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

by David Plouffe

  We worked over the networks and cable stations very hard on this point, and finally they started showing two graphics, one each for counting pledges and supers. It was a small victory, but we tended to be obsessive about even small things that could affect the outcome.

  The New York Times, however, was in a category all by itself. In their calculation of delegates won to date, they did not count caucus delegates, where we had an enormous advantage. Their rationale was that caucus states employed a multilayered process: after being elected through precincts, caucus delegates must attend further caucuses at the county and district levels before being officially selected at state conventions. Therefore, the Times did not consider these delegates locked up until their selection was set in stone at the state level. Technically this was true, but as a practical matter, the initial caucus results always reflected the final allocation, with only two exceptions: when a candidate dropped out or if one of the candidates did such a poor job organizing for the later rounds that their number of delegates slipped because the other candidate thoroughly skunked them in organizing and attendance.

  I thought our campaign had made it quite clear that if we knew nothing else, we knew how to organize for caucuses. It simply wasn’t credible to suggest we might end up with fewer pledged delegates than we earned on the initial caucus day; if anything, we might stand to gain a few through better organizing.

  Despite the erosion of the mainstream media’s once all-encompassing footprint and the ascendance of highly visited political websites and blogs, we were still concerned with how the race was interpreted by leading national outlets. What the New York Times said still mattered a lot, especially given the shifting nature of the race: just about every superdelegate read it. When the Gray Lady offered a take on the campaign, either through straight news coverage or frequent political analysis columns, it had outsized impact on audiences we increasingly had to be concerned with. And the paper’s distortion of the delegate situation was driving me crazy.

  I finally called Adam Nagourney on February 11, after we had won Nebraska, Louisiana, Washington, and Maine by wide margins and opened up our first significant delegate lead. Adam was the leading political reporter for the Times and perhaps held more influence than any reporter in the country. I told him that his paper was completely screwing up.

  For the next twenty minutes or so, I walked him through the flaw of their delegate-counting process (a frequent topic between us—he actually agreed with me but said it wasn’t his decision) and took issue with the fact that they were still writing about the race as a dead heat, even after our run of victories.

  “The point is we now have a definitive front-runner for the Democratic nomination,” I argued. “We have reached a tipping point. Yet reading the Times, which is supposed to be the leading referee and voice on issues like this, you’d never know it.” Then I offered an incentive. “You can be the first to explain that the race has taken a dramatic turn. And this is not spin. It is the facts.”

  What I really wanted out of this conversation was not just a correction of their delegate-counting process but a real affirmation of our advantage in the race. “Of course there’s still hope for Clinton, however slim,” I told him. “But it lies solely in supers. Obama has almost assuredly wrapped up the pledged-delegate victory. If you believe the supers will not overturn the verdict of the voters—that the winner of the most pledged delegates will persevere—then he’s almost certainly the nominee.”

  Adam was quiet for a minute. “I hear you,” he said. “If I can get them to agree, would you be willing to get on the phone with our polling unit, which manages our internal delegate-counting operation, and our political editor and walk through all this?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Anytime.”

  The next day, Bill Burton, our press secretary, gathered us in a paper-strewn conference room overlooking the frozen Chicago River for what would be one of our most important conference calls in the primary. It was an unusual gambit—part advocacy, part education, with the nation’s most important newspaper. I felt like we were sharing the secret recipe for Coke. Taking this stand carried a risk; for the first time, we were suggesting we were no longer the plucky underdog but the front-runner, based on the math. And being the front-runner had its own set of negatives. Hillary would have a field day with our argument. But it was a price we had to pay.

  On the call, I once again walked through our view of where the delegate race stood and how it would unfold, as well as the disservice I felt they were doing their readers by not accounting for caucus delegates. The Times folks took it all in and seemed to accept that, if the caucus delegates stayed roughly the same, we had, in fact, reached a turning point. What was a little unsettling was that this seemed to be dawning on them all, except Adam, for the first time.

  One of their polling unit members kept coming back to caucuses. “But you’re not disputing that those delegate allocations could change through the caucus process, right?”

  “No, we’re not,” I said. “But pledged primary delegates could change as well under certain scenarios. If we both stay in the race, then the estimates of delegates won at caucuses will largely stay the same. Somehow, you have to account for these delegates in your coverage of the race.”

  They said they would discuss our arguments. And shortly thereafter, we had our victory, of sorts: Adam reported back that they had decided to start counting caucus delegates, but with some caveat included—essentially an asterisk—to indicate that the results were not “final.”

  This interlude doubtless lacks the drama of the campaign’s more adrenaline-filled moments. But our mission was simple—to win. We had reached a point in the campaign where it made the most strategic sense to have our advantaged position in the race reflected in the media.

  The Times conference call was soon followed by a lengthy Adam Nagourney political column on February 14 that had a deep impact on the superdelegate battle and the conventional wisdom of the race. Talk about an unexpected Valentine’s Day gift.

