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

by David Plouffe

  I don’t know if Edwards sanctioned these diplomacy missions or the level of specificity and brazenness that was presented to us. The Edwards saga petered out after that; he stayed in the race through South Carolina, finished third, and dropped out several days later. Eventually he endorsed us; it came at an important time, and we were grateful to have his support. On Friday morning, the day before the South Carolina vote, NBC released a poll that showed our lead over Clinton narrowing to eight points. More significant from the press’s perspective, the poll showed our support among white voters at only 10 percent.

  This created a political firestorm heading into the primary. First, it fueled the big question: could Hillary actually pull off an upset? And even if she could not, the consensus was that a single-digit win for Obama would not meet expectations; the thunderbolt we needed out of South Carolina would end up little more than a fizzle.

  Second, the cable networks started obsessing over the “racial polarization” that seemed to be taking hold in South Carolina. The pundits ventured that even if Obama won South Carolina, it would now be almost entirely with black voters. This would raise real questions about his electability in the general election, questions that Clinton could use against him as part of her strategy to deny him the Democratic nomination.

  While this perception was frustrating to an extent, it was also quite useful to our strategy. Our own polling data and, more important, our field data, showed our lead stable in the mid-high double digits and our white support still over 20 percent. If those numbers held, we would benefit from exceeding expectations in both the overall margin and our support level from white voters. We began to realize that perhaps we could gain outsized momentum from a South Carolina victory after all—if we created a wide enough gap between the expectations produced by conventional wisdom about the race “tightening” and the actual results. To this end, it actually worked to our advantage to have the press see momentum swinging toward Clinton. So when Ron Fournier, a respected AP reporter, went so far as to tell the press heading into primary day that he thought Clinton could pull an upset, it was music to our ears.

  Just about every day we heard criticism about our organization-building in South Carolina. Staying true to our plan, we had rejected the idea of vying for the support of local kingmakers and focused on building from the ground up, just as we had in Iowa. We had to expand the electorate. To win, we needed to turn out younger whites, independents, newly registered African American voters, and African Americans who in the past had voted only sporadically. Getting these people involved required a massive ground effort. We held thousands of local house parties in the state; launched a barbershop and beauty-salon outreach program to find African American voters; organized people of faith and held hundreds of small faith-based gatherings; and worked the colleges relentlessly.

  We ran a ground campaign in South Carolina the likes of which had never before been seen. And it was widely believed by many old hands to be a colossal mistake. Our South Carolina staff deserved medals for staying focused amid the torrent of criticism from the local establishment. They were ridiculed, mocked, and harassed. But we knew we had energy on the ground and the ability to expand our share of the electoral pie. Obama deserved an enormous amount of credit for sticking by our strategy; every time he was down there, someone pulled him aside to tell him we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. But belief in the grass roots was embedded in him as a candidate—and Iowa had shown him how powerful a force it could become.

  The sun rose on Election Day and our fate settled into the hands of a few hundred thousand South Carolina voters. The day also brought a new mishap from Bill Clinton. While speaking to the press shortly before the polls closed, he was asked what it said about Obama that “it takes two of you to beat him.” Bill chuckled, and replied, “That’s just bait too. Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ‘84 and ’88....”

  This response immediately caused a minor furor on the cable shows and blogs. Since it was already primary day in South Carolina, the fallout did not affect the voting, but the radioactivity spread wildly in the days to come. Many saw it as Clinton’s way of suggesting that an Obama win in South Carolina could be discounted because of the heavy African American population—that, in essence, he would win because he was black.

  Bill Clinton took a lot of heat from the press over the course of the campaign, and from time to time I thought he got a raw deal. But this gaffe was hard to explain away. Empirical evidence showed voters throughout the country had a strong reaction to it. They thought it was low-road politics and certainly not a statement befitting a former president. Field reports throughout the day showed turnout would be through the roof, and we liked the details of who was voting. The first exit polls put us up thirty points, which seemed unrealistically high but suggested we would exceed expectations. Coupled with our own analysis of the turnout, it pointed to the dominant win we desperately needed.

  For once the exits were just about dead-on. When the dust settled, we had won South Carolina by a stunning twenty-eight points, earning 55 percent of the electorate, a clear majority. We won a quarter of the white vote, sailing past the media expectations and generating a very positive story line about our broad appeal. We also won white voters under forty, besting Clinton by over ten points. Our expectations strategy had paid off: it was clear this was going to be covered as a very significant win and a big blow to the Clinton campaign. They had competed vigorously and been walloped. Right away, we spun the lopsided margin as a repudiation of the kind of attack politics they had engaged in. Voters appeared to recoil from both their negative tactics and the media obsession with race. Bill Clinton’s Jesse Jackson comment, though not a factor in the vote, only served to add fuel to that narrative. We could not have dreamed up a better scenario: an authoritative victory coupled with a postvote analysis that amplified our overall message. I was in the Chicago HQ, where staffers were popping beers, high-fiving, and whooping it up. There would be no long night waiting for results this time—we had doled out an old-fashioned ass-whupping and, boy, did it feel good. Leaving aside our delegate-count coup in Nevada, it had been twenty-three days since our last win.

