Romney officials thought an easy win, was close, and Pennsylvania, where they had hoped to catch Obama at the tape, wasn’t. The donors and hangers-on didn’t believe the rumors. Stanley Tate, who headed Florida’s finance committee, remembered that supporters gathered in Romney’s suite at the Westin remained optimistic until well past 10 p.m. Paul Ryan even went over to the donor suites at the TD Garden and gave a couple of pep talks.

  As battleground states began to come in for Obama, the suites grew silent. Long before Romney conceded, donors left for Logan Airport, where they faced traffic jams on the tarmac as their private planes waited to take off. On the way out of town, Donald Trump tweeted that the election returns were “a travesty, a total sham, a disgusting injustice.” Later, when he learned that the election had not been stolen by the Democrats, he tweeted, “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle.”

  BEFORE THE ELECTION, Joe Trippi tried to tell his Fox colleagues that they were living in a fantasyland. “You guys think Barack Obama created all the change. He’s the result of the change,” Trippi told Rove. “The Republicans are the party of old white guys, and old white guys die.” But Trippi and Juan Williams and anyone else who made such arguments were immediately dismissed as “in the tank” for Obama. Fox wasn’t the only network with pundits out on a limb. George Will, usually a clear-eyed conservative columnist and ABC News analyst, predicted that Romney would carry Minnesota en route to an easy victory with more than three hundred electoral votes. On Election Day even liberal Fox News employees, conditioned by what they heard all day, went to work thinking Romney had it. Roger Ailes saw which way things were moving earlier than many of his people. In the morning he told his on-air talent, “If things don’t go well, don’t look like your dog died on the air.”

  After all the networks, including Fox, called the election for Obama, Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director, began emailing complaints to Fox anchor Chris Wallace. Boston claimed “real doubts,” as Wallace told viewers at 11:25 p.m., that Ohio was in the Obama column. Rove, also receiving emails from the Romney high command, echoed the caution. During a commercial break, producers in the Fox control room asked him, “Karl, what partner, Russ Schriefer, record earlydo you know?” Rove invoked the disputed election of 2000 but otherwise offered no new information.

  When live coverage resumed, viewers were treated to nearly twenty minutes of indelible political television as Rove stood athwart history shouting “No!” In the calm voice of an analyst, he told the anchors, “We’ve got to be careful about calling this when we have 991 votes separating the candidates.” Given the reversed network calls of 2000 and 2004, Rove might have had reason to be cautious, but the part about “991 votes separating the candidates” signaled that he was desperately grasping at straws. Even casual observers of politics know that the raw vote total is irrelevant when teams of statisticians across five networks use sample precincts for projections.

  As Rove patronized the anchors—“I’d be very cautious about intruding into this process”—and continued his odd and fact-free analysis of Ohio counties, a huge cheer went up at the Boston convention center, where the Romney throng watching Fox on the monitors saw hope from a celebrated Republican strategist. Fox didn’t air the cheer, keeping its cameras on the anchors and analysts in New York. After Rove finished and a brief silence settled over the set, anchor Megyn Kelly said, “That’s awkward.”

  Calling in from home, Ailes told his news chief, Mike Clemente, to have Kelly stay on-camera and stroll down the hall to the Fox decision desk to find out what was going on, another sign of Ailes’s instinctive talent as a TV producer. When she arrived, Arnon Mishkin and Chris Stirewalt of the decision desk told her they were “quite comfortable with the call in Ohio” and “99.9 percent” certain that the president had been reelected.

  Back on the set, Rove continued to contest the call. “They know the science!” Kelly responded, with the exasperation she usually reserved for Democrats. As Fox cameras cut to another roar from the crowd at McCormick Place in Chicago, Kelly inadvertently captured the mood of Obama supporters everywhere. “They are not listening to Karl,” she said. “They don’t care what Karl said.”

  Next to the president’s reelection, Rove’s odd appearance was the main topic of conversation in millions of homes and workplaces the next day. Here was a man responsible for investing hundreds of millions of super PAC dollars into the campaign helplessly watching it all disappear. Liberals thought it was outrageous that Fox would have the quarterback of their team deciding who won, but they relished a different metaphor: the Wicked Witch of the West melting before Dorothy’s eyes. Embarrassed conservatives praised Fox for standing up to Rove, who would face their wrath for wasting so much money with so little to show for it.

