Or like our St. Louis for Obama group, led by Jennifer Haro, Crystal Lovett-Tibbs, and Patrick and Angela Green. They formed the group using My.Ba rackObama.com and Facebook very early in the campaign and eventually attended organizing training together—though by that point they could have trained many of our staff. They were making it happen on the ground, with no resources, just creativity and passion. The group relentlessly grew the Obama community in St. Louis. When staff arrived in September 2007, the group was asked to focus some of its energy on Iowa, which bordered Missouri. They started weekly van trips from St. Louis to Ottumwa, Iowa, over five hours each way on small, bad roads. They met in a Target parking lot at 5:00 a.m. each week, in order to get to Ottumwa before 11:00 a.m., train walkers, knock on doors, get back in the bus in the early evening, and return to the St. Louis Target after 10:00 p.m. Jennifer, Patrick, Angela, and Crystal would then return the rented vans to the airport, getting home at about midnight. After Iowa, they moved all their energy into the Missouri primary, just a month away. They filled phone banks with the volunteers from the Iowa bus trips to keep the lines filled 100 percent of the time. Our state director, Mike Dorsey, said without their early efforts, all done on their own, and the hard push across the finish line, there is no way we would have won Missouri by the narrow eleven thousand votes that we did.
They were the heartbeat of our campaign.
At age forty, sleepless nights were far rougher than when I was a twenty-one-year-old field organizer, but as the dawn broke on February 6, I was filled with energy.
We had some great states in the next weeks and were likely headed for a winning streak. I thought the race was close to reaching a turning point, in our direction.
In fact, the next two weeks would probably be the most fun of the whole two years. But that exhilaration would soon turn to despair, as we faced the greatest threats to Obama’s candidacy we would experience in the entire campaign.
8
Ecstasy. Agony.
We rolled out of February 5 feeling strong and surveyed the road ahead. The next two weeks held eleven contests: Washington State; Nebraska; Louisiana; Maine; the Virgin Islands; Virginia; Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Democrats Abroad; Hawaii; and Wisconsin. Total delegates at stake, 537.
Demographically this was a terrific group of states for us, filled with progressive white voters, significant African American populations, and independents who would be allowed to participate. And caucuses. Lots of caucuses.
Our organization and grassroots supporters understood how to win caucuses. The Clinton campaign had performed so poorly in them they took to maligning them. Wolfson and the rest of the Clinton team argued that caucuses catered to a more liberal-activist slice of the electorate and discriminated against working-class voters who didn’t have the flexibility to attend a caucus during the scheduled one- or two-hour window.
This argument was total bullshit. The caucus base—those who had consistently attended previous caucuses—in just about every state we polled favored Clinton, in some cases by a healthy margin. She was the establishment candidate, after all, and the establishment attended caucuses, so she started with an advantage. As in Iowa, we had to expand the electorate to win, and our current lead in these states reflected all the hard work we had already put in on the ground. My view was they should shut up and start organizing.
In the wake of February 5, Maine, which had never seemed winnable, began to look more like a toss-up, and we believed our projected margins of victory in the rest of the February states could grow, producing more delegates, maybe even pushing us over 100, which would give us a virtually insurmountable lead in the count of so-called pledged delegates—those awarded based on primary and caucus results.
This was a strange period, filled with two- or three-day mini-campaigns and little on-the-ground stumping by Obama due to time constraints. We had been organizing in all these states for at least the month since the Iowa caucuses (Clinton had almost no presence) and had already been advertising. On February 6, we upped our media buys; we thought our performance the day before, coupled with what should be a nice little run of wins, would make February our strongest fund-raising month to date, so we could gamble a bit financially and pour it on.
We ended up raising $55 million in February, shattering records and surpassing our next-highest fund-raising month by over $20 million. Our list of donors also continued to explode. By the beginning of March we had over a million of them, more than double Clinton’s total. In fact, during this period her money situation became so dire that she very publicly lent her campaign $5 million of her own money. This was tactically smart—it roused some of her supporters from the reverie that she needed no financial help, and her fund-raising spiked for a bit. We read it as a sign that she was having serious difficulty reloading month to month.
The days after Super Tuesday also marked the point when the dam began to break open for us with superdelegates: the approximately eight hundred party leaders and elected officials around the country who were given a vote to decide who the Democratic Party’s nominee should be.
The Democratic Party established superdelegates during a wave of reform after the 1972 election. McGovern had lost in a landslide, carrying just one state, and the party felt it needed some kind of mechanism to guard against the voters nominating another unelectable candidate. The large number of superdelegates means that in a close race, it is possible (though not likely) that if a mass of them voted together, they could actually tip the nomination to the candidate who came in second with pledged delegates.
The supers had never decided the nomination; voters always delivered a breakaway selection. Even in 1980 with Carter and Kennedy and 1984 with Hart and Mondale—when the race went all the way to the convention—the prevailing candidates both won a clear plurality of the delegates awarded by primaries and caucuses. So far the supers had not affected the outcome.
