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

by David Plouffe

  Tuesday, I flew down to San Antonio, where we were holding our event on Election Day. Obama was playing his traditional primary day basketball game when I got to the hotel, so I went for a run. I ran by the Alamo, fervently wishing Hillary would face hers that night.

  After all the problems with exit polls, you’d think we would have completely ignored them on primary night. They were like counterfeit money. But we were just desperate enough for good news that we couldn’t put them down. March 4’s exits showed us tied in Rhode Island, ahead slightly in Ohio, and tied in Texas.

  Much as we liked them, these numbers made no sense. The only possible explanation was that our turnout was much stronger than Clinton’s. And while we thought that might be possible in Texas, where there were a lot of new younger voters and a surge of African Americans, in Ohio our ability to expand the electorate was fairly limited.

  Axelrod, Margolis, and I sat with Joel Benenson, our lead pollster, in a conference room at the San Antonio hotel chewing on results as they came in. Our boiler room in Chicago was updating numbers in real time, running and rerunning the models that told us whether we were ahead of or behind projections. We were also obsessively refreshing the media sites that were posting votes.

  It was clear early in the tallying that the Ohio exits were woefully off (as were Rhode Island’s; we lost by 18 percent). We’d be lucky to hold the margin under 10 in Ohio. The press waited to call it until well after it was clear to us we had been hammered. When they did, and Hillary emerged to give her victory speech, I wanted to throw the TV through the hotel window.

  We also got news around that time that John McCain had wrapped up his nomination that night. His general-election campaign would begin the next morning. I sighed heavily just thinking about it: ours could be three wearying months off.

  In the conference room we had now turned our prayers to a split decision. Muttering turned to something just below a yell, “C‘mon, Texas! Don’t fuck us.”

  Obama gave his speech before Texas was called. It was a pretty desultory crowd (many people were still at the caucuses) and his energy level was low. He was off his game and disappointed in the results. Before he took the stage, I gave him the latest update: though we led in early voting, we would probably lose Texas unless turnout in the remaining Hillary areas was unusually low and ours was very high. After the speech, I called him with confirmation: we were going down. The media wasn’t calling it yet but they would soon.

  “It goes on,” he said quietly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Our conference room was a den of gloom. Half-eaten sandwiches and soggy coffee cups were scattered across tables. We all did a lot of cursing and sighing. It didn’t matter that two weeks earlier we’d had no chance to win either big state. In the intervening days, we had moved so quickly that the prize was in our sights. Now we had blown it.

  Once the media called Texas, we packed up our laptops and left somberly for a short night of restless sleep. Without the final delegate data (there were some caucuses in addition to the direct voting), we found it hard to put the proper frame on how fundamentally unchanged the situation was.

  It wouldn’t have mattered. The press was not interested in delegates. There was only one story: Hillary Clinton had staved off elimination, and Barack Obama had failed to close the deal. The commentators also quickly moved to what the results could mean to superdelegates; Obama had done poorly with working-class older whites in Ohio and Hispanics in Texas; did that indicate a looming electoral problem that Clinton could use against him? So began a fierce debate about electability in the general election.

  The Clinton campaign maintained that we would struggle in the general election with blue-collar voters, seniors, and Hispanic voters, and that the Republicans would find ways to make their swiftboating of John Kerry look like child’s play. They rejected our claim that we could change the electoral map, asserting that the question would really come down to which of us could flip Ohio and Florida to the Democratic column on November 4, not who could put new states in play. Their argument got a lot of attention from the press and political community. Obama’s “electability problems” became a new narrative for us to fight through, less in terms of how voters processed the argument than how it was received by the few hundred superdelegates who now held our fate in their hands.

  For trail-weary campaigners, it felt like unnecessary misery, largely because the fundamentals of the race had not changed—our pledged-delegate lead remained close to insurmountable, we had almost caught Clinton in superdelegates, and we simply saw no avenue for her to win. In fact, the numbers had gotten much worse for Clinton.

  There had been 370 delegates at stake on March 4, a sizable haul. Despite all the significance granted to her Texas and Ohio victories, the final delegate breakdown of that day was Clinton 187, Obama 183. She netted only 4 delegates! Meanwhile, a big chunk of real estate was taken off the board. It was now virtually impossible for her to get our pledged-delegate lead below 100, much less erase it.

  I was certain that eventually the reality of the delegate math would reemerge as the dominant story line: yes, she had extended the campaign, but in fact her position had grown only more tenuous.

  I planned to discuss this the next day with Barack and Michelle as we drove from the hotel to the San Antonio airport. We were all headed back to Chicago for a meeting to assess what had happened and how we would handle the seven weeks before Pennsylvania.

  As the motorcade idled in the bowels of the San Antonio Marriott the next morning, I mentally reviewed the points I wanted to make from the third-row seat of our SUV. A few moments later the Obamas emerged from the elevator bank and climbed in.

