Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (13 page)

Teddy Goff told my colleague Aaron Blake, “For people who allowed us, we were able to say to them, ‘All right, you just watched a video about registering to vote. Don’t just share it with all your friends on Facebook. We’ve run a match, and here are your ten friends on Facebook who we think may not be registered to vote and live in Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Florida.’” This was especially helpful in trying to reach voters under age thirty. On Obama’s target lists, the voter file contained no good contact information for half of those young voters—they didn’t have landlines, and no other information was available. But Goff said 85 percent of that group were on Facebook and could be reached by a friend of a friend. Reed described another example. Someone interested in health care might click on an ad on Facebook, and up would pop an infographic on health care. At the end of it, there would be a “share” button, and if the person clicked on it, up popped names of friends the person could share the information with. The campaign knew from its own database which of those friends were most likely to respond to information about health care. “We went through and we looked at all those friends and found the ones that were the best matches for that specific piece of content,” Reed said.

Google’s Eric Schmidt said, “If you don’t know anything about campaigns you would assume it’s national, but a successful campaign is highly, highly local, down to the zip code. The revolution in technology is to understand where the undecideds are in this district and how you reach them.” That was what the integration of technology and old-fashioned organizing was designed to do for Obama in 2012.

•   •   •

At the beginning of the Obama presidency, Organizing for America, the successor to the 2008 campaign organization, was run through the DNC under the supervision of Dillon. Some Democrats hoped it would be the president’s secret weapon in helping to win support for his legislative agenda. The results on that front were mixed, and there were few obvious success stories about its political
muscle during the disastrous 2010 elections. The losses in the midterms taught another lesson, Stewart said. “Failure is always a better teacher than success, and 2010 was tough,” he told me. “We learned tactically some lessons, but ultimately I think what probably helped us more than anything else is a lot of our volunteers and staff had only been involved in the ’08 campaign, which was a lot of highs, and unless you were very early on in the process like I was, there weren’t a lot of lows. So 2010 was a good learning experience just in that [it showed us] this isn’t all rainbows and bubblegum. I think it actually helped harden some of our volunteers and staff to prepare for 2012.”

What wasn’t seen was all the work that was taking place behind the scenes—work that no Republican presidential candidate would be able to match in 2012, if for no other reason than the amount of time and money and experimentation invested up front by the Obama team. They were able to test and retest everything. Messina said there were other dividends returned by the decision to keep OFA operating between the campaigns. “It kept our super volunteers active in the organization and gave them a reason to talk to their neighbors for two years and continue to grow their ability and talent, and then second, it put a whole bunch of young kids who were kind of the second- and third-level people in the ’08 race in analytics and gave them a home at the DNC, a boss in Jen O’Malley [Dillon], and a patron at the White House.”

Dan Wagner had come to the DNC after the 2008 election to expand what was initially a tiny analytics operation. David Plouffe had seen the potential for analytics during 2008, and Dillon was a big believer in it as well. In early 2010, others on the Obama team had an epiphany about the value of analytics. It came just before the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy. Many Democrats were still in denial about the direction of the race, incredulous that a little-known Republican state senator named Scott Brown could have enough momentum to defeat Democratic attorney general Martha Coakley. Wagner, who was operating with the analytics team out of the DNC, analyzed the numbers and concluded that Brown was going to win. He delivered his conclusions and the data to Messina. “He said, ‘We’re going to lose, and here’s why we’re going to lose,’ and it happened almost exactly like that,” Messina said. “That’s when we first started saying this model can really
be
something.”
Later that year
, according to Sasha Issenberg, author of
The Victory Lab,
they began modeling seventy-four Senate and House races and pegged the outcomes with extraordinary accuracy.

Dillon and Bird brought Wagner to the reelection campaign, over some internal resistance, when they all moved to Chicago. Eventually the Obama campaign modeled practically everything—voters, states, volunteers, donors, anything that they could think of to improve their efficiency—to give them
greater confidence in the decisions they were making. They wanted to know who was most likely to serve as a volunteer, and they created a model to tell them. They established record numbers of offices in the states, and record numbers of staging areas for volunteers, based in part on analysis of how much more likely people were to volunteer if they were close to an office. “We built a model on volunteer likelihood,” Stewart said. “We built a model on turnout, we built a model on support, we built a model on persuasion—who’s most persuadable.” Dillon described the ways in which the modeling aided fund-raising. “We could model the likelihood of someone being at home during the day and more likely to answer the telephone, so those were the people we would call to help our contact rate,” she said. The campaign created a system that allowed for tailored fund-raising appeals to individual voters. One voter might get an appeal for, say, $213, and another voter got an appeal for a different amount. “Those weren’t random numbers that were being put in there,” she said. “Testing had shown us that if you asked for that amount you’re more likely to get it based on their previous history.” They built a model that told them who was more likely to give online versus who was more likely to respond to direct mail. They saved money by telling their phone vendors not to call certain people; they knew those people wanted to give only online and did not want to be bothered on the phone. In the fall of 2011 the campaign sent out a big direct mail solicitation from Michelle Obama. Half was sent to a list drawn in the traditional way, the other half based on the campaign’s analytic model. Messina said, “Wagner said, ‘I’m going to overperform them.’” He did, by 14 percent.