  The column was titled “Obama’s Lead in Delegates Shifts Focus of Campaign.” One of the key sections read:A delegate count by The New York Times, including projections from caucuses where delegates have not yet been chosen, showed Mr. Obama with a 113-delegate lead over Mrs. Clinton: 1,095 to 982....

  By any measure, Mr. Obama is in a much stronger position on Wednesday than he was just a few days ago and in a significantly stronger position than Mrs. Clinton thought he would be at this point. That is because Mr. Obama not only won a series of states, but also won them by large margins—over 20 percentage points—so that he began picking up extra delegates and opening a lead on Mrs. Clinton.

  And that is the problem for Mrs. Clinton going forward. If these were winner-take-all states, Mrs. Clinton could pick up 389 delegates in Texas and Ohio on March 4. Now she would have to beat Mr. Obama by more than 20 percentage points in order to pick up a majority of delegates in both states.

  From then on, the paper’s coverage of the race showed a whole new flavor. We shared this story with every superdelegate (most had read it already) as well as with our entire organization and fund-raisers so they understood how we were approaching the rest of the race strategically, and so, once again, they would have context for the decisions we made.

  We heard from supporters on Capitol Hill that this story was an eye-opener for their colleagues, many of whom were undecided superdelegates. One of our key people in the Senate called me that morning: “I know you guys kept preaching the delegate message to us, but until it was in print like this, it didn’t hit home,” he told me. “Our Hill supporters are fired up, and newly motivated to get their colleagues to join the winning campaign. And a couple of senators supporting Hillary told me they had no idea she was in such a tough position—they felt like the campaign wasn’t being honest with them about how they could win.”

  Motivation and clarity for our team, dissent and confusion for theirs. It was a great way to start the
day, kind of like getting an air purifier for our headquarters and rolling a stink bomb into theirs.

  There was one other key passage in the Times story, which reflected a new gambit for the Clinton campaign. Needing to reassure their supporters and convince superdelegates that there were metrics other than pledged delegates to evaluate in backing a candidate, they developed their own criteria:Mrs. Clinton’s aides said they would also argue to superdelegates that they should give less deference to a lead from Mr. Obama because much of that had been built up in states where there were caucuses, which tend to attract far fewer voters than primaries, where Mrs. Clinton has tended to do better than she has done in caucuses.

  “I think for superdelegates, the quality of where the win comes from should matter in terms of making a judgment about who might be the best general-election candidate,” said Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s senior campaign adviser.

  They were now constantly redefining success, and the measurements they invented got more creative over time. I viewed it as their alternate reality. As the Clinton campaign’s rationales became more and more desperate, our message remained clear and consistent: whoever wins more pledged delegates will and should be the nominee.

  We issued memos, held conference calls, and sent e-mails nearly daily to our entire universe stressing this point. Barack, Michelle, our senior staff, and I called all the superdelegates individually. There was no room for compromise on our part, and supers had to factor that in; left unsaid but not missed by anyone was that if they awarded Clinton the victory after we had won more pledged delegates, the party could be torn apart. None of our supporters would abide a coup without a fight.

  I wanted to have this message amplified throughout the press corps, so I decided to do a conference call with all the national press to walk through the delegate situation as we had done for the Times. I ran this by Barack, who had loved the Times story; it made our position in the race feel more real to him, too. He was gung-ho for the new education project but asked me to be cautious. “Just don’t gloat or make firm predictions for the future,” he advised. “Lay out the facts and your math.”

  I agreed, and he seemed satisfied. “It’ll be a pleasure to see the race we’re running reflected in the coverage,” he mused. “It’s been a while.”

  “I would still advise you not to pay attention to most of the commentary,” I said. “We’ve come this far playing our own game, let’s not switch gears now.”

  “I’ll leave the TV on the bus tuned to ESPN,” he joked. And he did, for pretty much the entire campaign. It might seem funny, but I thought this worked to our advantage; had he regularly watched cable news, we probably wouldn’t have run so strong a campaign. A candidate can’t help but be affected by constant criticism and second-guessing, so basketball on the bus was a godsend.

  Breaking with our campaign’s operating philosophy—which was not to talk about the political process—bred another rarity: Ax and me disagreeing. He understood why we needed to make sure the supers knew where the race stood. But he was concerned that to voters, we would come across as cocky and arrogant.

  As we were plotting this out, he dropped into a chair in my office and sighed. “I don’t like it. This is going to backfire big-time with voters.”

  He was absolutely right that there would be some downside to the move. Even though Obama would not talk about it on the stump, and we would not engage directly with voters on any of these process issues, naturally the default press shorthand would be “Obama says he has taken a commanding lead.” No fool, Hillary would quickly feed off the coverage in the remaining primary states, claiming that we were trying to make an end-run around the voters by appealing to superdelegates.

  Axelrod was fairly despondent. “She’s going to be out there like Joan of Arc and this will be just like New Hampshire,” he moaned. “She’s the feisty underdog and we’re the big bully trying to prematurely end the race.”

