“Well, the Obama ground game really was that good.” – Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 11/6/2012
Barack Obama will never be on a ballot again, but after his big victory last night, many will ask if the Obama campaign model can ever be replicated, or if is it the result of a once-in-a-generation candidate and circumstance. I think the better question is: can future Democratic campaigns afford not to try?
One of the first lessons I learned as a political operative is that no matter the campaign, there are only three ways to win an election: register new supporters, persuade potential supporters, or turn out existing supporters. The question for every campaign leadership team is to figure out how many resources (if any) and which tactics to use in pursuit of each.
In early 2011, the Obama campaign made a decision to make a big bet in the so-called “ground game” – or what people in the business simply call “field” – as a key component of their overall strategy on all three fronts. Over the last two years, thousands of paid staffers fanned out to the far corners of battleground states to register, persuade and turn out Obama supporters. Last night, that strategy was vindicated.
To me, the legacy of the 2012 campaign will be that effort and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party and presidential politics.
While the press usually speaks of the ground game in generalities – “thousands of phone calls,” “hundreds of volunteers,” “countless hours,” and so forth – good campaigns are obsessive about precision in their numbers. Campaigns are also typically very reluctant to release those numbers to the public or press – partially because it is valuable strategic information and partially because snapshots of field numbers don’t necessarily look or sound impressive.
But last Saturday, less than 100 hours before polls closed, the trio of organizers at the top of the Obama field hierarchy – Battleground States Director Mitch Stewart, National Field Director Jeremy Bird and their chief deputy Marlon Marshall – gave us insight into the scope and scale of what Obama 2012 was able to produce using real and incredibly impressive numbers. (Full disclosure: as former OFA Political Director, I’ve worked closely with all three of them in the past, and count them all as friends.) I won’t go into all of them here (you can read for yourself) but they are truly staggering, well surpassing the 2008 Obama campaign on every level. But perhaps most important is the way that change was achieved.
One sentence towards the end of Stewart, Bird, and Marshall’s memo captures it well:
“Ours is a people-centered, data-driven campaign that has built small, manageable neighborhood teams run by talented volunteers and supported by amazing field organizers who know the exact number of votes they need to win in their precincts.”
This seems so simple, yet it must be said clearly: never, in the history of presidential politics, in either party, has field organizing been done in such a people-centered, data-driven way. On the strength of his message, personality, and record – and with the help of thousands of dedicated field staffers and volunteers – Barack Obama built a campaign organization unlike any other in American history.
One of the core beliefs of the Obama team – from the president on down – is that personal contact from a neighbor or an acquaintance is the most effective way to recruit a volunteer or deliver a message. OFA had the time, the resources and, perhaps most importantly, the belief in organizing at the neighborhood level – to embed itself in communities, build infrastructure, and empower volunteers to take real leadership roles in the campaign. For five years, OFA has recruited, trained, tested and empowered its most committed supporters to serve in roles that would normally be reserved for paid staff.
The neighborhood team leaders of OFA 2012 weren’t just the most zealous or experienced volunteers, they were seasoned professionals in their own right, organizing their own phone banks, canvasses, or voter registration drives and reporting the results directly to Chicago with minimal (or even no) official support. They were the keepers of the lists of potential volunteers, of the relationships with local elected officials and political allies, of the schedule of events that needed to be staffed and the places from which to stage get-out-the-vote operations. This model of community organizing is nothing new – it’s been used in many popular movements, including the 2008 campaign – but OFA 2012 adapted it for a national presidential campaign and then executed it to near perfection.
The 2012 campaign also realized that the “ground game” wasn’t an end in itself; the work being done in the field produced valuable data could be used to inform the rest of the campaign operation.
In a way unlike any presidential campaign before it, OFA 2012 created systems to centralize data collection from grassroots field activity and built an unprecedented, in-house quantitative analytics team that could harness it to make its voter contact efforts more efficient. Improved technology combined with the reporting discipline demanded by Stewart, Bird and Marshall gave the campaign leadership the ability to obtain virtually immediate feedback about whether and how targeted voters were receiving messages from the campaign.
