The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory

by David Plouffe

  We all told AFSCME we were not attending. The next day I receive a sheepish call from Patti, who had infuriating news: they needed to reverse course and attend after all.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to stick to the plan but I got overruled. Not at the staff level.” I assumed she was talking about Bill, who was exceedingly close to AFSCME’s president after receiving a big endorsement from him during the 1992 primary.

  “So, we are going to the forum,” she concluded.

  I was deeply frustrated. “Our first test, and you guys blinked? Now we’re going to have to do them all, a damn debate a week, maybe more.”

  Patti sounded resigned. “I know. We tried. That’s all I can say.”

  I was boiling over. I called Prince and he said he would talk to his candidate, but that he was hoping to hold tough. We assumed the Edwards campaign would be pretty disciplined, having been around the track once before. With a clear electoral strategy of winning Iowa and hoping lightning would strike, they knew time was precious.

  A few minutes later, he called back with bad news. They were really pissed about it, but if Hillary went, they felt like they needed to as well, or they were essentially ceding AFSCME’s endorsement to her.

  Just like that, our debate deal was out the window and the whims of outside groups were threatening to drive a large part of the campaign. Now we had a decision to make.

  We stuck to our guns. While the other candidates shared a stage in Nevada, we elected to spend the day in Iowa instead, with Obama’s support. “Plouffe,” he said to me when he got word of our decision, “I assume it was not in your plan to cede the AFSCME endorsement, which I suspect we will have done by not showing up, but I’ll stick to our plan here.”

  “Our plan to win doesn’t really take endorsements into account,” I responded. “We should assume that we’ll get few if any institutional endorsements. And anyway, AFSCME is a lost cause as far as I’m concerned. Their president is thick as thieves with the Clintons.”

  Watching it play out, I knew we’d made the right move. It was not even a close contest in terms of who did more that day to further their chances of winning the nomination. We signed up Iowa caucus-goers. The other candidates—a total of eight went to the forum—were yakking on a stage for only ten minutes each. And they blew most of a day traveling to and from Nevada.

  We stood alone in our decision. Most first-time presidential candidates would have folded in a minute. It speaks to Obama’s discipline that he went along, as well as to his belief that we should try to run our campaign on our own terms.

  This AFSCME affair was a very illuminating exercise, and it boosted my confidence. The Clinton folks were not showing the discipline and resolve that we had expected. Political pressure could clearly get them to change course, even if doing so went against their strategic interest. It was a strong indication of weakness; given their strength in the race, any sign of faltering was welcome. If we could count on our discipline being matched with reactivity on their part, it gave us a leg up.

  We did agree to attend the next candidate forum, on health care (also in Nevada), sponsored by SEIU, the Service Employees International Union. We structured our event schedule so we would be out west anyway and wouldn’t have to waste travel time, but I think we showed weakness here on two fronts. First, by going at all. We should have stuck to our guns when it came to denying requests. That one acceptance revived the hopes of countless other groups and made future events that much harder to decline. Over time we declined many more appearances than the other candidates, and eventually some order was established, but we did buckle from time to time. Second, Obama’s performance, by his own admission, was very weak. He rambled, got very defensive when pressed on certain issue-related questions, and was generally off his game—particularly in comparison to Clinton, who was sharp and had her bullet points down. He even took the bait on why his website still lacked a detailed health care plan (because we didn’t have one!); instead of simply laying out his health care reform principles and promising a fleshed-out plan in due time, Obama said his campaign was new and if “we didn’t have a plan on there in a couple of months, we’d be in trouble.”

  It was not a good day for the home team.

  His performance showed we had a lot of work to do. Obama’s chief takeaway was that he needed to get all his policy plans completely developed right away. This became a constant struggle in the months ahead. Axelrod and I knew that of course we needed to develop white papers, but we viewed these early multicandidate forums largely as message exercises. What are your priorities? Who are the special interests standing in the way of progress? What is your criticism of Bush in that area? How are you going to get it done? And when it came to these questions, Obama already had a solid framework for just about any answer. To spend time developing complex policy positions now would drain resources we needed to maintain our momentum. The lesson was valuable, but it was still a blow to Obama’s confidence.

  He called me after the forum, very dejected. “I just whiffed up there, and Hillary was exceptional. I am not there yet.”

  It was the first time I sensed that he might be realizing what taking on Hillary was going to mean.

  But there were many other reasons for him to feel confident. Our grassroots base was growing very quickly. Online sign-ups were progressing nicely and reached 450,000 by the end of March. We had taken the unusual step of holding rallies in cities around the country, and this was very educational. I had initially pursued rallies to maintain the perception of the campaign as grassroots-driven. We spent most of the first few months fund-raising, while much of our organizing took shape online and in living rooms. Free rallies provided a nice balance to the Geffen-style high-roller events, and the database was growing every day.

  We held rallies during this period in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Austin. All were well attended, but the Austin event drew over twenty thousand people, an enormous crowd for a primary event. We didn’t ask for money at the rally, but we followed up with e-mail and mail solicitations. The response was terrific. At the end of March, the county with the largest number of Obama contributors was Cook County, Illinois, not surprisingly. Number two, though, was not Manhattan or Miami Dade or Marin County, California. It was small-by-comparison Travis County, Texas, home of Austin.