  “No doubt,” I said. “This will cost us with some voters—and she’ll use it as a rallying cry. But we have to land this plane. And the pathway to victory now is winning the primaries that we can, but it’s also managing the atmospherics so that the insiders don’t steal this from us. She’s still leading superdelegates today, even after we just won eleven straight.”

  This last bit seemed to resonate with him, so I went on. “Look,” I said, “you and I both know we’re going to get thumped in some states down the line. We need the measuring stick to be the race in totality, not a reassessment after every primary. She’s going to win more states than we do from here on out; it’s much friendlier terrain for her.”

  Ax put down his sword. We were partners, but on these types of strategic electoral matters, it was my call, just as in matters of message and advertising, I generally gave him the benefit of the doubt. If I had a concern about an approach or language and he felt very strongly about it, I often relented. And he was usually right.

  Our new attitude had already produced some cringe-inducing headlines: “Plouffe: She Can’t Catch Us”—Politico.com, February 13, 2009.

  All of this heat was a necessary side effect of achieving our objective: change the framework for media coverage of the race. The correct frame acknowledged that the race was no longer in a dead heat, that we were going to win the pledged delegates, the only question was by how many, and that supers should support the winner of the pledged delegates as the only relevant metric that mattered. We had to put our heads down and get some beer spilled on us as we ran through the tunnel, confident that at game’s end, if we achieved our goal of positioning the race properly, we would be holding up the trophy.

  Next up, on March 4, were four states; 370 pledged delegates would be awarded that day. The only friendly territory at the outset was Vermont.

  Rhode Island, also on the bill, was small like Vermont and offered a modest amount of delegates. We believed Clinton would win here comfortably and aimed to minimize her margin and delegate haul.

  The two big prizes were Ohio and Texas. Two weeks out we trailed in both by double digits, though we had made up some ground from the twenty-point deficits the polls had shown a few weeks prior. These were big states in which Obama had spent no time and where Hillary’s numbers were very strong. She had been tattooing us with older voters and Hispanic voters, two groups that would play key roles in these states, respectively.

  We had started advertising in all four March 4 states in mid-February. Staff and organization had long been plowing away on the ground. Our most valuable resource, Obama’s time, we planned to split between Texas and Ohio, with a possible trip to Rhode Island. Our plan was, first and foremost, to maintain our commitment to a delegate strategy. If we also managed to win one of the two big states, then perhaps Clinton would think about ending her campaign. I explained this strategy to Obama, and he was on board.

  Meanwhile, the political pressure for Hillary to abandon her quest was growing. In a New York Times article titled “For Clinton, Bid Hinges on Texas and Ohio,” a Clinton superdelegate told the paper, “She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out.” No less an authority and interested party than Bill Clinton said shortly thereafter while campaigning in Texas: “If she wins Texas and Ohio I think she will be the nominee; if you don’t deliver for her, I don’t think she can be.”

  Texas presented a very unusual situation as it related to delegates. It was the only state to hold a hybrid contest—a primary and a caucus on the same date, the caucus at night. Two-thirds of the delegates would be awarded in the primary and a third in the caucus.

  When we alerted the press to this idiosyncrasy early in February (Texas had not had a competitive primary since 1992, so it was new to out-of-state media), their responses and the reaction from the Clinton camp tipped us off that the Clintonites did not have a handle on Texas’s unusual way of selecting delegates (it’s the only state with a hybrid caucus and primary system). This was hard to believe, especially since Bill Clinton had gone through it in 19
92. Regardless, we were already planning ahead and sent our Iowa caucus director, Mitch Stewart, to Texas to manage the caucus side of the operation. We never saw much organizing there from the Clinton campaign.

  The delegates in the Texas primary were also distributed a bit unusually: they were awarded by state senate district, and districts with very high Democratic turnout in past statewide elections were awarded proportionally more delegates. This benefited us tremendously, because some of our stronger areas—progressive cities like Austin and African American areas like Houston—were advantaged under this allocation formula. For example, a state senate district in West Texas where Clinton was strong might offer only three delegates total, while a district in the middle of Austin would offer nine, even though both had the same population.

  We built our strategy accordingly, focusing on gaining extra primary delegates in our base areas and winning the caucus portion of the contest. If we succeeded, we could win the overall delegate battle in Texas even if Clinton won the popular vote. This delegate-oriented approach had been our bible to date, and we saw no reason to change it.

  We were outspending Clinton by enormous sums in both Texas and Ohio. Our fund-raising was on fire, particularly online, and since we were trying to win one of the two big states, we decided to pour it on. I went down to Larry Grisolano’s office right after the Wisconsin primary and told him he had another $15 million on top of our already robust budgets in Texas and Ohio. “Let’s finish this thing off,” I told him. “Let’s bury her.”

  We bought everything imaginable—our TV and radio levels were stratospheric ; we actually bought five days’ worth of full-page newspaper ads in all the major dailies in both states. Our Internet advertising was omnipresent. It was like playing with Monopoly money for two weeks.