Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (48 page)

In pure debating terms, Obama had the advantage that night. In political terms, it was a clear victory for the president. He had avoided another calamity and reassured his supporters.

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The third debate took place six days later at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. Romney’s team was more nervous about this debate because it would focus on foreign policy, a natural advantage for an incumbent commander in chief. Obama’s team believed Romney could approach the debate in one of two ways. He could continue his aggressive attacks on Obama’s conduct of foreign policy, or he could try to hug the president on everything except Benghazi in an effort to reassure voters that he would not pursue a reckless foreign policy. The debate team asked Kerry to practice both ways. Their conclusion was that even if the gentler Romney showed up, Obama would still attack him at every turn, which was exactly how the debate played out. Benghazi came and went quickly. CBS’s Bob Schieffer raised Libya in the opening segment and it largely disappeared. Romney tried to assure people watching that he would be a prudent and restrained commander in chief. Obama kept on savaging him as reckless, uninformed, and unready. When Romney charged that Obama was dangerously allowing the Navy to shrink in size and that there were now fewer ships than in 1916, Obama replied caustically, “Well,
Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

As the debate ended, Tagg Romney went onstage and approached the president. The week before, during a radio interview, he had been asked what it was like to hear his father called a liar repeatedly during the Hofstra debate. Tagg said it made him want to take a swing at the president. He immediately regretted the comment and wanted to make amends directly: “He was shaking hands and I just leaned in and said, ‘Mr. President, I hope you know how sorry I am for what I said. I didn’t mean what I said. I would never want to punch you or anybody else and hope you understand it was an expression that was used badly on my part.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. If someone said that about someone in my family I’d feel the same way. You’re just protecting your dad. You’re a good son. I hope my daughters are as protective of me as you are of your dad.’ Michelle Obama looked at me and said, ‘Thank you for saying that. That means a great deal to us.’”

If Romney had won Denver decisively, Obama carried the night in Boca Raton just as decisively. With the debates now over, both campaigns were looking to their ground forces in the battleground states to carry them to victory.

Ohio and the Path to 270

O
n an unseasonably warm evening in late October, two dozen people gathered in the backyard of Wanda Carter’s home in Columbus, Ohio. They were part of the frontline forces Barack Obama was counting on to deliver the state on November 6. They were all volunteers, with the exception of a twentysomething young man who was a paid staffer with Obama for America. Over hot dogs and other picnic fare, they shared stories and swapped ideas. Then Carter stood up on the deck to give them a pep talk. “If you are reading the newspapers and watching TV, what are you always hearing?” she said. “Get out the vote. Ground game. It’s the ground game. It’s the ground game. It’s the ground game. And that is us. At this point, we and all the other people who are doing what we are doing are the most important people in the campaign.” Jim Messina had always said that while he loved the campaign’s paid staff, when the operation met the voters on their doorsteps, it was much more effective if the people knocking on the doors were the volunteers—friends, neighbors, relatives of those they were encouraging to vote for the president on election day.

The group in Carter’s backyard represented that strategy. Carter, a lawyer, was a neighborhood team leader in Upper Arlington—an NTL in the vernacular of the campaign. NTLs were at the top of the Obama volunteer organizational chart. They had considerable autonomy over how to implement the campaign’s voter contact program, but were held accountable in meeting the campaign’s goals almost as if they were paid staff. After Carter spoke, Carol Mohr, another neighborhood team leader, outlined to the other volunteers where they had to concentrate their efforts during the final days. “We really care about you if you vote every time, but we’re not going to come knock on your door during the get-out-the-vote period,” she said. “We care about you until we find out that you’re for Romney, and then we’ll never knock on your door again. We care about you if you’re undecided and we’ll come back to you and talk to you several times until after this weekend. Then we don’t care about you if you’re undecided. If you haven’t made up your mind by Sunday
night at seven o’clock, we don’t care about you. After that we only care about those people who are for Obama but are sporadic voters.”

The election was now less than two weeks away. The debates had come and gone. Early voting was well under way. What was left was the last big push. The election had come down to just a handful of states. Florida, Virginia, and Ohio were the big three. Others in play were Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Hampshire. Obama’s inner circle refused to give up on North Carolina, but everyone else believed it would tip to Romney. Four years earlier, Obama’s campaign had shaken up the electoral map—winning Indiana and Virginia, two longtime Republican strongholds (although Virginia was turning purple), and conservative North Carolina. His advisers even made forays into states like North Dakota and Montana. Early in the 2012 cycle, they talked about expanding the map again. Those dreams quickly gave way to reality. The economy and the dissatisfaction with the president made holding territory more important than seeking out new states.

