We had enormous respect for McCain’s potential strength as a Republican nominee. He was their only possible nominee with existing and perhaps even majority support among independent voters, the group that often decides the presidency. He had a history of supporting some reforms, most notably the campaign finance legislation that bears his name, and was celebrated by the press for being a “maverick” willing to buck his party. This reputation made him very dangerous to us and our stance as the true change and reform candidate. However, in pursuit of his party’s nomination, McCain had embraced the Bush agenda whole hog, including items like the Bush tax cuts, which he had originally opposed as too large and irresponsible. We assumed he would now try to unwind much of that during the general election, to try to reclaim the mantle of independence.
McCain’s camp was also asserting that they could peel off a healthy percentage of Democrats, especially the so-called Hillary Democrats: older, downscale whites. While we never believed this claim was valid, based on historical voting patterns, it was something we had to watch carefully. McCain also was unique among Republicans in his standing and potential strength with Latino voters, who could make the difference in battlegrounds like Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado. Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, and we could ill afford to have McCain match that number. This was another narrative the press sank their teeth into; because we lost Hispanic voters decisively to Hillary in the primaries, the conventional wisdom was we would struggle mightily to earn their votes in the general.
While Latino voters bore watching, the notion that primary trends carried over into the general rested on flawed logic, and defied history. In fact, our initial general-election research showed that some of the groups we struggled with in the primary—older women, Latino voters, union households—would be bulwarks for us in the run for the White House. And some of our bases in the primary-upper-income voters, male independents—would prove a much tougher slog. Forests were destroyed with all the stories about our potential problems with Hillary’s primary voters.
Presidential races are often covered as if they are a national race. This is far from true. In the 2008 election, much of the media focused on national polls, paying far too little attention to what was unfolding on the ground in the battleground states. When the new Gallup poll came out each day, for example, the cable networks treated it as breaking news. But in actuality the national polls had little to say about the real story of the race.
Winning the presidency requires piecing together a combination of states to reach 270 electoral votes. That is all that matters. In 2000, for the second time, a presidential candidate lost the popular vote and won the presidency—and George W. Bush lost the raw vote by a healthy margin. We now turned to Electoral College votes with the same laser focus we had trained on delegates during the primary. “Two-seventy” was our new mantra.
Our plan was to attempt to run the most muscular state campaigns ever assembled in battleground states. If we were successful, the campaigns in those states would have a deep impact, potentially creating a clear departure from the national polls. TV and radio ads, Internet advertising, historically large grassroots campaigns focused on turnout, voter registration, and aggressive in-state press operations—all these would create their own dynamic, one that didn’t necessarily track with conventional polling techniques. Of course, national news would still matter and things like the conventions and the debates would break through battlegrounds and nonbattlegrounds alike.
Most of the country—those who lived in safely red or blue states—did not truly witness the 2008 presidential campaign. The real contest occurred in only about sixteen states, in which swing voters in particular bumped up against the campaign at every turn—at their doors; on their phones; on their local news, TV shows, and radio programs; and on their computers on the Internet. In these states, we trotted out the candidate and our surrogates, built large staffs and budgets to support our organizational work, and mounted ferocious and diversified advertising campaigns. They were the canvas on which we sketched the election.
From an electoral perspective, nothing was more important to us strategically than having a wide playing field. This was my goal from Day One. We did not want to wake up on the morning of November 4 dependent on one state, as Kerry was on Ohio in 2004 and to a lesser extent Gore was on Florida in 2000. We wanted to have a wide set of targets so that we could lose some and still win the presidency.
We believed Barack Obama would have unique and strong appeal out West in states like Nevada and Colorado, in Mid-Atlantic states like North Carolina and Virginia, and throughout the Midwest, including unlikely targets like Indiana. In these states, he was polling very well with independents in suburban areas like northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of Denver, and the research triangle in North Carolina. We thought registration activity and turnout boosting here could make the electorate more favorable. But Obama’s appeal would not be enough. We needed to be able to mount individual state campaigns hearty enough to meet our vote goals. Ample funding was a piece of that puzzle, but far more important was the strength and growth of our grassroots movement in these states as we got closer to the election.
To figure out which states we should target, we focused our analysis on determining where we could credibly get to a win number, 49 or 50 percent in most cases (third-party candidates would skim a few votes in some states). We modeled many different scenarios, playing with various turnouts among certain demographics, different scenarios for how undecided voters could break, and the effect of increased voter registration. Our calculus took into account patterns in each state’s voting history, demographic analysis, our own research, and some old-fashioned gut instinct. We put states through the paces under various scenarios to see how they held up and if they gave us a reasonable path to victory.
This was one of the most important and enjoyable exercises in the campaign. Our data team, led by Hildebrand, Carson, and Jen O‘Malley (our battleground-states director, whom we brought in from Edwards’s campaign during the spring), developed a range of scenarios in each state that ran the gamut from optimistic to pessimistic.