  One of the beauties of technology and data is that you can track the contribution history and volunteer performance of people all the way through the campaign. On November 4, 2008, we knew how each person at the Austin rally had performed through the entire campaign. How many times did they contribute? Did they volunteer? Did they vote in the Texas primary and attend the Texas caucus? Are they part of an online group? This type of data made establishing metrics much easier and allowed us to track what people responded to and what they didn’t.

  The rallies were a big part of our growth during the spring. Many people got involved through our website on their own initiative, and we had great success in encouraging people to ask others to sign up. When people asked how they could help, we told them that nothing was more important than getting additional people signed up on the site so we could communicate with them and try to convert them to donors and volunteers. All this was happening before we had done any large-scale online advertising to drive people to our site. It was remarkable organic growth that revealed a core of passionate early devotees.

  The Texas swing also marked the end of our days flying commercial. We spent the first weeks on passenger jets, two or three legs a day. It was brutal, but we were concerned about money. Obama himself cited cost reasons to reject the notion we should be flying private more often. As each day passed, however, it became harder and harder just to get through the airport. He was being mobbed by people who wanted to take a picture with him. Many were also running into nearby airport bookstores to buy one of his two books, generally on prominent display, so he could sign them. We had private security traveling with us, but they could do little to help speed thi
ngs along. Obama called me the morning after Austin from the airport.

  “There’s a sea of people here. I’ve barely moved in a half hour,” he quietly said into his phone as he signed books. “I’m just going to have to make a run for it toward security if I’m going to make the flight.”

  I could hear the hum of the crowd through the phone.

  “The people are all very nice, but we are going to have to get to airports two hours early at this rate. The upside is, I’m selling a lot of books. My publisher will be happy.”

  He seemed more bemused than irritated by the situation, but we decided we needed to make a travel change. And with that, Southwest’s brief tenure as the unofficial airline of the Obama campaign had come to an end.

  Another unique decision we made during this time period was to try some low-dollar fund-raising events. This idea came from a supporter in Kentucky, Matthew Barzun, who was one of our larger fund-raisers. We were holding a fund-raiser for high-dollar contributors in Louisville, and Matt’s team wanted to add an event with ticket prices of around $25 so that more people could see Obama. Most high-dollar fund-raisers would never have considered this, but it spoke to the commitment our core early fund-raisers felt to the cause and the excitement they were picking up on the ground.

  Our initial inclination was to decline; a low-dollar event added time and was labor intensive, and we would be lucky to break even. Kentucky was not an early primary state, so the organizational value was very limited.

  But they persisted and said they could do all the work themselves; we would just need to send a few e-mails to people in the area and set up an event page online where people could sign up. Matt and his group would shoulder the load so our staff could keep its focus on the big-ticket event generating the bulk of the revenue. Trusting our ground team, we agreed to give it a shot.

  The event was a smashing success. Three thousand people came, all paying, to hear Obama. True to their word, the local folks took care of pretty much everything. And, as in Texas, many attendees gave again when we solicited them online.

  We carried this model across the country. Through dozens of events like it we grew our list and donor base, and many of these low-dollar contributors became our best volunteers down the line. It also provided a nice local press hit wherever we happened to be. Holding only a high-dollar dinner would generate a local-news story that Barack Obama was in town raising money, but when we added the low-dollar event, the report would also include footage of Obama delivering his message speech and excited supporters at what looked like a rally. It gave viewers strong images to associate with our campaign. And Obama really enjoyed them; he drew energy and motivation from the crowds, and appreciated the organizational strategy behind them.

  This was also the beginning of what might be called “citizen fund-raisers.” In most campaigns there are people who give a small amount in response to an e-mail appeal or direct-mail letter, and then there are people at the higher end who host big events or collect large checks from wealthier contributors, a process called bundling.

  In our campaign, grassroots supporters started to raise money. Generally, they brought in relatively small amounts—$100, $500, $1,000—using a tool on our social-networking site to keep track of the money they raised and to ask others to contribute.

  Over time this grew into a powerful force. We treated these citizen fund-raisers as no less important than our larger raisers. They were asked to join conference calls with Barack, me, and other senior staff so we could thank them for what they were doing and give them updates on the campaign. They believed their effort was valued—and it was—so they dug deeper and kept raising. This was not a tactical relationship. It was authentic. And that authenticity became a very powerful driver in the connection between Barack Obama and his supporters.

  I suspected from the beginning we would have a core of rabid supporters who wanted Obama paraphernalia. Being in the T-shirt business along with the election business is kind of a pain in the ass, and most political campaigns outsource this task to a vendor. The campaign doesn’t make any money if they do, but a service is being provided to supporters who want a T-shirt or a bumper sticker. I asked our lawyers if we could keep the merchandising in-house. There were two complications. First, we had to buy all the merchandise up front. It would be considered an illegal corporate contribution for us to pay the vendor for only the stuff that sold. So if we planned poorly we would be stuck with expensive inventory, tying up our money in mugs and hats gathering dust in a closet at HQ. Second, it added a layer of complexity to our campaign finance reporting; since these purchases would be contributions, it meant someone who had already given us the maximum allowable amount of $2,300 could not buy merchandise. Taking this on would require detailed tracking.