The electoral calculus would turn on two questions. First, which of the nine states that Obama had turned from red to blue in 2008 could Romney and the Republicans put back in their column? Indiana was a certainty, North Carolina a probability. New Mexico was lost for the Republicans because of the Latino vote. That left six of the nine to fight over. Second, could Republicans put any Democratic states in play? Wisconsin seemed a possibility. It had backed Democratic presidential candidates since 1988, but the margins were razor thin in both 2000 and 2004. Wisconsin’s controversial Republican governor, Scott Walker, had just survived a recall election by a surprisingly large margin, the culmination of a sixteen-month battle over collective bargaining rights of public employees. The state was deeply polarized around Walker, but Republicans had fresh momentum from the recall and a tested organization. With Ryan on the ticket, Romney hoped to add it to his column. Another possibility was New Hampshire. The Granite State had voted Democratic in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, but Republicans had swept the state clean in 2010. Romney, from neighboring Massachusetts, hoped to take advantage of the conservative uprising and his own familiarity with the state.

That made eight true battlegrounds, the smallest number in years. But Ohio stood out above all the others.
A cartoon by Rob Rogers
of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
in early October captured the state’s symbolic significance. Three schoolchildren stood before a map of America, outlined in black but with no state boundaries delineated. The map said, “Ohio.” “I like the new map,” one of the youngsters said. “It’s a lot easier than memorizing fifty states.” This was a familiar role for the Buckeye State. It was ground zero in the 2004 campaign, the state that ultimately broke John Kerry’s heart. Early exit polls on election day 2004 had
given Kerry the advantage. In Boston, his advisers were calling him “Mr. President.” But when the votes were finally counted, George W. Bush’s campaign had outmaneuvered the Democrats with a superior get-out-the-vote operation.

Ohio had been a battleground in 2000 and in 2008 as well, but it took on greater significance in 2012 because of its potentially pivotal strategic importance. Obama had multiple paths to the 270 votes needed to win in the Electoral College. In the spring of 2011, Messina showed me five maps representing five different paths to an electoral majority: the West path, the Florida path, the South path, the Midwest path, and the Expansion path. Each was narrowly drawn to make a point: Obama could lose any number of battleground states and still get to the minimum of 270. Romney had to win most of the likely battlegrounds. Beyond that, no Republican had ever been elected president without winning Ohio. It may have been mathematically possible for Romney to win the election without Ohio, but politically it was almost unthinkable; the combinations of states he would have to win without it made it foolhardy to think about a strategy that did not make the Buckeye State a strategic priority. If the Obama campaign could roadblock Romney in the heart of the industrial Midwest, the challenger’s hopes likely would die there.

The campaigns weren’t ignoring other battlegrounds, but there was hardly a day in the final month of the election that one of the four candidates—Obama, Romney, Biden, Ryan—was not in Ohio. Political ads ran nonstop; local news programs were so clogged with ads that the time devoted to the news shrank noticeably. From April until late October, ads by the two campaigns had run 187,000 times, according to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. In October alone, at least seventy different ads had been shown there. Radio ads were as prevalent. Anyone driving the jammed roads in the fast-growing suburban and exurban areas around Columbus quickly got a taste of that—one ad piled up on another and another. Direct mail filled mailboxes. One Romney supporter estimated that he had received fifty different pieces in the fall. Phone calls to voters were incessant. One day in late October, a woman who lived near Cincinnati was telling my
Post
colleague Felicia Sonmez that she and her husband were receiving ten to twelve calls a day. At that point, her cordless phone rang. She looked at the screen and saw a 202 area code—Washington, D.C. “And here’s what I do with these calls,” she said as she clicked the “on” button and then quickly hit the “off” button. “I’ve been doing that a lot in the last month,” she said.

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Ohio became the focal point of the campaign for another reason: No battleground state better encapsulated the debate over the economy and the contrasting arguments by the president and his challenger—with Obama’s bailout
of the automobile industry at the very heart of their disagreement. Ohio had a diverse economy of manufacturing, agriculture, health care, and coal, but the auto industry still played a significant role in the state’s well-being. One of every eight jobs was tied directly or indirectly to the auto industry (though that was down from one in five in the previous decade). The industry had at least some presence in eighty of the state’s eighty-eight counties. Half of those jobs were in just ten counties, most of them running across the state’s northern tier. The entire presidential race might come down to one issue, the auto bailout, and a handful of counties in Ohio. That too made the state the focus of so much attention. “It’s so rare that in presidential politics you have such a state-specific message,” Aaron Pickrell, Obama’s chief Ohio strategist, told me over coffee one morning a few weeks before the election. “The auto bailout gave us that contrast.”

The writer Susan Orlean
once said of her native state that it “conveys a certain regularness, a lack of wild distinction, a muting of idiosyncratic extreme. The state is a sample of nearly every American quality and landscape but it levels out to be something quietly and pleasantly featureless rather than creating a crazy quilt of miscellany. It is an excellent place to live and a less excellent place to describe, since nothing stands out in that theatrical way that allows for easy description.”

