USA TODAY International Edition
Obama cultivates high- tech grass roots
Re- election campaign seeks to build on 2008
WARREN, Mich. — Every time a bell rings in the field office of President Obama’s re- election campaign here, it means a phone bank worker has just persuaded a potential volunteer to come in for a one- on- one meeting.
That would seem a small victory to celebrate — except that it’s repeated virtually every hour of every day in scores of field offices across the country, including eight in Michigan.
The details of all those phone calls and more are entered into the Democratic Party’s “Vote Builder” database and sent to Obama’s Chicago headquarters each night. There, the data are collected, sorted and analyzed by some of the 300- plus paid staffers who have taken over an entire floor of the Prudential building.
Call it grass roots meets high- tech. Whatever the name, it marks the beginning of what campaign aides hope will be the first successful effort to combine the traditional ground game of politics with a digital, social- media environment to create a seamless, real- virtual world.
While the Republicans who want Obama’s job spend most of their time and money tearing each other apart from New Hampshire to Nevada, the president’s team has had 10 months to build an organization for November’s general election that improves upon the one they used in 2008 to devastate Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Mccain. It raised $ 125 million before the election year began, dwarfing Obama’s potential Republican opponents combined.
“We have a simple, audacious goal: to run the best grass- roots campaign in modern American political history,” says campaign manager Jim
Messina.
“That in there,” he says in an interview, surveying a Chicago office that sports a ping- pong table and dozens of youthful staffers’ college banners, “is a grand experiment in putting a whole bunch of really smart people in one room and telling them to dream it up.”
Republicans admit they have some catching up to do, but they insist they’re not intimidated by the Obama campaign’s head start in fundraising, hiring and organizing for the fall election. The Republican National Committee and aides to front- runner Mitt Romney claim they will have enough money and manpower to overcome the incumbent’s advantage because of public disenchantment with the struggling economy.
“Organization doesn’t matter if you don’t have any message,” says Katie Packer Gage, Romney’s deputy campaign manager. “I’m not sure that organization and money can make up for that.”
Obama may need all the organizational muscle his campaign can muster. No president since Franklin Roosevelt has run for re- election with unemployment as high as today’s 8.3%. No president in more than 60 years has run for re- election with a job approval rating below Obama’s 46%.
Those head winds are in evidence in the swing states Obama hopes to win in November. In Detroit and its suburbs — including here in Macomb County, where the term “Reagan Democrats” gained fame in the 1980s— the campaign is striving to reinvent the magic of 2008.
“There have been people who felt he should have been a miracle worker,” says Cynthia Jackson, a team leader in Detroit.
Back in Chicago, those people become “persuadable voters” who will be contacted again by neighbors or people with common interests. National field director Jeremy Bird illustrates the outreach effort with a series of snowflakes that reach from headquarters to individual voters, donors and volunteers.
“We really get local,” Bird says of his operation. “People are working like we have a primary.”
‘ Bigger, faster, stronger’
The Chicago headquarters of Obama for America is an imposing sight: row after row of long tables, filled with predominately young staffers and their computers, silently tapping away.
Every Monday, the vast floor gets more crowded as more people are hired to help re- elect the president. They are placed into sections: communications, research, policy, field, training, digital, video, graphics, technology.
In the middle of the room is Messina, whose office is dominated by the No. 2 framed jersey of New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. A former top Senate aide who became White House deputy chief of staff, Messina’s passion as a campaign manager is metrics.
“What we’re doing is just bigger, faster, stronger than anyone’s ever done,” he says.
The Obama campaign keeps track of everything. At last count, it had about 25 million Facebook friends and 12 million Twitter followers. It passed 1 million donors in October, 46% of whom had not given to the 2008 campaign, and 1 million “conversations” with voters in November. When the president delivered his State of the Union Address last month, the campaign sponsored more than 2,700 house parties.
Not everything is public knowledge, however. Believing they are once again outmaneuvering their Republican opponents, Messina’s minions won’t reveal exactly how many field offices or paid staffers they have around the country. Nor will they discuss details of their still- under- development digital dashboard.
“We don’t want the other guys to know what we’re building in metric stuff, in computer stuff, online,” Messina says. “We don’t want to give them a game plan of what we’re going to do.” Here’s what they’ve already done:
- Money. The campaign raised $125 million in 2011, 75% more than in 2007, putting it on pace to top the record $745 million it raised for Obama’s first race. It woos the maximum $35,800 that wealthy donors can give in one year to the campaign and Democratic National Committee. It also solicits $3 contributions from supporters, a few of whom have won a meal with the president.
- Staffing. The campaign shelled out nearly $ 11 million in salaries last year after starting business in April; consulting contracts drove the cost higher.
