We had to swing by the motel to get some bags, and I plopped down in the business center and started to print out all the official results, internal tabulations, and entrance polls I could get my hands on. Turnout had dwarfed even our fantasies—more than 240,000 people came to caucus. Twice I was warned by our advance staff to get up and get moving, but I couldn’t pull myself away. We had devoted our lives to this day, and I wanted to spend some of the plane ride really poring over the data to see exactly what had happened. Iowa was done, but I was not ready to be done with Iowa. Finally Axelrod, usually the late one, came up to me and barked, “Plouffe! Get your head out of Iowa! Into New Hampshire!” With a sigh, I reluctantly peeled myself away.
From inception to election our campaign lasted a total of two years. Half of that was essentially spent on Iowa. The state became our laboratory, and much of what we would do and try later in the campaign was a direct result of the lessons learned there.
Those lessons were many. A homegrown, committed grassroots organization was a mighty weapon when properly motivated and trusted to take initiative. Young voters would indeed turn out for Barack Obama. In Iowa, defying all history, voters under thirty turned out at the same rate as those over sixty-five; older voters traditionally had shown up in double the numbers. Our unwavering commitment to an electoral strategy and message made us a more solid and disciplined campaign. With the “big” things settled, we could focus on creative and relentless execution, not casting about for new messages and strategies every few weeks. We had also confirmed an old axiom: money matters. In the last days before Iowa, Clinton and Edwards both had huge outside money spent on their behalf by private groups and individuals. On our side, we started alone on the airwaves and in the mail. Yet we were able to fight back, close to dollar for dollar. The power of our fund-raising and our growing donor base gave us the financial flexibility to ensure that we could match our opponents and their outside help combined.
Directly exposing voters to Obama had been key for us, but we would never again be able to spend as much time doing that as we had in Iowa. From here on, advertising and strong person-to-person communication would be even more important—deficient but important substitutes for the candidate himself. Our core message of change trumped experience. And perhaps the low road that voters thought Clinton was traveling more often than we were might lead her campaign to less success than they expected. We were rewarded in our belief that technology would help us organize and grow the campaign. Many in Iowa organized online for us and even more first made contact with us through the Web. And we found that we could use the Internet to drive our message, in some cases circumventing the mainstream media filter. It also allowed us to provide basic voting info—like where to caucus—that was crucial when trying to expand the electorate beyond habitual voters.
Our campaign team, once considered deficient to the vaunted Clinton juggernaut, not only hung with them but also beat them. We might be unknown and unconventional in approach, but we pulled together and did what we set out to do. And far more important than the rest of the lessons was what we learned from the performance of our candidate. Meandering, unmotivated, and hesitant in the early going, he buckled down and turned in one of the best performances of any candidate in recent memory during the close in Iowa. He was forceful, passionate, clear, and motivational, all without making any major mistakes under the harshest of spotlights. No matter what happened in the coming weeks, the result in Iowa was a testament to him, to his performance under pressure, to his authentic call for change, and the connection he developed with thousands of Iowans who gave all they had to the campaign. The numbers on caucus night reflected their commitment and dedication.
As we drove down Fleur Drive, the last leg to the Des Moines airport, I was flush with memories and thoughts. We passed the apartment building where I had lived nineteen years before, making $600 a month working for Tom Harkin at the bottom of the campaign totem pole. Now I was leaving as the manager for the first African American ever to win the Iowa caucuses and the first to have a real shot at the presidency.
We did not know if or when we’d be back in Iowa. It had defined our lives for a year. But this, I thought, has to be one of the best feelings in American politics—to be pulling up to the Des Moines airport, your charter waiting, taking off into the early-morning skies as the winner of the Iowa caucuses, heading to New Hampshire with momentum at your back.
As we pulled up, though, we had a bit of a surprise: we had to wait before proceeding to the tarmac because the Clinton plane was taking off. As we cooled our heels I had a delicious thought: this will be the last time she’s ever in front of us again.
The first phase of Plan A had gone perfectly. The second phase was New Hampshire, and we were all much more confident than we had been just a few hours before that we would strike a mortal blow to Hillary in the New England snows. As we lifted into the air and the skyline of Des Moines receded behind us, I was still energized. “I don’t just want to win New Hampshire,” I blustered to Ax, “I want to pound them into submission, win it by double digits.”
“Greedy, now?” he asked, smiling. “But yeah, it could happen. Essentially we’re tied now. We could be up ten by Saturday and then momentum from the win here settles in. It sets up perfectly.”
As we reached cruising altitude I settled back into my seat. “Hope they enjoy that charter up ahead of us. She could be flying commercial sooner than she thinks.”
6
Roller-Coaster Time
On Friday, January 4, we landed in New Hampshire after 4:00 a.m. As we got to the hotel, it was nearly time for the day’s first conference call, so I skipped sleep altogether. Instead I checked our online fund-raising numbers; they were through the roof, with over $6 million raised in the hours since we were declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses.It was like a lit match had been dropped in gasoline. New donors and fund-raisers were showing up everywhere, wanting to help a potential winner, and our previous donors and fund-raisers were digging deeper as their initial investment was rewarded in Iowa.