  “Morning,” I said, aiming for cheerfulness. “Hey, Plouffe,” replied Barack. He seemed fine. But Michelle was not in a good place. Her quiet “Good morning” seemed clipped and distant.

  Barack and I talked about the results, where the delegates stood, and what the press coverage was like. I tried to get a laugh out of him, saying, “Well, at least we won Vermont.” He ran with it. “See, Mich,” he said to his wife, “at least we won something last night.” No response. Barack tried another time or two to lighten the mood, as did I, in the spirit of helping a friend with his spouse, but all we got were uninterested, monosyllabic responses. Michelle was giving us both the cold shoulder and it continued on the plane ride home.

  I stewed in her tacit criticism. Sure, we had stumbled at the end. But our position in the race was fundamentally unchanged. And, hey, look at where we had come from. Nine times out of ten Hillary Clinton should have won the nomination. Yet here we were, still in the catbird seat, set to assume the Democratic mantle. Hillary Clinton was the Democratic establishment. Things never go as planned on campaigns.

  The loss seemed easily papered over. But as the plane made its way back to Chicago, and I spent the hours staring out the window at nothing, I began to see that Michelle had a very valid point. While we were pinching ourselves at having come so far, the undeniable fact was that we had missed our chance to close out the race.

  This primary would now go at least another two months, maybe three, because of our failure. If we had closed out the primary, Barack and the rest of us would have had more time to spend with our families as we ramped up to the general election; everyone could have recharged a bit. Instead of spending more interminable weeks fending off Hillary Clinton, we could have planned more methodically for the general election.

  We had also delivered our Republican opponent a rare gift in politics—three extra months of practically unopposed campaigning. It occurred to me that we might have just cost ourselves—and our party—the presidency.

  As I reflected on this and thought harder about our March 4 losses, I tried to go beyond the surface explanation that these were tough states for us and we had closed poorly. I bolted upright in my seat when it finally dawned on me: for the first time in the campaign our strategy had been off. We should have put aside our delegate chase for
these contests and gone in for the kill in Texas, trying to win the popular vote. We should have focused at least two-thirds of our effort there instead of splitting our resources with Ohio. Thinking back through our efforts, I realized we hadn’t even campaigned vigorously in the Hispanic areas of Texas or in many of the rural and small-town areas, where Clinton annihilated us. We focused our time and attention only on the areas where we could net more delegates.

  If we had gone all-in, we would have had more time to campaign all over the state. If our schedule and other activities had been based on a statewide vote goal, we just might have pulled out a win in Texas. We lost by only 4 percent statewide; more time and focus might easily have changed 2 percent of the electorate.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have worked. But it hadn’t even been considered. And that mistake rested on only one set of shoulders—mine. I was responsible for our electoral strategy, from making the decisions on our direction all the way down to design and execution. And I had not even considered adjusting to a Texas-focused popular-vote scenario until that moment on the plane.

  The close in Texas also hearkened back to the finish in New Hampshire, where we wound up on the defensive. Michelle was right to be upset about the outcome. This was our race to win, and we had just coughed up our best chance to close it out. My head had been deep in the sand.

  The consequences were severe, especially when I thought about how we had just given John McCain, a formidable general-election opponent, a significant leg up. What if we lost the presidency, and my lack of judgment and foresight resulted in the continuation of Bush economic policies; of an abysmal war in Iraq; of fraying international relations? Those were the stakes.

  On our ride in from Midway Airport to our HQ in Chicago, I shared my thoughts with Obama, sparing him the drama but trying to explain how I thought I had failed to adjust our strategy to meet the moment.

  “I hadn’t thought about that either, but it makes complete sense,” he responded. “I did feel like we were going through the motions a bit, that we were just moving forward after Wisconsin without asking the tough questions about whether our strategy was correct for the next challenge.

  “In any case, we can’t let it happen again,” he continued. “This is your job. Maybe you need more time to think—whatever it takes, you need to figure out how to stay ahead of the game on electoral matters like that. But we all played a part in coming up short.”

  Our meeting at HQ included Obama and our senior staff, a group of about fifteen. We met like this infrequently but had scheduled this gathering before we knew the outcome of March 4, hoping to discuss how we would segue from the primary to the general election. Instead we had a discussion about mistakes, changes, and the challenges ahead. There was a lot to talk about.

  Obama started the meeting with a critique of his own performance. To have a boss willing not just to shoulder blame but to do so first established an indescribably healthy dynamic. It made people less defensive and more open with their own critiques, of themselves, him, and the campaign as a whole.

  His major point was that during those last two weeks, he had not been driving toward the finish line. He wanted the race to be over more than he wanted to win it, and it showed in his day-to-day performance, most notably at the disastrous Rezko press conference the day before the vote. We had become too predictable and stale. He felt he needed to regain the pre-Iowa mentality and suggested we all did. And he needed to regain the bounce in his step and the sense of mission that had seemed to abandon him in the last two weeks.