Virtually every e-mail sent by the campaign included a test of some sort—the subject line, the appeal, the message—all designed to maximize contributions, volunteer hours, and eventually turnout on election day. There was nothing particularly new about this, but it could mean millions of dollars lost or gained and a more efficient use of volunteers’ time. The campaign would break out eighteen smaller groups from their e-mail lists, create eighteen different versions of an e-mail, and then watch the response rate for an hour and go with the winner—or take a combination of subject line and message from different e-mails and turn them into the finished product. Big corporations had used such testing for years, but political campaigns had not. In the Obama tests, the differences among e-mails sometimes were as great as 90 percent. Mitch Stewart said the 2012 campaign was light-years ahead of 2008 in its technical precision and efficiency. “When you’re spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, finding 3 percent efficiency, or 8 percent, that’s real money,” he said.

From modeling and testing, the campaign refined voter outreach. Years earlier, political scientists Don Green and Alan Gerber of Yale had first shown
convincingly that there was added value by having volunteers knock on the doors of prospective voters. The Obama campaign discovered that while that was generally the case, it wasn’t always so, that some voters were more likely to respond to different kinds of contact. “Up until ’12, I would stake my career on the fact that door knocking is the most powerful communication tool that we have, face-to-face communication essentially in terms of grassroots organizing,” Dillon said. “[But] I don’t think you can say today that door-to-door contact is more effective communication for all voters. You need to understand the way people want to take it in. It doesn’t have to be a door knock. It could be a phone call from the person you know or a shared article that you read that they’d be more likely to open because you shared it.”

•   •   •

From their post-2008 analysis and other research into management practices, Obama’s field team concluded that the best management ratio was six or eight to one. That became the model for building the organization—one field director would have half a dozen deputies. The deputies would have six to eight regional field directors, who in turn would oversee the work of six to eight field organizers. Those field organizers were members of the paid staff and also were the connection between the paid team and the volunteers. They interacted directly with the neighborhood team leaders, who led the campaign in their local areas. As was often the case, these neighborhood team leaders were in their fifties or sixties, being directed by Obama campaign field organizers in their twenties.

With those ratios in mind and with an early estimate of the size of the electorate and the likely vote totals they would need to win specific states, the campaign calculated that it would need to recruit fifteen thousand neighborhood team leaders to oversee hundreds of thousands of volunteers. After continuous tweaking of their models, they ended up at just over ten thousand. By November 2011, they had relatively concrete goals for their field operation. In actual numbers they were far short of what they needed—short too of the size of their army in 2008. Starting early and working methodically, they established goals for organizing, held state organizers accountable to meet them, and eventually filled out the organization. The year before the election, Obama’s advisers began setting state-by-state goals. “We didn’t care at all [about] national demographics,” Bird said. “It needs to be states. How can we get the demographics in a place where we can win?” The campaign looked at three groups: Who was registered and who wasn’t? What was the existing and potential electorate? Could they change the composition? Were the people who weren’t registered likely to vote Democratic? “That was number one,” Bird said. “That was how many people can we register and can we change the pie?” Next
they analyzed who had voted for Obama in 2008 but did not vote at all in 2010—the sporadic voters. How many would they need to get to 50 percent? The third group was the pool of potential undecided voters, people who had voted for Obama in 2008 but had voted for Republicans in 2010. Once that analysis was done, the next step was to determine the right blend for each state. “In Nevada the blend was registration and turnout,” he said. “We didn’t need to persuade a single undecided voter if we did our registration work right. In Florida we had to do all three [registration, persuasion, and turnout], and they were all three huge tasks because just the size of all of them is massive.” The campaign established metrics for each state in the early summer of 2011 and then kept refining them. “The worst thing that campaigns do is they set up a plan, they set up a strategy, and they think it’s a noun—like, ‘I got a strategy’—and it’s really a verb,” Bird said. “You should be changing it as you move forward.” They were trying to create an electorate as partial to Obama as possible so that they could win even if the odds said otherwise.

The campaign’s attention to detail rivaled that of the best corporations. Dillon and her team believed in training and preparation and set up a training operation unlike anything campaigns had done previously. “If you think of innovations in campaigns, it could be the biggest we had,” Bird told me. The campaign provided volunteers with training on everything from how to use and manipulate all the data available to how to talk to voters on their doorsteps. Over some objections, Messina approved a budget to cover the cost of training directors in the battleground states. Another innovation was the recruitment of corporate trainers or coaches, who volunteered their time to help teach everyone how to manage. “We recruited a whole group of pro bono executive coaches,” he said. “These are people that coach Fortune 100 companies.” Obama’s team recruited them as volunteers, but instead of having them knock on doors, they were asked to provide management training. “We had them partner up with our state leadership,” Bird said. “They didn’t need to know anything about campaigns, because we didn’t want their advice on how to run a campaign. We wanted their advice on how to be a manager.”

The better trained the volunteers, the more effective they would be. The campaign prepared another thick binder that described best practices for volunteers. They wrote and rewrote scripts to be used when volunteers went knocking on doors. They embraced the work of social scientists—an increasingly common practice in political campaigns—to help them find the right language for those scripts.
They consulted with
what the
New York Times
later called a “dream team” of academics—who called themselves the “consortium of behavioral scientists”—for advice. The group included political scientists, psychologists, and behavioral economists. The campaign was operating well
outside of the traditional network of political consultants. Many of the insights came from academic research that was three or four decades old but up to now mostly ignored by political strategists. Obama’s team embraced it, as Bush’s 2004 campaign had embraced the work done by political scientists on the efficacy of face-to-face communications, and integrated it into its targeting efforts.

Throughout 2011, Obama advisers were baffled by the slow start to the Republican presidential race. They knew from their own experience in 2008 how long it took to build a field operation capable of winning a presidential campaign. They were even more keenly aware of the lead times and money required to build the technological infrastructure to support a sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation for 2012. Republicans could see that the Obama campaign was spending tens of millions of dollars in 2011. They weren’t sure on what.