  I decided to plow ahead anyway, and we ended up netting millions from sales of Obama merchandise during the campaign—and I am convinced we actually expanded our base at the same time. Some in the press scoffed at this, suggesting that including merch sales in contributions inflated our donor numbers. I thought the opposite was true. If someone felt strongly enough about Obama to buy merchandise, they would probably also be receptive to nonmerchandise solicitations, and more likely to volunteer. And, of course, they were wearing Obama stuff around town, which had value as well.

  “Can I get a cut of all the money we’re making off my name and face?” Barack joked.

  “No,” I told him. “Just consider this a down payment on the private plane.”

  I often kidded Barack that at any moment I might step down as manager and open up the Obama Store kiosk at O‘Hare. There were plenty of days when the notion was appealing.

  We also experimented with live streaming video during this early period. Our first and most significant effort was to live stream a small-town Obama event in western Iowa to all of our supporters around the country. It would ground them in our campaign’s strategy—all about Iowa. We needed to condition our supporters to understand our electoral strategy and path so they would not feel dejected by national polls showing us losing big in later primary states where Hillary had a huge lead.

  Despite a few technical issues, the live stream grabbed a significant number of people, and it became a sharp tool in our arsenal. Rospars and his new media team increasingly looked for events that lent themselves to the live-streaming option, another way we could try to make barackobama.com a “home,” where supporters could find valuable content and comprehensive information about the campaign with one click of the mouse.

  But it was not all forward progress. Our opponents and the media were going through every phase of Obama’s life, trying to unearth any inconsistent facts. Our own preparatory research on Obama was still way behind schedule; it should have been completed before he announced, and we were scrambling to catch up. In the meantime, not a day went by without a reporter or opponent confronting us with a new question about something we were unaware of, like so many cats delivering dead mice to our door. This was probably the hardest part of getting the campaign off the ground. We were routinely blindsided and had to decide quickly what information we had and didn’t have, what we needed to get, and how to respond. It was brutal, and the time spent putting out these fires added to every day.

  The biggest moment and metric of the entire first quarter of the campaign was release of the candidates’ fund-raising reports, which covered the period through March 31. The press had circled this date on their calendar from Day One, and we had worked hard to make sure we had positive news to report. This early in the campaign, fund-raising is viewed as a test of viability and potential. Too much is probably read into these numbers by the press, but a poor report certainly can endanger a candidate’s prospects.

  It became clear as we moved into March that we would exceed our $12 million goal. Then it became clear we would obliterate that number. The take from our events was blowing by the goals we had set, sometimes doubling or tripling them. Almost all of March was a succession of fund-rais
ers, sometimes four or five events a day. Our online money was still modest, so almost all of this came from our finance staff and our core, early fund-raisers across the country. They put us on their shoulders.

  It was unlike anything any of us had ever seen. Our finance staff was both amazed and struggling to keep up. We had to keep finding bigger venues to hold all the people willing to pay to hear Obama. This was the quarter when we were most reliant on old-fashioned fund-raising. Penny Pritzker, our finance chair, was a prominent businesswoman, new to this level of politics ; the head of Hyatt, she earned people’s respect immediately with her poise and leadership qualities. Penny and Julianna and her staff did a great job of lining up talented raisers, many of whom had never met Obama or did not know him well.

  Our pitch was not based on access, titles, or future jobs or influence. That resonated with a lot of people. We simply put forth that Obama was the right candidate for the time, and that we had a strategy to win that was more plausible than people might realize. We also made it clear that we were a democratic organization, without a lot of hierarchy. This contrasted with the Clinton campaign, where only the top dog in a region was afforded special fund-raiser treatment.

  Most finance committees are a pain in the ass, offering ideas on everything, trying to monopolize time with the candidate, and generally thinking they should be running the show. Ours was anything but, a great mix of young and old, experienced fund-raisers and novices, and an important ingredient to our success. There was a great esprit d‘corps, and like the rest of the staff, none of the finance people joined Obama because they had picked out the ambassadorship they wanted; they were there because they believed in him and the promise his candidacy held.

  We raised $4 million online, a significant amount but far less than our fund-raisers wanted. Our new media team and I were very careful about how often we asked people for money by e-mail. We wanted our online contributors to have a balanced experience with us, thinking that if they felt part of and connected to the whole campaign, they might be more generous over time. The fund-raisers, who felt the pressure I was putting on them to post a big number, wanted to ask for as much as possible, as often as possible, starting right away. These were some of the tensest disputes I had to navigate throughout the whole campaign, and they left a lingering sore spot that did not heal for over a year. The finance team really believed that the new media team was underperforming financially, and the new media team thought the finance team viewed them and our supporters as an ATM.