The Republican base saw the president as weak and beatable, but Mitt Romney’s high command struggled to find a winning message.
“The bottom line is that the Obama campaign [had] a candidate that was very hard to lay a glove on because he was somebody that the American people, by and large, had decided that they just liked,” said Romney’s deputy campaign manager Katie Packer Gage.
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“It was one of the most frustrating things in our campaign,” Gage added. “In focus group after focus group, when you would sit down with this sort of narrow slice of voters — undecided female voters who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 — they weren’t ready to vote for Barack Obama yet, but when we would test message point after message point after message point, there was almost nothing that would stick to this guy because they just liked him personally” (Hohmann 1).
On paper, Democrats' turnout efforts this year dwarfed those of their GOP counterparts. The 125 million voter contacts the Obama team claimed were more than twice the Republican total. The hundreds of Democratic field offices outnumbered GOP outposts by greater than 2-1 or 3-1 in key swing states.
But the Obama campaign insisted it wasn't just about the numbers.
"Many field campaigns have historically favored quantity over quality. We do not," Obama national field director Jeremy Bird told reporters just before Election Day. "These are not phone calls made from a call center. They are done at the local level by our neighborhood team leaders, members and volunteers, who are talking to people in their communities."
And in an election cycle where billions of dollars were spent on attack ads -- far more than ever before -- that kind of old-school retail politicking may have made the difference.
In the home stretch, the Romney campaign pointed to a big jump in voter contacts this year over John McCain's 2008 effort. But a significant percentage of the voter contacts they pointed to included indirect contact -- like door hangers -- that didn't give voters the all-important sense of personal connection.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign's turnout effort flooded the zone. While Republicans were still battling for the nomination in the spring, the number of Obama field offices in key primary season states likely to play significant roles in the fall -- states like Ohio, New Hampshire and Florida -- already outnumbered those of all his potential GOP challengers combined, even though the president wasn't facing any primary season challengers.
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Record-breaking numbers of voters cast their ballots before Election Day this year -- half the voting population or higher in some states -- and the Obama campaign was able to bank huge leads weeks ahead of the race's final day.
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… these Obama outposts, no matter how small, weren't just window dressing; they filled a couple of key functions. Since each was staffed with at least one Obama for America staffer, they served as an initial point of contact with the campaign, and a recruitment center for local volunteers. They provided a central location for campaign events, for phone banking and for data collection. And their permanence allowed the campaign to develop vital local insight: to build detailed voter files on potential supporters, field test the best ways to motivate them, and push them to cast their votes weeks before Election Day.
Republicans said those early voting efforts by the president's campaign were just tapping out their support from voters who would have shown up for him in the end anyway -- and that the edge fueled by early voting would evaporate when Republican voters headed to the polls on Election Day. They weren't entirely wrong; a good chunk of those early Democratic votes came from banking ballots from the president's strongest supporters, base voters who would have shown up no matter what.
But that early vote cushion wasn't just cosmetic. It helped create an aura of inevitability on the ground in key swing states. It provided an insurance policy against potential vote loss to Election Day lines and snafus. And instead of devoting valuable home stretch resources to bringing guaranteed votes to the polls on Election Day, the campaign could instead focus on using those hard-core supporters as Election Day foot soldiers, employing the most personal and effective form of voter persuasion to bring less enthusiastic backers to the polls (Sinderbrand 1-3).
The Democrats’ position on … domestic issues and the improving economy convinced independent voters—better than one-third of the electorate—that President Obama deserved re-election. Mitt Romney’s gaffes during the campaign, particularly his “private” remark writing off 47 percent of the electorate as dependent on government programs, enabled Democrats to frame Republicans as out of touch with ordinary Americans.
Romney simply did not resonate well with the majority of voters. Polls indicated that Americans “liked” Obama, even though some disagreed with his policies. Personality and perceptions play a significant role in campaigns. But it is important to understand that a candidate’s stance on the issues help to create positive or negative images. So elections are not simply about personalities, but also reflect the effectiveness of getting across a positive message to voters (Goldfields 14).
… a reconstruction by the [Boston] Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.
One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts. The effect was to open the way for Obama to define Romney through an early blitz of negative advertising. Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people.
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Rich Beeson, the Romney political director …, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,’’ Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,’’ something that Romney did not have the staff to match.
Republicans, as it happened, had lost track of their own winning formula.
Democrats said they followed the trail blazed in 2004 by the Bush campaign which used an array of databases to “microtarget’’ voters and a sophisticated field organization to turn them out. Obama won in part by updating the GOP’s innovation.
Romney’s inner circle of family and friends understood the candidate’s weakness all too well: He was a deeply private person, with an aversion to revealing too much of himself to the public. They worried that unless the candidate opened up, he would too easily be reduced to caricature, as a calculating man of astounding wealth, a man unable to relate to average folks, a man whose Mormon faith put him outside the mainstream.
Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, drew up a list of 12 people whose lives had been helped by his father in ways that were publicly unknown but had been deeply personal and significant, such as assisting a dying teenager in writing a will or quietly helping families in financial need. Such compelling vignettes would have been welcome material in almost any other campaign. But Romney’s strategists worried that stressing his personal side would backfire, and a rift opened between some in Romney’s circle and his strategists that lasted until the convention. More than being reticent, Romney was at first far from sold on a second presidential run. Haunted by his 2008 loss, he initially told his family he would not do it. While candidates often try to portray themselves as reluctant, Tagg insisted his father’s stance was genuine.
“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to ... run,’’ said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.’’
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Family members kept pushing for a film or series of advertisements that would show how Romney had helped average people in personal ways, based on Tagg’s list of 12 people, along with clips about how Romney raised his family. The film project was to be overseen by documentary filmmaker Greg Whiteley, a longtime family friend who had been allowed to film portions of Romney’s 2008 campaign. But the plan was rejected, leading some in the family to blame [Stuart] Stevens, [Romney’s chief strategist].
Stevens said he did not kill the documentary. But he said he did have a strategic vision that went another way, one he grounded in four questions he put to voters in focus groups.
“There [were] different areas that you could go into,’’ Stevens said. “Talk about Mitt’s business record, Mitt‘s personal story, what Mitt would do as president ... and why Barack Obama is bad. We tested all four equally. We were open to doing any combination, and the one that tested far and away the best, people wanted to know what Mitt Romney would do as president.’’
President Obama’s strategy had very different roots.
His national field director, Jeremy Bird, … was confident that Obama would commit massive resources to building an organization that zeroed in on individual voters.
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… Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon’’ strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains’’ were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains’’ were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.
A first-class ground operation in 2012 required leading-edge technology, and here also an early gap opened between Obama and Romney.
The goal was to create the political equivalent of a Facebook or Twitter, a platform that would change the way presidential campaigns are run. And Obama’s team found just the man for the job: a 34-year-old programming whiz named Harper Reed, who got his start as an 11-year-old pecking on an Apple II and had never held a top job in a political campaign. With his wildly flowing black hair, big earrings, and bigger glasses, he was not long on humility — his website proclaimed that “I am pretty awesome’’ — but his talents were real.
As Reed assembled his team, he insisted on being given leeway to hire some of the best techies in the country, from Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter. Moreover, he insisted the team be largely internal, rather than have the enterprise be divided up among outside consultants.
The group was haunted by the failure of a similar venture in Obama’s 2008 campaign, when a get-out-the-vote computer program called Houdini crashed and could have cost the election if the race had been closer. This time, Reed and his team created a successor that they named Gordon, after the person who punched Houdini in the stomach shortly before the magician died.
Separately, the Obama team created a system called Narwahl, named after an Arctic whale, which linked disparate computer programs together. Narwahl and Gordon would be tested repeatedly in exercises that Obama’s team called “game day.’’ Every imaginable failure would be thrown at the systems — hacker attacks, database meltdowns, Internet failures — and the team would be challenged to write up a manual for how to deal with each disaster. It was, they said, more fun than the fantasy war game Dungeons & Dragons.
Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital director, did not have the luxury of Reed’s time or resources. Moffatt came from the world of politics, had worked at the Republican National Committee and had long believed Romney would be the best GOP candidate for president.
Moffatt played catch-up from the start. He had 14 people working for him in the primaries and then, around May 1, he submitted a general election plan that required at least 110 people and would eventually have 160. Obama was far ahead. Moffatt recalled his assignment in daunting terms: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?’’
Moffatt’s team nonetheless managed to create big projects on short notice. For example, one of the highest priorities was a Facebook app that would enable the Romney campaign to locate voters who otherwise could not be found by telephone. By some estimates, half of younger voters do not have a landline or cannot be reached by cellphone. Three weeks before Election Day, the app was unveiled by the campaign and downloaded by 40,000 Romney supporters.
There was only one problem. Months earlier, Obama’s campaign had developed a similar app, which had been downloaded by 1 million people.
“I questioned why they didn’t spend more time and energy early defining Romney in a fuller way so people could identify with him,’’ [David] Axelrod [Obama’s senior strategist] said in a post-election interview.
“One of my conclusions is so much of his life was kind of walled off from use. His faith is important to him, but they didn’t want to talk about that. His business was important, but they didn’t want to talk about that much. His governorship was important to him, but his signature achievement [health care] was unhelpful to them in the Republican primary. My feeling is you have to build a candidacy on the foundation of biography. That is what authenticates your message. I was always waiting for that to happen.’’
