The Obama Campaign Strategy

I had intended to write about the election results from the standpoint of Romney’s failed strategy today, and I will at some point.  But what’s been lost so far in the post-election analysis is what Obama’s strategy was and how well it worked.  The conventional wisdom seems to be that the President was lucky, and in some respects he was, and even his own reaction speaks to that.  

But I have stumbled upon what the Axelrod-Plouffe strategy was and frankly it is pretty dark.  Not in a black helicopter, conspiracy theory kind of way, just in the tonality of it.  To think that anyone would try to get someone elected President by pursuing this strategy.  But the reality is it worked, and if there is not an appropriate response from the culture, the media, or the GOP, it will continue to work and have serious implications for our country.

By day I work in market research in the Chicago area (I know crazy to think that I could not support my family based on a lightly read blog).  I’ve been in the field for over a decade working for blue chip companies.  This week I was out with consumers in Chicago, one of whom who volunteered a rundown of other projects she had been a part of.  One of them was a deep dive into attitudes around abortion that she surmised was being done by a political campaign.

This was a politically independent white woman, happened to be a baby boomer, although not sure age was part of the calculation.  Obama campaign headquarters was based in Chicago and I can tell you when money is tight, clients stay close to home.  You can find independent white suburban women in Chicago just as easily as anywhere else.  

Why do I assume this was Obama?  Well, Mitt Romney clearly never had any intention of saying anything about abortion as he did not nor did he permit any talk of it at the GOP convention (I believe this was part of the calculation Obama’s team made, but I’ll get to that) and Romney’s team would have been crazy to do research in Obama’s backyard and potentially tip their hand to what they were thinking about.

Also, there were no statewide races for Senate or Governor in Illinois this year and if it was Planned Parenthood trying to figure out how to sell more abortions, no reason to include a woman age 50+.  The logical conclusion is that it was the Obama team trying to understand how to talk about abortion.  

You say, “why, they are pro-abortion, that is well known, what more is there to say?”.  Let’s look at the coalition Obama cobbled together to win with.  The two Davids (Axelrod and Plouffe) knew coming into this election they had 80% or better support among Latinos and blacks.  The game among those groups was turnout.  But despite the post-election media hype to the contrary (this is a red herring), Obama still needed to capture just enough white voters to win.

His team knew based on the economy that getting blue collar, white males (traditional Democratic base) was going to be difficult.  The first prong of their strategy, designed to keep Latinos from defecting to Romney (as they had voted for Rick Scott and Marco Rubio in Florida in 2010) and to try and pick off blue collar white males was the Bain Capital line of attack against Romney.  Portray Romney as the stereotypical cold-hearted rich capitalist who trades jobs for profit.

This worked because Romney’s campaign was left financially unable to respond to these early attacks after a tough primary campaign (see yesterday’s WSJ article - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324073504578105340729306074.html?mod=ITP_pageone_0.  Some in the GOP will no doubt use this to try and blame Gingrich, Santorum, or the primary process for Romney’s defeat.  But keep in mind it was Romney who chose a primary strategy of simply running as inevitable.  He didn’t seek to quickly define himself and offer concrete proposals designed to grab momentum and quickly end the race. 

Even when it became painfully obvious that was necessary to end the race, he refused.  While his strategy ultimately worked, it left him completely vulnerable to Obama’s early attacks.  Failure to anticipate this would seem directly attributable to the team of political rookies he had in his kitchen cabinet.  He opted for advice from long-time friends and associates as opposed to political professionals and it cost him.

As the WSJ points out, the result of the protracted primary was that Romney had to plot a campaign trail based on getting cash, not votes.  Hence he was in the Hamptons or Hollywood when he should have been in Ohio and Florida.  He also spent most of the campaign speaking to potential high dollar donors and not sharing ideas with the American people.

But smearing Romney’s record at Bain was only one prong of the Obama strategy.  Even though it succeeded because of Romney’s poor primary strategy, it would not have been enough even to win Ohio. 

And that is where the electoral map comes into play.  High Latino turnout (again a group that could go as high as 80% for the President) was going to help in places like Nevada, Florida, and Colorado.  But it wasn’t going to be quite enough and in states like Wisconsin and Ohio where less than 3% of the vote was going to be Latinos, even with record high turnout, it wasn’t much help at all. 

No, they still had to pick off white voters, a block that was going to largely go for Romney.  The Bain attacks would help with blue collar white voters, but they needed more as Romney’s advantage among men was going to be huge.