The body of supers is made up of elected officials (governors and members of Congress are all automatic superdelegates), all the members of the Democratic National Committee, and a smattering of esteemed former party leaders—Speakers, former presidents, among others. They are not bound when voting by their state’s or district’s election results; they can make an independent judgment—though some do make their choice based on who wins in their area.
On the whole, giving so much power to the supers was not a very democratic approach for the Democratic Party. But those were the rules and we had to play by them, even if it meant taking some time away from convincing voters to work on politicians.
“I had no idea this race could come down to me groveling to party insiders for support,” Obama told me after making an hour’s worth of calls to superdelegates. “If we win, we need to look at making sure the voice of the voters carries more sway.” This kind of obvious unfairness particularly frustrated him. “Half the superdelegates I talk to don’t want the obligation anyway—they think it looks bad that party insiders have this role. Some didn’t even know they had a delegate vote that could affect the race.”
“I agree, it needs to be changed,” I told him. “But ironically, to be in a position to fix it in the future we need their support now. If it’s any consolation, I’m spending some of my day calling supers too.”
“Really?” he asked. “How many have you got to commit so far?”
“One,” I said. “But he won’t commit until May.”
Obama boasted, “I have you beat. Three so far.”
“Well, we’ll see,” I countered, egging him on. “Some of your hard commits might be less firm when we circle back to ask them to announce their support.”
Many of the superdelegates possessed their power only because Bill Clinton had appointed them to party positions in the 1990s, and almost all had deep ties to the former first family. But Hillary’s lead among this group was not as large as we had expected it to be. We attributed this gap to apathy as well as some real concern about her electability and potential effect
on down-ballot races. Because quite a few of them had not committed early to Clinton when she was the odds-on favorite, we thought the whole universe of undeclared supers was up for grabs. The Clinton campaign was notoriously unsubtle; we considered fair game anyone who had managed to resist its entreaties so far.
Before Iowa, she had led us in superdelegates by well over 100, but on February 6, our internal review showed that the count stood at 250 to 179 in her favor. Encouraged by our progress, we set an internal goal of erasing her superdelegate lead by March 4.
This two-week period was my favorite of the entire campaign. We scored win after decisive win. Our closest margin of victory was in Wisconsin at seventeen points. We won “toss-up” Maine by nineteen. In the process we racked up an enormous number of delegates, opening a real and sustainable lead for the first time.
The Clinton campaign went through a long-anticipated management shakeup in this period, replacing the campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, and her deputy. Thankfully the real culprit behind their underperformance (in our view), Mark Penn, was left in place.
By now many news reports had emerged describing acrimony and huge disagreements in the Clinton camp. These reports suggested Penn was responsible for pushing the message of inevitability and was fighting suggestions that Clinton should be humanized more in their message and ads. Some articles even speculated that Penn did not properly understand how the delegate system worked, and that late in 2007 he still thought delegates were awarded winner take all, not proportionally. I found accusations of such ignorance hard to believe, but it was the first explanation I saw of how they might have developed their flawed strategy for Super Tuesday.
All in all, it was a fun time to be Barack Obama’s campaign manager. He was invariably on the road on election nights, usually in a state where the vote was drawing near; there was no sense making a victory speech in a media market where the polls had already closed. The calendar was so aggressive that we needed to be on to the next state as quickly as possible.
Every few days, I got to have the following conversation:
“Well, the press is going to call the race at poll closing. It looks like we blew her out again. We will net at least X delegates, more than we projected.”
“This never gets old.”
You’ve heard of baseball fantasy camp? This was like campaign fantasy camp. We were in a highly competitive presidential election that had been tighter than a tick since Iowa and now we were winning contest after contest by laughably big margins against Hillary “Inevitable” Clinton and her massive political machine. Here’s a breakdown with raw vote percentages and delegate margins:
I’m not sure any candidate in the modern era has had a run like that in a very competitive overall race. Our average margin of victory was 34—34!—points. We also netted 125 delegates in the period alone, pushing our overall pledged-delegate lead to over 150.
A variety of factors were behind our success. Once again, it seemed like we had outplanned the Clinton campaign. They must have assumed they would clinch the nomination on February 5 and did not concern themselves with states that would come later. Conversely, we had been salivating about this two-week period as far back as the summer of 2007. Carson, Berman, and I were convinced we could dominate this run if we were at relatively full strength coming out of Super Tuesday, though even we couldn’t have predicted such whopping margins. Clinton barely had a presence in these states and, for the first time, seemed a little aimless. Their schedule did not always make strategic sense to us, and they seemed unsure of their footing. This was a far cry from the Clinton juggernaut we had feared for over a year. Our respect for their political history and acumen was monumental at the beginning of the race; even now it was hard to believe we were hanging loss after loss on them.