  Moving on, we discussed the two small contests coming up, Wyoming and Mississippi. We thought we would win both, and probably comfortably.

  Looming after Mississippi was a seven-week stretch before the next primary, Pennsylvania, a contest we were already dreading. Unless something very surprising developed, we had next to no chance of winning. Demographically, it was one of the worst states for us in the whole country—older and more blue collar—and independents were not allowed to participate. Hillary had the support of Governor Rendell and most of the in-state Democratic machine. And Pennsylvania was one of the few states where the machine was still formidable.

  We decided at this meeting that we would campaign hard in Pennsylvania but not exclusively. Indiana and North Carolina were two weeks after Pennsylvania, so we would spend time there as well and potentially in some of the states holding contests even later. Michelle had already told Barack she was all-in for the run in North Carolina and Indiana and would find a way to devote close to full-time campaigning for these two weeks. She knew the stakes and wanted to finish out the race now. We wanted the race to be viewed by the press—and ultimately the supers—as in its last stages. To take some of the focus away from Pennsylvania, our mantra would be that Pennsylvania was just one of thirteen states remaining. There were 607 delegates to be awarded in these states, and we looked at them as a body of contests; all that mattered was whether Hillary could dramatically cut into our delegate lead.

  The Clinton campaign was already calling Pennsylvania the “New Iowa,” trying to move the coverage and analysis of the race from our broad advantage to the narrow question of who would win Pennsylvania. We were determined to avoid playing into the all-or-nothing trap that was being set for us.

  It was a sound strategy. But soon, a reverend from Chicago would explode on the scene, upending our best-laid plans. Electoral strategy took a backseat, as we were quickly engaged in a desperate fight for political survival.

  9

  Agony. Ecstasy.

  Had the Clinton campaign approached the entire primary as they did Wyoming, it probably would not have changed the ultimate outcome. But it might have.

  It was clear to both campaigns that Obama would win the Wyoming caucuses. We had been organizing for months and built up a solid lead. In a change from their approach to prior caucuses, however, the new Clinton regime decided to compete in Wyoming in an effort to hold down our delegate yields. They placed staff—albeit late—and both Hillary and Bill campaigned there in the closing days with other surrogates. It paid off for them in delegates.

  We still won by a big margin, 61-38. But if the Clintons had not made that late effort, we almost assuredly would have gotten over 62 percent, which would have grown the delegate spread from 7-5 to 8-4 in our favor. Whether the Clinton campaign fully appreciated this lesson, I don’t know. “It’s a good thing they wised up so late in the process,” I told Jon Carson that afternoon. “Super Tuesday could have been a different ball game entirely.”

  We also won Mississippi, as expected, netting a total of nine delegates in the two contests and erasing Clinton’s gains from March 4. That’s all it took.

  There were now just 611 pledged delegates left to be allocated in the remaining contests, and our lead was just over 160. It was impossible—barring cataclysmic collapse—for Clinton to get within 100 pledged delegates of us. She had zero chance. Too little real estate left on the board.

  We fixated on 100 as the magic number based on conversations with undeclared and undecided superdelegates. If our pledged-delegate lead never slipped below 100, there was virtually no chance that the supers would do anything but break en masse to us and deliver the nomination officially.

  Meanwhile, we remained in a frustrating limbo. Obama’s eventual nomination was all but assured, but we had to play out the remaining contests. McCain was already gallivanting around the country, running for president as the Republican nominee. Our race dragged on and on and on, with Clinton grasping on to faint hope that we would self-destruct in some way that would cause the supers to determine Obama was not electable, voters be damned.

  That hope grew stronger when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright burst back onto the scene as we headed into the seven-week death march toward Pennsylvania, which voted on April 22. Those who missed him the first time around with his quotable zingers in Rolling Stone surely got a full dose of him now.

  Wright was Obama’s longtime pastor at Trinity United Chu
rch of Christ. He married Michelle and Barack, and baptized the adult Obama and his children. In Obama’s early years at Trinity, the two men were quite close.

  After their girls were born, the Obamas attended Trinity less frequently. Barack was traveling a lot, further cutting down his attendance, and his relationship with Wright was not as close as it had been. But Trinity was the Obamas’ faith home, and Wright was the flamboyant and forceful leader of the congregation and parish.

  Of course, we knew as early as Obama’s announcement speech that Wright would be a problem. Our research team had reviewed some of his sermons but not all. Many of them were available from the church for purchase. Researching them was as easy as buying them all and screening for problems. This was not brain surgery.

  We didn’t do it. But one of our opponents or their allies apparently did. Wright’s extreme views had been bubbling just below the surface for months, but they finally burst through into mainstream consciousness on March 12 when ABC News and then Fox News began playing excerpts of his most inflammatory sermons on constant, endless loop.