This, as Slate’s Sasha Issenberg has written about, allowed the brain trust in Chicago to conduct scientific experiments, testing new messages and new tactics and actually measuring their effects in real time. Combined with more traditional methods of campaign research and microtargeting, OFA 2012 had a treasure trove of data to work with to ensure that it was getting the right message, to the right people, in the right way.
Campaigns – especially at the presidential level – are far too complex and multi-layered to be able to say definitely that the Obama field program was the decisive factor in his big win. It’s also far too early to be able to make conclusive cause-and-effect statements. Here is what I can say with some measure of confidence:
1. Ensuring the success of early voting is now the most important element of the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort – and monitoring, tracking, and boosting the early vote is uniquely suited for the ground game. Obama’s margins in states like Iowa and Ohio were boosted by weeks of “chasing” outstanding vote-by-mail ballots with multiple calls and door knocks, organizing shuttles from college campuses or African American churches to early vote locations, and relentless focus on turning out sporadic-voting Democrats and left-leaning independents who were supposed to have “lost enthusiasm” since 2008.
Expanding the electorate through voter registration is something that cannot be done with ads or direct mail – it’s painstaking work that requires a real investment in human resources. In most campaigns, registration is typically considered last among the trinity of possible field strategies; it’s extremely work intensive, and newly-registered voters still have to be turned out come election time. On a presidential campaign, devoting field resources to registration is even more rare because it can more easily be outsourced to third party groups than persuasion or even GOTV.
OFA did not accept this conventional wisdom, and early in the campaign decided to change the electorate through brute grassroots force – to the tune of 1.8 million new voters in battleground states. The tens of thousands of new Obama voters that OFA registered in places like Colorado and Florida were the margin of victory yesterday, and all the credit should go to the people on the ground who ground through that thankless and difficult task.
2. The great, unwritten story of the Obama campaign is its revolutionary use of data and quantitative analysis, led by Chief Analytics Officer Dan Wagner. What makes what Wagner and his team did different from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog is the access to a wealth of inside information, including data generated by a field team that could provide near-instant feedback and conduct live experiments. In the same way that Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign showed the power of online organizing and fundraising, Obama 2012 has shown the power of analytics-based campaigning and the importance of a ground game to reinforce it.
Building a grassroots field organization requires playing a long game, and the return on investment often isn’t seen until the waning days of a long campaign. Data analysis is esoteric and unsexy work that is largely (and understandably) misunderstood by the press and public, myself included. But in my opinion, the Obama 2012 campaign has shown that “people-centered” and “data-driven” are no longer buzzwords; they might be the last best hope for future campaigns to break through the cacophony of ads, polls, and cable news chatter.
I want to be very clear: field organizing alone does not win an election. Even the best people-centered and data-driven program cannot overcome a poor candidate, a poor message, or events or macroeconomic trends that are out of a campaign’s control. But as we move into a midterm cycle in which Democrats are going to have to buck historical trends if we want to take back the House and hold onto the Senate, it will interesting to see if and how downballot candidates embrace the ground game.
I believe they can and should, with a few caveats. First, organizing requires commitment – field is often the first thing on the budget chopping block, but an understaffed, under-resourced field campaign is worse than none at all. Second, organizing requires time – candidates have to decide early if they will embrace a grassroots strategy and start to execute at least a year before Election Day. Third, organizing requires talented staff – luckily for Democrats, there are thousands of young campaign veterans who have been brought up through the crucible of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns and who believe to their core in the power of this kind of politics.
With a real commitment, an early start, and a talented staff, candidates for non-presidential races can build their own people-centered, data-driven campaigns. Interestingly, while OFA will almost certainly continue its work on behalf of the administration in the second term, Obama’s army of trained neighborhood team leaders are out there waiting to be courted by the next candidate to capture their imagination.
Addisu Demissie is co-founder and principal at 50+1 strategies, a California-based political consulting firm. He was previously national political director at Organizing for America. You can follow him on Twitter @asdem.