We were able to execute so well because we had long ago put into place in these states what we thought we needed to win. The added boost of resources in the last month allowed us to communicate at an even higher level, but I don’t think this extra money made the real difference. Yes, we outspent the Clinton campaign in this period and on February 5. But up to that point both campaigns had about the same amount of money available. We just spent and planned more carefully, following our rigid internal rules of the road on budget matters.
Throughout our organization, it was known that trying to get an idea funded required an airtight pitch, and even that was no guarantee of a check. Staffers were challenged aggressively if they had a new budget request or if their projects came in over budget. Culturally, that was important. Our staff was conditioned to think first about how we could do without and to budget accordingly before looking for more money. This conservative approach gave us a big strategic advantage after our opponent had burned through her money.
Our grassroots supporters again deserve the lion’s share of credit. The farther we got from Iowa, the more important our volunteers were. The campaigns in these states were shorter and we had fewer staffers on the ground. The volunteers built our campaigns in the February states and executed incredibly well in the closing weeks. They recruited more help, identified supporters, and made sure people knew where to vote and caucus (an unsexy but critical step when dealing with untraditional voters; if they don’t actually vote, their support means nothing).
Huskers for Obama, Virginians for Obama, Badgers for Obama—the groups that emerged very early in the primary and organized for a year while the spotlight was elsewhere are the real heroes of February. When staff arrived bearing more resources and focused goals, followed by advertising and some candidate time, the foundational work of our supporters on the ground paid huge dividends.
Yet throughout the campaign, we never stopped running into people who thought we were going about things the wrong way. During the general election, on a conference call we held with labor leaders, one of Clinton’s big labor supporters who had spent millions on her behalf in the primary derided our belief and trust in volunteers. He insisted that we needed to pay people to do things like door-knocking and phone calls, and that we should rely more on local elected official organizations.
“Well, our volunteers certainly did a number on you in the primary,” I reminded him.
He was one of many who, even after witnessing the endgame, discounted our grassroots strategy in favor of the old dusty playbook. The way I saw it, we were able to run such a disciplined campaign because most party leaders did not jump on the Obama bandwagon in the early going, and those that did were open to change. We were able to make decisions without a lot of guff from our leading political supporters because they were not in the driver’s seat. We had a clear message and strategy to push forward, and volunteers were our engine. Groups and political leaders who supported us were the caboose.
Many candidates would have thrown in the towel after eleven straight beat-downs. Not Hillary Clinton. And while I resented it at the time, I had to admire her remarkable resilience. She must have known the odds now were very steep—our delegate count was going up while her bank account was going down—but she also knew, as we did, that she could rely on some pretty big wins in the upcoming primaries, and that in politics anything can happen.
While the Clinton people complained that the press was trying to run her out of the race, we thought the opposite was true. Any other candidate would have been long gone. But reporters and Democratic leaders alike kept telling us that, after all, these were the Clintons. “They’re like Houdini,” said one Democratic superdelegate I was courting. “It looks hopeless but somehow they find a way to survive. Anyone else, this thing would be over. But in the back of your mind, you’re wondering what they may have up their sleeve. So, we let the race play out.”
On February 10, the New York Post said we were “locked in a dead heat”—after eleven consecutive wins. The race was now all about the pursuit of delegates, and we had opened up a meaningful lead, one we did not think we could lose. The moment marked a critical juncture in our strategy: at this point we needed to
shed the mantle of underdog and explain to the political community and press where the race really stood.
Most important, we needed to explain the state of play to the superdelegates. They made up roughly 20 percent of the total of 4,049 delegates at stake. The magic number to clinch the nomination was half of that plus one, or 2,025. That number became a mantra inside our campaign, just as Iowa had been for all of 2007. It was our new North Star.
By now we could see in our projections that if Clinton stayed in until the end, neither of us would get to 2,025 delegates through pledged delegates alone. We would have more than Hillary but still would need the added support of roughly 200 supers to claim the nomination.
Our operating philosophy, going all the way back to my first plan drafted at the end of 2006, was that the supers would ultimately follow the voters. We did not prioritize their endorsements as a core imperative of the campaign. We communicated with them frequently and certainly celebrated when we got an endorsement, but we assumed that if we did well at the polls, the supers would follow, and if we stumbled early, it wouldn’t matter.
Since supers had never come into play before, the media was all over the map trying to present the delegate race to the public. Most news organizations had their own delegate count, and while these were roughly in the same ball-park, there were some significant distinctions from outlet to outlet. Many cable and TV networks started off counting supers and pledged delegates together, a measure that benefited Clinton and misrepresented the real status of the race. Supers, unlike pledges, were not bound by their initial pick, and the pledged number alone reflected the outcomes of the primaries and caucuses, the true measuring stick at this point in the campaign.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 24