Obama made it clear from the beginning that he did not want to be left shouldering a big debt. I had always managed campaigns that way, so we had prepared for the worst and had hoped for the best, budgeting conservatively post-Iowa and projecting only $10 million raised for all of January. We assumed that even with a loss we could cobble together enough money through our diehard supporters to execute our game plan in the remaining early states. Now, we almost certainly would raise over $10 million in the first eight days of January alone and might raise over $30 million in January, giving us what we believed would be a huge financial advantage for Super Tuesday. In the space of a few hours, we had not just won Iowa but also considerably strengthened our ability to compete against Clinton in a drawn-out slugfest.
Friday morning, sleep deprived but showered, Gibbs, Axelrod, and I climbed into the motorcade idling outside our hotel and thumbed through the morning’s stories on our BlackBerrys while we waited for Obama to emerge. We were working our way through the standard road show campaign breakfast—coffee and Dunkin’ Donuts to go. I was tired but enjoying the moment of peace when Ax erupted from the backseat.
“Shit!” he yelled out. “I don’t believe it.” Well, I thought, I guess the good times can’t last forever.
I turned around to face him in the backseat. “What is it?” I asked. “What a shitty story? Is it bad?”
He looked up at me with a mixture of despair and incredulity. “I got glazed doughnut in the trackwheel of my BlackBerry and it’s stuck,” he replied. “I can’t get the thing to work.”
I stared at him for a second before bursting into laughter. In another second the whole van had joined in. Ax looked beleaguered but then finally cracked a smile. For all his brilliance as a communicator and strategist, Ax was legendary within the campaign for spilling food and mishaps with electronic gadgets. But this was the piece de resistance. It had to be a first in the history of smartphones—dea
th by glazed doughnut. If we had lost Iowa, it would have been just another pain in the ass. But we were on cloud nine, so it was part of the adventure. Glazegate.
I was happy to see Ax bask in the post-Iowa glow. This was Obama’s campaign, of course. But after him, the DNA of the organization was mostly David Axelrod’s. Over the years he and Obama had become more friends than business associates, and Ax had been instrumental to Obama throughout his career. Without David, I’m not sure Obama would have won his 2004 Senate race and made it to the national stage. Many of us who were working on the campaign at senior levels were there because of an Axelrod connection. David’s career was very successful by any measure, but I always got the sense that he was yearning for one last ride. Though Ax was a street fighter when he needed to be, at heart he was an idealist. This campaign, fueled by average people and appealing to their best aspirations rather than their darkest fears, was in many ways his ideal. He had come full circle, having started in politics as a young boy handing out leaflets for Bobby Kennedy in Stuyvesant Town, a housing development on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whatever happened from here on out, I felt that Ax would feel satisfied that he had experienced the campaign he had long yearned for.
Historically, the period between New Hampshire and Iowa was often the most turbulent seven days of campaigning in American politics—and the longest. Working a New Hampshire campaign, you could pack a couple of lifetimes into that short period. For us, New Hampshire came only five days after Iowa—four campaigning days. It could be a ferocious beast, but we thought we could use it to our advantage. The fallout from Iowa would dominate the first couple of days of press coverage. Most observers, if they had to bet their mortgage, would have put their money on Clinton to win the caucuses. Our Iowa victory in itself was not an earthquake, but when you threw in the eight-point margin, Clinton’s third-place finish, and the demographic successes we had, it was seismic. We would be riding the crest of a wave of media coverage about everything we had done right while Clinton was eviscerated for what she had done wrong.
Then, just as the rosy reviews from Iowa began to subside, there would be a major debate on Saturday night that would dominate coverage until Primary Day. People would be voting just as our momentum reached its peak. Or so we thought. Our schedule in New Hampshire was a good mix of retail campaigning—drop-ins at coffee shops and diners—plus scheduled events. We did tons of ground-level, one-on-one campaigning; we wanted to generate pictures of Obama hustling for votes, connecting with average voters, not taking anything for granted. But the press take on the campaign was like those stops never happened. The shots were all of the enormous crowds we were drawing. Granted, it was true—our events brought together some of the biggest crowds ever seen in the New Hampshire primary. But the relentless attention the media gave these events told a different story than the one we were trying to get across. For five days the coverage was predictable and consistent—Obama has huge momentum, he’s drawing rock-star crowds, he’s gaining and surpassing Clinton in the polls. The only question is how big his margin of victory will be.
All this made us a little uneasy. But it squared with reality. We were surging in every poll, ours included. The fieldwork on the ground was picking up similar momentum. We had every volunteer shift for the last four days filled well ahead of time. We were making every phone call, waving every sign, knocking on every door. We were actually telling people from out of state who inquired about helping that there was no need—the inn was full in New Hampshire. This never happens in campaigns. You always need more help.