I met with this group every couple of days in May, as we were still winding down from the primary, to review where we stood in the general. My strategic outlook was that we needed to play on the widest map possible in terms of targeted states. In 2000 and 2004, our party was forced to have its fate rest on the outcome of one state. That would not happen in 2008.
Consistent with the philosophy of the campaign, we eschewed head fakes. We wouldn’t target a state we couldn’t win solely to draw McCain into additional contests, forcing him to spend what would likely be his thinner resources more diffusely. Where that occurred, it would simply be a derivative benefit. If a state went through our obstacle course and came out looking good, it meant we believed we could win it.
I also didn’t want to play it safe. We were likely to be rolling through a fairly favorable climate politically and financially once we got into the fall, and we knew we would have a more robust grassroots presence. Rather than spend a lot of resources defending every state won by John Kerry in 2004, we gambled that most of these states would likely stay the course without much push from us; if we ran into trouble, we could always swoop in and correct our difficulty with a rush of time and money. I wanted our orientation to be almost exclusively offensive. This would increase our ability to win tougher red states and could potentially prevent McCain from playing offense himself. His campaign was prattling on to the press about how he could win states like Connecticut, New Jersey, and California. We didn’t take the bait. Our goal was to force them to defend Bush states, and we saw little to no evidence that they could add to the Bush Electoral College margin. If our plan worked, we would wake up the morning of November 4 with many different winning combinations, giving us greater margin for error. We could lose many of our targets but still get to 270. McCain, on the other hand, would have to run the whole table.
The states John Kerry won yielded 252 electoral votes. While some would unquestionably fall in our column, others looked likely but not certain. There was no doubt Michigan and Pennsylvania would be fiercely contested, and we could not afford to lose either. If we did, it would force us to win a much higher percentage of our targets than we felt comfortable with. Given this, those two big states would get the full treatment: we would spare no expense and they would get a lot of Obama time (and Pennsylvania already had in the primary).
Four additional Kerry states were critical strategically: First, in the Northwest, Oregon and Washington. These two states are always key battlegrounds and were very close in 2000 and 2004. The Democratic nominees spent a lot of time and money ensuring they went blue on Election Day. This year they looked to be tilting heavily Democratic, and even more important, they were states where Obama performed unusually strongly with independents. We also had very strong organizations built up during the primary in both Oregon and Washington.
With these factors in mind, we decided to gamble a bit and not fully target these states—no media budget, very modest staff presence, and no candidate visits. As the race unfolded, McCain gave us a big advantage by not fully engaging in either state—keeping them out of play took a couple of his potential moves off the table. We were delighted. Having Oregon and Washington in our column from the start let us devote resources to fighting McCain on his turf.
In the Midwest, Minnesota and Wisconsin were also traditionally fierce battlegrounds. Wisconsin was decided by less than one percentage point in both 2000 and 2004. It was clear McCain was going to go all-in on these states, but we took a more conservative approach. We planned a more rigorous presence than in Oregon and Washington, but less so than in the Bush states we were trying to convert. These states possessed two of our most muscular grassroots organizations in the country, and we brought in talented staff to work with an army of volunteers, who would make up for the absence of a live candidate and media buys.
Obama’s strength in the Northwest and upper Midwest was never properly appreciated during the primary, when electability was being debated as a criterion for winning the nomination. In the Midwest, Obama had regional appeal, and in both geographic areas, he was overperforming with independents. For a Democrat running in any of these states, combining a solid and energized base with a lead among independents was game, set, match. Perhaps other Democratic nominees would have won all four of these states in 2008, but I believe they would have had to fight much harder than we did. And money, time, and focus are zero-sum factors; any spent in your own backyard is unavailable for launching an assault on your opponents.
The list of Bush states we were putting through the paces went as follows, west to east: Nevada, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and New Hampshire. This is a big list and once again flowed from our belief that we should not follow a conventional playbook. We looked at the Electoral College with fresh eyes, ran the traps, and based our strategy on our analysis, not on preconceived notions about what a Democrat could win.
We believed Iowa and New Mexico presented the most solid opportunities for takeaways. McCain did not compete seriously in Iowa during the 2000 or 2008 caucuses, choosing to start his primary campaign in New Hampshire. Conversely, we had spent more time in Iowa than anywhere else so far and had a huge organization on the ground. New Mexico was strongly trending Democratic, and even though it neighbored McCain’s home state of Arizona, we saw no sign that he would have outsized appeal to the Hispanic voters that made up a hefty percentage of New Mexico’s electorate.
If we held on to all the Kerry states and won Iowa and New Mexico, we were sitting at 264 electoral votes, just 6 away from victory. With no remaining slam dunks, though, we needed a broad set of targets for those last votes. We could lose almost every other state if we won just one state with five or more electoral votes (a 269-269 tie would be decided by the U.S. House of Representatives, which the Democratic Party would almost assuredly control).