But for all its regularness, Ohio was a complex megastate. Pickrell liked to say that running a campaign in Ohio was like running a national campaign.
An analysis by the Bliss Institute
at the University of Akron noted, “Each region has a distinct political ethos and votes in a different fashion.” Northeast Ohio encompassed Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown—cities closely identified with the steel and heavy manufacturing muscle that were once the core of the state economy. Northwest Ohio, which was close to Detroit, was long reliant on autos and manufacturing as well, but it was more rural, less populated, and more Republican than northeast Ohio. Southwest Ohio, including Cincinnati, was more classically midwestern. Southeast Ohio was coal country and part of Appalachia. Central Ohio, anchored by Columbus, had a younger population with a larger percentage of white-collar workers and was home to the state’s premier institution of higher education, the Ohio State University. It was no accident that Obama held the first official rally of his campaign at Ohio State on May 5, 2012. Winning the Columbus market was now key to winning the state. The Bliss Institute broke the state into five regions, but political analysts added a sixth in west central Ohio, nestled between Toledo in the north and Cincinnati in the south, with Dayton at its heart.

Ohio was not well suited to Obama. In other states, the president looked to a coalition of minorities, young people, and affluent, well-educated white
voters. Ohio had a sizable African American community, but the white population did not fit the model for Obama’s winning coalition. The 2010 census showed that whites without college degrees—a particularly challenging group of voters for Obama—accounted for 54 percent of the population, one point higher than it had been a decade earlier. Ohio was also emblematic of the economic hardship of the entire industrial Midwest and of decades of decline as manufacturing jobs disappeared and young people moved away in search of better opportunities. During the first two years of Obama’s administration, Ohio’s unemployment was well above the national average. It peaked at 10.6 percent and held there for seven consecutive months. Polls showed sustained pessimism in Ohio—years and years in which more people thought the state and nation were going in the wrong direction. “After 2010, we were very, very worried about Ohio,” said Mitch Stewart, the battleground state director. “We thought we were in a very difficult spot there.”

The Obama campaign’s route back in Ohio began with two state-specific fights. The first was a ballot initiative in November 2011 to repeal Senate Bill 5, which restricted collective bargaining rights by public employee unions. Obama’s campaign helped labor unions collect enough signatures to put the initiative on the ballot. The measure was convincingly repealed and gave Republican governor John Kasich a black eye. One Romney adviser said later that the fight cost Romney and the Republicans among some of the working-class voters they hoped to attract—police and firefighters who were angry over the collective bargaining restrictions. The second was a fight over House Bill 194, legislation passed in the spring of 2011 to change Ohio’s voting laws, including restrictions that would have limited early voting. The Obama campaign wanted as much time and opportunity for early voting as possible, and helped organize an effort to collect signatures for a citizen veto. Faced with the opposition, the Republican-controlled legislature repealed the law in May 2012, though bitter court fights over early voting regulations that pitted the Obama campaign against Jon Husted, the Republican secretary of state, continued almost to election day.

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During the summer, the Obama campaign bombarded Ohio voters with ads attacking Romney. The attacks on Bain’s role in investing in companies that had outsourced jobs had particular resonance. Ted Strickland, the former governor, believed that Romney’s Swiss bank account and Cayman Islands investments alone could beat him, if enough people knew about them. From May through August, the campaign spent about $30 million on ads in Ohio. Romney’s pre-convention cash-strapped campaign could spend barely $10 million, according to Kantar Media’s CMAG counts. Republican super PACs could not
make up all the difference. A top Romney adviser said later, “By the time we sort of engaged in the campaign our problem was that Mitt Romney’s favorables were impossibly low,” he said. “In other words, you couldn’t win a campaign even if you won on all the issues with his favorables as low as they got. I think it was high thirties at the time we engaged. That’s pretty tough to overcome.”

Ohio’s economy was improving, and the president was quick to claim credit for saving the auto companies. The state’s unemployment rate dipped below the national average in November 2010, and just before the election it ticked below 7 percent. Obama hit Romney for his opposition to the bailout. “When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, and more than one million jobs were on the line, Governor Romney said we should just let Detroit go bankrupt,” he said at a rally in Maumee during a July trip to the state. Someone in the audience shouted, “That’s what he said!” Obama said, “Governor Romney’s experience has been in owning companies that were called ‘pioneers’ of outsourcing. That’s not my phrase—‘pioneers’ of outsourcing. My experience has been in saving the American auto industry.” Romney tried to explain that Obama had eventually embraced what Romney had long advocated, a structured bankruptcy. But he never effectively rebutted Obama’s argument that the auto companies would not have made it into bankruptcy proceedings without an infusion of government money.