  I talked to Obama on the phone before he gave his victory speech, and he was as ebullient as I had ever heard him, much more so than after Iowa. “Plouffe, we thumped them,” he said, with uncharacteristic relish. “I feel so good for the people down here—they rejected all the story lines and decided to write their own.”

  I went through some of the numbers with him so he could appreciate how deep the win was and how demographically broad. We lost only two of South Carolina’s forty-six counties. And for the first time, one candidate had dominated the delegate yield, too. In the first three contests, we had netted a whopping two delegates more than Hillary. But in South Carolina it looked like we would get twenty-five delegates and Hillary only twelve. This was another important moment of education for the press and political community—the only way to net delegates in large quantities was to win by landslides. A net of thirteen delegates in a state that had only fifty-one was a big deal.

  Despite the significance of this factor, I could sense that Obama felt relief at the mere fact of the victory. “It feels good to get another W,” he said. “And to win the right way.”

  For both Obama and the campaign, the South Carolina victory offered a chance to exhale. Had we lost the contest or won it narrowly in a racially polarized vote, it would have left us limping. Instead the blowout put fresh gas in our tank and galvanized the whole campaign. Winning contested primaries by twenty-eight points just doesn’t happen very often. We had also smashed all turnout records, which was a testament to our organization and a tantalizing glimpse of what might be possible in other states. And to top it off, we had muzzled the naysayers who told us that our plan would never work in South Carolina. It had, and powerfully so. The win was an affirmation of our conviction that the rules could be rewritten.

  As Obama took the stag
e at our victory party a spontaneous chant broke out: “Race doesn’t matter. Race doesn’t matter. Race doesn’t matter.” It felt liberating-South Carolina voters had exorcised, at least for one election, the notion that their state could not move beyond race. In the state capital, Columbia, just down the street from where a Confederate flag still waves, a broad and diverse coalition of South Carolinians responded to the skeptics and the cynics with our powerful refrain “Yes we can.”

  In his speech, Obama shifted focus from his usual message and issues and wandered into what the win meant politically. We needed to tie a bow on our success in the first four states, a goal that had been our North Star for a year. “Tonight,” he told the crowd, “the cynics who believed that what began in the snows of Iowa was just an illusion were told a different story by the good people of South Carolina.

  “After four great contests in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates, and the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time.”

  For the first time in eighteen days, I believed once more that we could win the nomination. We just had to find a way to scale the mountain looming ominously in front of us: Super Tuesday.

  7

  Super Tuesday

  The glow from South Carolina lasted only a matter of hours. Twenty-two states would vote on one day; we trailed in most of them and the few leads we held outside of Illinois were narrow. Given the outsized role momentum plays in the primary process, Super Tuesday had developed into a day meant to kill off pesky insurgents and ratify front-runners. We had ten days to prepare.

  There were eleven contests in February after Super Tuesday, and we liked our chances in those states based on the demographics and our organizational strength. We thought we could win many of them and perhaps seize the upper hand in the race. But if we lost too badly on February 5, all bets were off.

  We had settled on our approach to this quasi-national primary in early January. Pulling out the map, we had methodically laid out where Barack and all of our surrogates would campaign and how we thought we could piece together enough wins and collect enough delegates to survive. It appeared that the two campaigns were pursuing diametrically opposed approaches to this day. The Clinton camp focused their resources on the contests held in big states—California, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. They argued that the big prizes mattered most and whoever won them would be in the driver’s seat for the nomination. This was how they spun their strategy to the press.

  Our approach was very different. Unless we got clobbered on February 5, we thought the race would be a war of attrition, a delegate-by-delegate battle. There were 1,681 delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday alone; when the dust cleared the morning of February 6 the results would provide a useful tale of the tape. Anyone who won a large majority of the delegates that day would surely be in the driver’s seat. If the tally was close, the race would simply move on. We thought of February 5 not as a chance to triumph but as a bullet to dodge; if we could mitigate their likely raw-vote wins by keeping them from netting too many delegates, we’d stay alive. The Clinton campaign saw Super Tuesday as their crowning moment, the day on which they’d post big-ticket wins in marquee states and decisively consign us to the campaign dustbin. On one point we agreed: if they won big with delegates, we’d be bowing out before long. But if we emerged relatively unscathed, we believed the campaign would enter a new strategic phase. This was our guiding principle and our decisions flowed from it. We reached out to the press with our perspective on these upcoming contests, explaining why it was a mistake to focus on a narrow set of states as the ones that “really” mattered. Our efforts met with little success. Much of the media discussion in the lead-up to Super Tuesday centered on the big states. This was another instance—and certainly not the last—where I felt we were running one campaign and the press was covering another. We had gotten used to the discrepancy by this point and made sure we communicated our strategy internally to our staff and supporters so they understood how we viewed and approached this critical day. Even if they weren’t sure our plans were sound, we wanted our supporters to understand our decisions flowed from strategy.