All things being equal, New Hampshire would have joined Iowa and New Mexico on the list of Bush states leaning toward Obama. The Democrats were in ascendance there, having won just about all there was to win in 2006. But McCain had a special relationship with voters in New Hampshire—they had given him a huge win in each of his runs, and we were a little gun-shy after Hillary had the rug pulled out from under us in the primary.
Virginia was a cornerstone to our strategy. Consequently, it was the first state Obama visited after having formally secured the nomination. We went to southwestern Virginia, the rural, more conservative area; a Democrat has to avoid being routed here in order to win the state. Soldiering into historically unfriendly territory sent a very important message both in Virginia and nationally: we were going to fight for votes in every corner of every battleground state. We also thought our early endorser, Governor Tim Kaine, would help us develop a solid road map and execute our game plan.
Virginia had changed enormously through the decade; after years of Republican dominance, Democrats now routinely won statewide office. It was also a relatively large state, offering thirteen Electoral College votes. Wresting Virginia from McCain would severely limit his options. He would have to win a large Kerry state or the race was over. We thought Virginia was prime real estate for us, and fortunately, the McCain camp did not believe they could lose there until it was too late.
McCain met several of our other targets with similar indifference. His campaign told the press we could not win North Carolina, Montana, Indiana, or, remarkably, Florida, so they would not compete there. This gave us a huge head start in states we believed were certainly in play. All in all, it was a huge gift.
My personal favorite target was the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska. Nebraska and Maine are the two states that do not award all their Electoral College votes based on statewide results. Instead, the winner of the raw vote in each congressional district receives one Electoral College vote. We felt confident we would carry all of Maine’s (though McCain made an ill-considered play for the northern congressional district), and it was clear McCain would carry two of Nebraska’s three districts comfortably. But we thought we could steal the 2nd District, around Omaha, where our organization was strong, and we already had ads on the air to reach Iowa voters.
The political history nerd in me would have loved to win 270-268, through a combination of all the Kerry states, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, and one vote from Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District to put us over the top. I mused to Obama about this scenario, remarking how unusual and historic it would be. In some ways it would resemble our primary win, where we stitched together an unlikely electoral path. “Plouffe, that’s interesting daydreaming,” he said, laughing. “Let’s try not to have it all come down to Nebraska 2.”
We knew both campaigns would compete aggressively in Missouri, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. We thought Ohio would be close no matter what; it was one of the few states where we did not think we could fundamentally alter the electorate, a top strategic goal in all battleground states. Because it had been ground zero in the Bush-Kerry race, turnout and registration levels were already exceedingly high. Even if our enthusiasm levels were higher than McCain‘s, and he had some drop-off from Bush’s turnout (a distinct possibility), we would still need to win the persuasion war with swing voters on the economy.
We believed Missouri, usually considered a bellwether, was an outlier in 2008 and trending a bit against us. If we won there, it would be by the thinnest of margins. The state had eleven electoral votes, though, and McCain was investing heavily, suggesting to us that they saw something that concerned them. In the end, Missouri was a bridge too far, but we hung in there, and forced McCain to as well.
Colorado and Nevada were great takeaway opportunities. Neither state broke Democratic or was particularly close in 2000 or 2004, but the growing influence of Latino vot
ers and Obama’s appeal with western independents gave us a great shot to pick them both up. Expanding the electorate through voter registration could have a meaningful effect in both states, and we thought younger voters could really help juice turnout favorably.
As I played with the map, a dozen times a day, I kept coming back to a scenario in which we won the White House by holding all the Kerry states and winning Iowa, New Mexico, and either Colorado or Nevada. This was our most conservative win formula. Of course, we would have liked the biggest margin possible, but we all tried to keep our appetites focused on what we had to have, not what we wanted to devour. “I’m not really interested in spending my time dreaming up landslide scenarios,” Obama told us. “Let’s just make sure we hit 270. I don’t want to get 260 wishing for 360.”
Perhaps wishing for 360, we initially targeted Georgia, North Dakota, and Alaska. We actually never had a credible path to 50 percent in these states but thought that if the two third-party candidates could get a few points—and Bob Barr, the libertarian candidate, was from Georgia—we might be able to eke out a win with 47 or 46 percent. We ended up pulling back from all three states, though we jumped back into Georgia and North Dakota. Ultimately we received 45 percent in both states—a very high number for a Democratic nominee—but we made a mistake including them on the original target list. It was just plain greedy, and target states we were unlikely to win wasted money and focus we could have used in the core battlegrounds.
This was the playing field. It was critical to keep all these states in play throughout the race, ideally taking the lead in some. But we built our campaign to do everything possible to win close battleground states. That’s what we assumed would decide the outcome.
On a trip to Washington in June, I outlined this approach for the press. We had put together a presentation that laid out our electoral strategy, where we saw the race message-wise, and some of our perhaps underappreciated assets: our grassroots operations, the ability to register voters, and so forth. We played it straight, no hyperbole. After struggling during the primary to get the press and the political community to understand our electoral strategy, we wanted to lay it out as clearly and as simply as possible. This way, as we were making moves, they could understand why and evaluate them through the prism of our strategy.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 33