Top earner: Michael Slaby, the chief integration and innovation officer, at $98,000. The campaign paid $3.1 million just in payroll taxes, according to its Federal Election Commission report.
- Field operations. Beyond the Chicago headquarters, the campaign is paying regional directors, state directors, state regional directors and field directors. At the volunteer level, they have neighborhood team leaders, core team leaders, faith captains, campus leaders, even people who visit barbershops and beauty parlors.
- Targeting. The campaign’s “Operation Vote” targets women, young people, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, gays and lesbians, seniors and veterans. Beyond those broad categories, there are subsets, such as union members, environmentalists and health professionals. The website singles out Jews and “people of faith.”
- Digital. The campaign’s website was redesigned in November using a “responsive design” format that automatically fits on any device. The emphasis is on one- stop shopping: Volunteers can register voters and take donations on the street. The campaign has its own Youtube page. Click on some of its online ads, and you can send an old- fashioned postcard to a friend.
“What’s changed is all the tools and channels that we can use,” says digital director Teddy Goff. “It’s sort of one message, many formats.”
Organizing ‘ like the president’
Perhaps nowhere is Obama better organized than in Michigan, a state he cannot afford to lose if he wants another term in office.
The president won with more than 57% of the vote in 2008 after Mccain, in a strategic move, pulled his staff out of Michigan to work elsewhere. Obama’s campaign dominated in that race, particularly online.
Through Obama’s first year in office, Michigan had the nation’s worst jobless rate of 13.3% before beginning a steady decline. In December, it stood at 9.3% — better than nine other states and the District of Columbia.
At the heart of the rebound is the resurgence of the Big Three auto companies: General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. Obama supported the multibilliondollar loans to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and presided over their makeovers. Last year, all three companies increased their market share for the first time in 20 years. On Sunday night, Chrysler’s “Halftime in America” ad starring Clint Eastwood proclaimed the comeback.
“We placed our bets on the American auto industry, and today the American auto industry is back,” Obama said during a visit to the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor in late January. “Jobs are coming back— 160,000 jobs.”
That’s good news for the re- election campaign in more ways than one. Many of the people holding those jobs are so grateful, they plan to offer their services.
“I will be donating money. I will be out there going door- to- door. I will do whatever it takes,” says Stacie Steward, a 40- year- old United Auto Workers member who was unemployed for 14 months before getting her job back at Chrysler’s Sterling Heights plant, north of Detroit.
The night before Obama’s visit, volunteers manned phone banks in Detroit and Warren, the heart of Macomb County, searching for more volunteers to build Messina’s grand experiment.
“We’re teaching people how to organize like the president,” says state director Garrett Arwa, noting Obama’s early career as a community organizer in Chicago. Arwa calls it “people power that you can’t put a price tag on.”
Last year, they got organized by practicing on state and local campaigns in swing states. Obama’s volunteers helped overturn an Ohio law that reduced the time frame for early voting and helped recall two Wisconsin Republican state senators. They also were active in local campaigns in Florida and North Carolina.
And despite having no opposition in this year’s primaries, the Obama campaign had more field offices in Iowa ( eight) and New Hampshire ( seven) than any of the Republican candidates.
Here in Michigan, Obama’s volunteers are well aware of their status as a crucial swing state, so they’re working day and night on his behalf.
“We’re canvassing in neighborhoods that we know,” says Wanda Black, a Warren field office volunteer, as another bell rings. “We’re letting them know that the campaign is geared up.”
Republicans vow ‘ toe- to- toe’ fight
Republican officials say they have plenty of time to catch up to the Obama re- election juggernaut, in Michigan and nationally. Rick Wiley, the Republican National Committee’s political director, says Obama must spend time shoring up his liberal base, “whereas our base is so fired up to fire Barack Obama.”
Indeed, much of the Obama team’s work thus far has been aimed at past supporters — to the chagrin of some Democratic leaders. “What it is in a lot of ways is keeping the true believers involved,” says Ed Bruley, chairman of the Macomb County Democratic Committee. “I don’t think it extends much beyond that, and I wish it would.”
Until the GOP has a nominee, the RNC and state parties are doing the general- election organizing. Wiley says the national party has a similar focus on grass- roots volunteers and plans to launch a new digital program in March that turns online activists into “virtual precinct captains.”
“When you don’t have the incumbent, then things wait a little longer. The incumbent always has the advantage early on of building things much sooner than the other guy does,” Wiley says. “It doesn’t concern me that they are out there doing this.”
Gage, the Romney deputy campaign manager, is similarly sanguine. By autumn, she says, “we’re going to be able to go toe- to- toe with Barack Obama in terms of organization.”