The answer was to find a way to pull white female independent voters away from Romney.  It wasn’t about making the President more attractive, it was about finding a way to make Romney repulsive to them.  The answer was abortion and contraception.  They learned, and correctly, that those were issues they could use to drive a wedge, pick off enough white women, and hold on for a tight election victory.  Given their record, the lack of credible ideas for the second term, it was their only hope.

So they gathered independent white female voters in a focus group facility in Oak Brook, IL (possibly other places) and peppered them with questions about abortion, having them write down their answers.  This is partly necessary when asking consumers to discuss a highly sensitive topic with a room full of strangers, but it also gives you a wealth of information to pour over after the research is over.  Particularly helpful if you need to understand nuances in language or figure out how to massage language to elicit the correct response (as a politician would need to).

But part of this strategy and the reason you would even think it had a chance is if you could be sure that Romney wouldn’t respond.  An honest debate on abortion could backfire on the Obama team because as recent polls have shown the country is starting to become increasingly pro-life.  But they had Romney pegged.  He was a fiscal conservative who could be socially moderate and was not particularly comfortable discussing social issues.  You also had a GOP that was nominating Romney precisely because they believed that talking about social issues would be their demise.  So it was a reasonable gambit by the Obama team that Romney would not respond.

If they had the field to themselves to define abortion and contraception as issues of “women’s health” or “rights” that they alone could be entrusted to protect, then they could pick off enough white women to win states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and make a path to re-election.  But I also believe this strategy was devised well in advance of the election and not left purely to political rhetoric.

No, a year before the election the HHS announced that all employers, with only a narrow exemption for religious employers, would need to pay for insurance coverage of contraception and abortion.    This caused uproar among Catholics, a miscalculation on the part of the Obama team, but one that was blunted when they delayed implementation until after the election.  This, combined with the media’s gross underreporting on the issue, meant most Catholics were still largely in the dark come election time.  While the Catholic vote was basically split, Obama did not lose enough Catholic votes to cost him the election.

But what this mandate did, a violation of religious conscience protections, a violation of the 1^st amendment, was set the stage for the Obama strategy.  In a year when Romney and the GOP were not going to do it, it introduced social issues into the campaign.  It introduced abortion and contraception as key issues, not just boxes in a long party platform.  I speculated at the time that the only logical reason for doing so was to divide white women and they knew they could win the argument.

With the stage set, the Democratic convention became abortion palooza.  Much to the confusion of the Catholic media and even some of the secular media in attendance, almost every single speaker talked about “women’s health” and “women’s reproductive rights”.  They had to keep chipping away at white women in order to have a chance.  Romney staged a highly coordinated GOP convention that was all about the economy with not a single prominent speech about social issues.  

The Obama strategy worked as just weeks before the election, in a Gallup poll, women voters ranked issues like abortion and contraception ahead of even the economy in terms of their concerns.  While Romney claimed some momentum after the first debate, he lacked the messaging to match the Obama strategy.  Romney was preaching to the choir, talking about the economy, preaching to his white voting base. 

He never effectively rebutted the Bain Capital attacks which meant Latinos never gave him a serious chance (they probably viewed him as an American version of Carlos Slim) and he never made a case for life.  That meant that come election day while he won handily among white males, he won white females by 6 fewer points.  That was enough to be the difference in a place like Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia.  

I’ve gone on quite a bit today and plan to keep unpacking this in the coming weeks, so let me quickly wrap this up.  In a year with the worst economy in decades, this election was ultimately decided by abortion and contraception.  And it was decided with only one team on the field on those issues.  The GOP has to learn from that.

Number two, we had people on the Obama team (presumably Axelrod and Plouffe) who wanted to retain power so bad, that they devised the only successful strategy they could, even if it was built around dividing the American people based on class and fundamental moral values.  Even if it meant not building a coalition to address the serious issues in the second-term, even if it meant not even discussing the difficult issues.  They would throw the American people under the bus to get power.  

Number three, even beyond the point I just made, they were willing to put forth an HHS mandate that violated the religious conscience protection of Catholics, one of the single, largest providers of health care and charitable services in the country.  They would knowingly propose something that violated the 1^st amendment of the Constitution.  You can almost hear somebody cynically chiming in as they made the decision, “the courts will overturn it eventually anyway, we just need to set the tone for the election”.

A lot to unpack here, but I believe the Obama strategy was calculated to do precisely what it did, cobble together just enough voters to win re-election.  But the American people should be very, very concerned about the how.  We will talk about the implications in the coming weeks.