Our New Hampshire operation was not as big, to scale, as Iowa, but we had invested early, and our staff was embedded in communities right from the start. We were also fighting a different kind of battle than we had in Iowa, with a strategy geared toward winning a different type of contest. Field and volunteer work can have a decisive impact on a single caucus, where the turnout is much smaller than a state- or countywide primary; theoretically it’s easier to adjust the electorate. If ten people normally turn out for a precinct caucus, and you bring two new people, you’ve significantly changed the math. But when five hundred people turn out in a precinct to vote in a primary, adding two people is tinkering at the margins. And New Hampshire traditionally had sky-high turnout in their primary. There was no way to replicate the near doubling of participants we had effected in Iowa’s caucuses—there just weren’t that many new voters to find. We would have had to gain support among those who were already likely to attend. The entire Clinton campaign seemed to have a better grounding and comfort level in New Hampshire, from the candidate on down. Iowa had been foreign turf for many of them, Hillary included. New Hampshire was like a comfortable old sweater for her. We had maintained a laserlike focus on Iowa leading up to the caucuses, and the fit in New Hampshire was not as good.
Still, we were hitting all our internal field metrics in terms of doors knocked, calls made, and volunteers recruited. We assumed the Clinton campaign was, too, but we viewed being at rough parity organizationally a plus, given that the Clintons had such strong and deep ties going back to 1991 in the state.
On Saturday we had one big-crowd event scheduled before an afternoon of light prep for the debate. The event was a rally at Nashua North High School, a huge school in an important suburban community where Clinton was strong. As our road show drew near the school, over an hour after the event had begun, there were still people streaming toward the doors. We couldn’t believe our eyes: a line of people literally a mile long stood in the snow outside, breath visible above grinning faces, cheerfully waiting to get in. Our hard count—the number of people that had told our staff and volunteers they were coming—was over a thousand, which would have been a huge event by New Hampshire standards. Now it was clear we were going to have four or five times that many. And a great number of those additional people must have decided to go on their own in the final hours before the event, which was an even more important factor than the high turnout.
Obama waved to people as we drove by. “This is unbelievable,” he whispered, shaking his head. We were all speechless at the sight in front of us—a huge outpouring of optimism in tough, hardened, flinty New Hampshire.
I told him there was no way everyone could fit in the main gym. The advance teams would have to scramble to put people in at least one if not two overflow areas, which meant he would have to give extra speeches. We were still tired from two sleepless nights and had a big debate looming, so I half expected Barack to meet this announcement with mild complaint. Not today. “Of course,” he agreed, without hesitation. “They’ve been standing out in the cold, we need to take care of them.”
Most of our events in this five-day window were bursting at the seams, so we switched from our normal New Hampshire town-hall format, where Obama took questions from the audience, to a straight stump speech. We had learned that once crowds got over a thousand, question-and-answer did not work well. With the odd exception of one or two smaller, invite-only events at people’s homes, we closed our New Hampshire campaigning with large rallies.
When the Nashua event finally wrapped up, overflow speeches and all, we found we couldn’t leave. There was one long driveway from the school to the main road, and it was clogged with exiting traffic. If we departed, it would keep everyone waiting as the Secret Service and police cleared the driveway and surrounding road to let us pass. That was a no-no in New Hampshire; it would come off as too self-important, especially since we were trying to attract the support of everyone who had just attended the event. And they had already been forced to cool their heels after waiting a long time to get in. So we waited. And waited. And waited. This was just fine with our candidate, who was never eager to spend hours in debate prep. We spent the wait in the emptied-out gym, shooting hoops, throwing a baseball around, and generally feeling very loose. Gibbs was teaching Obama how to throw a football in a spiral—while Barack was a natural athlete, he had never played football as a kid, so throwing a tight spiral bedev
iled him; he was determined to master it. I had seen this routine often and noted his halting progress. His throws were now a little straighter but still lacked rotation. We tried to get him to do a debate prep session by phone with the team back at the hotel, but he brushed this aside. We were not overly concerned, because he was relaxed and feeling confident, which is half the battle.
I called Axelrod, who was back at the hotel working on questions for the prep session, and reported in. “We’d better win this primary,” I told him. “And big, because every reporter at this event seemed to think it was the breaking point for Hillary—that the dam broke in Iowa and now we’re going to sweep to an easy victory.” I thought back on the gym and two overflow rooms packed with people. “And I guess it was something to see. But it all seems a little too easy, especially after the slog Iowa was.”
Ax was trying to reconcile the facts of our ascendance with his inner anxiety. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right,” he replied. “It almost seems like the New Hampshire primary has become a pro forma exercise in our march to the nomination. But I suspect New Hampshire voters don’t see it that way, just like Iowa voters didn’t see Hillary as inevitable when we were thirty points down nationally.” He let out a sigh. “I just hope we keep gaining ground because I don’t like this dynamic now, the rock star gallivanting across the snows of New Hampshire.”
Some of this worry I attributed to Ax’s tendency to see the glass half empty. But I, too, was concerned that things simply couldn’t be as rosy as they appeared.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 19