  EVERY ELECTION DAY assumption of the Romney campaign was mistaken. It assumed the Democratic turnout would end up somewhere between that in 2004 and 2010 when it was much closer to that in 2008. It failed to recognize that the independents moving their way (the much heralded “momentum”) were just former Republicans returning to their natural home. And it wrongly predicted that undecided voters would break for Romney in the end.

  But even after Fox projected that Obama won, the Romney high command wouldn’t give up for nearly an hour. Campaign lawyers had planes partner, Russ Schriefer, " aid="1MPaready to fly to Florida, Virginia, and Ohio, where Scott Jennings, the Ohio state director, and his colleagues were still saying it was too close to call. Visions of 2000, when the networks late in the evening moved Florida from Gore’s column to Bush’s, danced in their heads. Romney’s friend and campaign chairman, Bob White, was game to reprise Don Evans’s role in 2000 and go into the convention hall and tell the world that the governor wasn’t ready to concede. But now Colorado and Virginia were definitely gone, and Florida much closer than expected. Romney was “shell shocked,” as one aide put it. “It’s not going to happen,” the candidate said.

  All night Paul Ryan had clung to the example of the June 2012 Wisconsin recall election that Governor Scott Walker survived: “I heard the same thing before the recall: ‘Walker’s not gonna win.’ And then he blew it out.” He paced the living room of his hotel suite as the returns flowed in. Finally, Dan Senor, hearing on the phone that Romney was preparing to concede, pulled Ryan into the bedroom of the suite, sat him down, and told him it was over. Ryan was stunned. “What are we in for?” he said, worrying aloud about the country with four more years of Obama.

  By the time the running mates and their families came together at the Westin, Ann Romney and Janna Ryan were weeping. As staff filtered in, Romney wrapped his people in warm hugs. They had always seen a humanity and decency in him that many voters never glimpsed. Romney’s personal assistant, Garrett Jackson, called Marvin Nicholson to arrange the concession call. The rivals had a short polite conversation that the president, with a hand over one ear, couldn’t hear well because of the noise in his suite. Romney’s impromptu five-minute concession speech, delivered an hour and forty minutes after the networks called the election, was gracious, but the strain showed.

  THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL election wasn’t close. Obama crushed Romney in the Electoral College, 332–206, and carried every original battleground state except North Carolina. He could have lost both Ohio and Florida and still prevailed. When the popular vote was fully counted a week later, he had won 51 to 47 percent (a fitting number for Romney), with a margin of around five million votes out of 126 million ballots cast. The Obama coalition consisted of women, young people, labor, blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, gays, and those with advanced degrees. A collection of Democratic Party constituency groups that had managed to carry only one state for George McGovern in 1972 (Massachusetts) and one state for Walter Monda
le in 1984 (Minnesota) now constituted a majority. Romney won 59 percent of the white vote and carried seniors by 12 points, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

  The gender gap remained, with Obama carrying 55 percent of women and Romney 52 percent of men. But all of the stories about “the enthusiasm gap” turned out to be wrong. While young voters may not have swooned for Obama this time, they voted for him by 20 points. That was down from his unprecedented margin of 35 points in 2008 but still a large part of his victory, especially as the youth vote grew to one-fifth of the electorate. While Romney narrowly carried the white youth vote, it didn’t help him much. More than 40 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old voters were nonwhite, a sign of America’s new face. Young voters were now a dependable part of the Democratic coalition and less likely than in the always said the same thing: onvpast to find an excuse not to vote.

  African Americans, 93 percent for Obama, remained constant from 2008 at 13 percent of the electorate. Boston had few contacts in the black community, and its assumptions (and those of much of the press) of dampened enthusiasm were inaccurate. To the surprise of everyone except African American politicians and local leaders, black turnout was actually up in battleground states over 2008. In Ohio, where 200,000 more blacks voted than the last time, their percentage of the electorate increased by nearly a third (to 15 percent), in part because many whites stayed home. In Virginia eleven predominantly black counties in the southeastern part of the state increased their turnout over 2008, more than compensating for rural white counties that voted heavily for Romney.