Axelrod jumped at the opening. In a major gamble, the Obama campaign moved $65 million in advertising money that had been budgeted for September and October into June, enabling the president to unleash a series of attacks that would define Romney at a time when the Republican would have little money to respond.
From Axelrod’s viewpoint, the timing was perfect. Romney had been weakened by assaults from fellow GOP candidates during the primaries. Romney alienated many Hispanics by suggesting that illegal immigrant families should “self- deport,’’ and he said he had been a “severely conservative’’ governor, hurting his strategy to move to the middle for the general election.
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… Obama’s campaign had far more people on the ground, for longer periods, and backed by better data. In Florida, for example, the Romney campaign said it had fewer than 200 staff members on the ground, a huge commitment of its total of 500 nationwide. But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida out of 3,000 or so nationwide.
“They had more staff in Florida than we had in the country, and for longer,’’ said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman.
Indeed, in swing state after swing state, the Obama field team was much bigger than the Romney troops. Obama had 123 offices in Ohio, compared with Romney’s 40. Obama had 59 offices in Colorado, compared with Romney’s 15, according to statistics compiled by the Obama campaign.
Romney’s confidence remained strong as Election Day approached. While public polls showed Obama in control, some of Romney’s internal polls showed him winning.
But Obama’s field organization was too strong. In Florida, 266,000 more Hispanics voted than four years earlier. “They altered the face of the election by driving up the Latino turnout,’’ Romney political director Rich Beeson said. “They told us they would do it. I didn’t think they would do it, and they did.’’
Ohio was the greatest surprise of all. Romney pollster Neil Newhouse calculated that 209,000 more African-Americans voted this year than in 2008 in Ohio, while 329,000 fewer whites had voted.
“I don’t know how that’s possible,’’ Newhouse said. “If that is what the Obama campaign achieved, hats off to them.’’
A key difference was the depth of voter contact. Romney took comfort in polls that showed voters had been contacted equally by both campaigns. But the polls were misleading, perhaps equating a recorded robocall on the phone with a house call by a worker.
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As dawn broke on Election Day, 800 Romney volunteers filled the floor of TD Garden in Boston. This was the centerpiece of the campaign’s turnout operation, code named ORCA, that was supposed to swallow Obama’s Narwhal program. But the Romney team was so determined to keep ORCA secret that it had never run a test at TD Garden; it had only gone through some lesser runs in a different building.
The ORCA workers were supposed to be in contact with more than 30,000 volunteers stationed at polling places across the country. Those volunteers were told to bring a smartphone and go to a secure Web page on which they could report the names of everyone who voted. In this way, the Romney campaign could determine if supporters had failed to show up and urge them to vote.
But as volunteers on Election Day began tapping in the names of voters, it became clear something was wrong.
The system was so overloaded with incoming data from volunteers that it exceeded capacity and crashed.
The Obama campaign, which had suffered a similar meltdown in 2008 and had been zealous about testing its systems this time around, had no glitches. Tens of thousands of Obama volunteers across the country sent real-time data from polling places, enabling workers at Chicago headquarters to ensure that expected vote totals were on track. More importantly, the field organization put in place by Jeremy Bird hit its goals, turning out the needed number of voters to reelect the president.
Exit polls told a stunning story. The majority of voters preferred Romney’s visions, values, and leadership. But he had clearly failed to address the problem that Romney’s own family worried about from the start. Obama beat Romney by an astonishing 81 to 18 percent margin on the question of which candidate “cares about people like me.’’
That finding still frustrates those closest to Romney. His former lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, who believed the campaign wasted an opportunity to highlight Romney’s life at the convention, said, “even at the end of the campaign, I never felt that the American people understood Mitt Romney’s genuine character and that is a terrible shame.’’
Romney, who did not respond to an interview request, was ultimately responsible for his campaign’s failings. Republicans variously blamed factors such as a candidate who was too moderate or not moderate enough, a lower-than-expected turnout of white voters for Romney coupled with a heavy minority vote for Obama, and the president’s leadership during the Sandy storm.
Inevitably, much of the blame has been directed at Stevens, and he hasn’t ducked it. “If there’s blame to be thrown, throw it my way,’’ he said. But he said it should be noted that Obama had no primary opponents, giving him an enormous advantage (Kranish 1-25).
Works cited:
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what-we-can-learn-from-the-2012-presidential-election/
Hohmann, James, “Campaign Officials Dissect Election.” Politico, December 8, 2012. Web.
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/campaign-officials-dissect-election-cycle-084796
Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/noprimarytagmatch/2012/12/22/the-story-behind-mitt-romneys-loss-in-the-presidential-campaign-to-president-obama
Sinderbrand, Rebecca, “Analysis: Obama Won with a Better Ground Game.” CNN. November 7, 2012. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/politics/analysis-why-obama-won/index.html