  On January 28 we unleashed what became a political earthquake. Senator Ted Kennedy, after assiduous courting from both Obama and Clinton, had privately committed to endorse us. Bolstered now by our South Carolina momentum, we knew we could reveal the endorsement in a big moment that would receive a lot of attention just as voters in many of the Super Tuesday states were tuning in to the contest for the first time.

  Kennedy’s endorsement would not have been so defining a moment if not for two factors. First, Caroline Kennedy was publishing an op-ed in the New York Times the day before her uncle’s endorsement, also pledging her support to Barack Obama. She had never before actively campaigned for a candidate outside her family, so her words carried real weight. And it was not lost on people that she was a prominent woman from New York, Hillary’s base. I found out later it was not lost on Caroline, either. She knew she was kicking a hornet’s nest, but because her children were so taken by Obama, she felt compelled to speak out, damn the consequences.

  Her op-ed grabbed headlines around the nation that Sunday and featured some very memorable lines: “I have never had a president,” she wrote, “who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president—not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.”

  I’m not generally given to sentimentality, but I must have read her essay five times. Like many in Democratic politics, I had consumed just about everything produced by and about the Kennedy family. And with these words, the daughter and only surviving child of President John F. Kennedy not only endorsed Obama but connected him to the legacy and spirit of the era of Camelot. It was one of the few times in the campaign when I stepped back and fully appreciated that we were part of something special, win or lose.

  Another of the reasons Caroline’s statement was so powerful was that she wrote it herself. It wasn’t marred by any campaign talking points. Throughout the campaign people’s own words and feelings about why they supported Barack were always most effective, whether they came from grassroots volunteers or as significant a national figure as Caroline.

  Senator Kennedy took the same approach, and this was the second factor that made his endorsement so significant to the overall arc of the campaign. We did not see his speech until shortly before he and Barack took the stage (joined by Caroline and Congressman Patrick Kennedy, the senator’s son), but we wouldn’t have changed a word of it. It was an eloquent and forceful speech, offered by a man with a deep understanding of the past half-century of American politics, and rebutting every attack that the Clinton campaign and the media had leveled at Obama. Several times Senator Kennedy linked the criticisms visited upon Obama to those made about his brother John during the 1960 campaign, most importantly on the question of experience. “There was another time,” he told the crowd at American University, “when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a New Frontier. He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic president, who was widely respected in the party. Harry Truman said we needed ‘someone with greater experience‘—and added: ’May I urge you to be patient.‘ And John Kennedy replied: ’The world is changing. The old ways will not do. It is time for a new generation of leadership.‘

  “So it is with Barack Obama.”

  By pugnaciously dismissing the argument that Obama lacked experience and by linking Obama’s vision and ability to unify and inspire to those of his slain brother—which in forty years he had never before done—Kennedy created a political upheaval. Coupled with our strong tailwind out of South Carolina, it might, we hoped, provide just enough electoral magic to see us through Super Tuesday.

  Paid staff had been on the ground organizing in many of the February 5 states since September, and most of our
people from Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and even South Carolina had already been dispatched to new states. By the end of the primary, many of our organizers had pulled tours of duty in five or six different places. They’d pack up their meager belongings, jump in their cars, and head for the next contest. It was a brutal life but a great learning experience. Every state’s voters and politics are different, and the learning curve from such diverse exposure in a short period of time was something no textbook or standard campaign experience could replicate. People like Paul Tewes and Mitch Stewart, fresh off their Iowa win, ended up pulling leadership duty for us in a number of states. Hundreds of our early-state staffers became a mobile Obama army and ended up being deployed around the country wherever we needed them.

  Thanks to our social-networking site and all the organizing done by our volunteers on the ground, we often had an in-state presence well before the first Obama staffer arrived. We felt we had a meaningful organizational advantage in most of the February 5 states, particularly in the caucus states, where organizing could provide the most acute advantages.

  Our January fund-raising boom continued, and we ended up raising over $32 million for the month, $28 million of it online. We were now up to 650,000 total donors; perhaps most important, 170,000 new donors joined the campaign in January alone. The windfall allowed us to run advertising in most of the February 5 states. This was critical because Obama would not be a constant presence on the ground in any of these states. Advertising could help fill the void. Clinton’s advertising was meager in comparison, a strong signal that they were having a very rough fund-raising month in January. We had thought their money would suffer once the sheen of inevitability wore off, and that appeared to be the case. Our unexpectedly strong January allowed us to run ads in the prohibitively expensive Los Angeles and New York markets. Though we assumed we’d lose New Jersey, New York, and California overwhelmingly, the closer we kept the margin, the fewer delegates Clinton would net. We wanted to avoid getting blown out wherever possible, and we hoped to create a few blowouts of our own. We had money; what we did not have was enough time. Obama would be a fleeting presence in these states over the final ten days. So we let our overall approach to the race define how we would use his time and the time of our surrogates—we would try to harvest votes and delegates everywhere. Rather than concentrating on a handful of states, we set out to blitzkrieg the country.