Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (9 page)

In the wake of the debt ceiling battle, Obama’s reelection prospects appeared worse than ever.

Message for the Middle Class

O
ne of the hallmarks of Obama’s 2012 campaign was its prodigious appetite for research and data. The trio at the top of the operation—Jim Messina and David Axelrod at the campaign and David Plouffe in the White House—were all enthusiastic consumers of research. Though different in their approach to politics—Axelrod operated intuitively; Plouffe’s watchwords were “prove it”; Messina wanted to be able to measure everything—they all pushed the campaign team for more research, testing, analysis, and innovation. Everyone knew that the economy represented the president’s biggest obstacle to reelection. Obama’s top advisers wanted to make the 2012 election a choice and not a referendum on the president’s economic stewardship. They doubted he could win a race on the latter. But to avoid the election becoming a referendum, they knew they had to do two things. First, they had to develop and refine a message that somehow leapfrogged the debate about the current state of the economy, which would always leave Obama on the defensive. And second, they had to disqualify their opponent—they assumed that would be Mitt Romney—from being seen as a credible alternative able to do for the economy what Obama had failed to do.

The first priority was to understand what had happened in 2010: Why had many of the people who had bought into the hope and change message from Obama’s 2008 campaign decided just two years later that they were ready to burn down the house? Obama’s team was eager to know what was really behind the shellacking. They decided to look for answers in a familiar place: Iowa. For Obama’s team, Iowa was always the touchstone. Whenever the Obama team was in trouble, whenever they needed reassurance or understanding, or were merely curious about something, they thought first of Iowa. What do Iowans think? So in late 2010 they convened a focus group in Des Moines composed of independent voters who had supported Obama in 2008 and then backed the Republicans in 2010. One man in particular, who was in his fifties, caught the attention of the Obama advisers who were watching from Washington. One adviser summed up the grievances encapsulated in the man’s response this
way: “I can’t send my kid to college next year. I can’t do it because my house is underwater now and I was going to refinance it to pay for tuition. I don’t think any parent knows how hard it is to tell your kid I can’t send you to school. I haven’t had a raise in five years. I’m paying more for health insurance and getting less. My 401(k) that was supposed to be the reward for doing everything the right way is gone. I am sick and tired of giving bailouts to the folks at the top and handouts to the folks at the bottom. I’m going to fire people [politicians] until my life gets better.”

That was the beginning of what would become a massive research effort that went on from early 2011 into the late summer. As Obama engaged in politically debilitating hand-to-hand combat with congressional Republicans, his political advisers were quietly at work developing the framework for the reelection campaign message. The Obama team launched parallel efforts in early 2011 to probe more deeply the psyche of the country. “We began to understand that the real demand in the electorate was not just to recover from the recession,” said Larry Grisolano, who oversaw media and message. “If we just got back to where we were in 2008, that was not a good place to be. They saw the long erosion of what it meant to be middle class in America.”

•   •   •

Not long after David Plouffe had settled into his new role at the White House, he had a conversation with Joel Benenson, Obama’s lead pollster in 2008, who was in the same role for 2012. They talked about the research operation for the coming two years, and Plouffe urged Benenson to think creatively about new ways to examine the electorate and the state of the country. Benenson described a project he had done for the Service Employees International Union after the 2004 election—what he called the “middle-aged, middle-income, middle America” study. They had mailed journals to a selected group of people and asked them to fill them out, describing their lives from a personal financial perspective. The more he explained it, the more Plouffe liked the idea. That conversation launched the campaign’s ethnography project, which David Simas, the director of opinion research for the campaign, later described as “the best and most important research we did the entire campaign because of the insight it gave us into truly how people view the economy, not on a macro level but on a day-to-day level.”

Benenson started the project in the spring of 2011. He recruited about 150 people who said they were willing to participate; in the end just over 100 actually did. The participants were all between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-five, with household incomes of $40,000 to $100,000. They were either white or Hispanic and lived in the suburbs of Columbus, Denver, or Orlando. They had little or no allegiance to either political party. They were either self-identified
independents or weak partisans. While definitely planning to vote, they were undecided—they were open to both Obama and the eventual Republican nominee. Obama’s campaign, which wanted what Benenson called a “totally nonpolitical deep dive into their lives and values,” did not reveal that it was behind the research. The subjects were chosen because they were considered emblematic of the “up for grabs” voters Obama’s team always kept a close watch on. The Obama campaign asked the participants to fill out a journal twice a week for three weeks. In contrast to the SEIU project, Benenson decided to do this all online. Twice a week, he sent the participants eight to ten questions, different topics for each session. Rather than asking one broad, open-ended question, the campaign posed an opening question and a series of follow-ups to drill deeply into the topic. The journals provided a revealing body of work about how people were living with the economy day to day, what choices they were making, whether they were putting off purchases or buying a used car rather than a new car, how they viewed their work and their career options, their fears about the future, and their doubts that the American dream still meant something. “If you want to know about being treated unfairly at work,” Benenson said, “we would ask, ‘When was the last time you felt you were treated unfairly at work? What specifically happened? What made you feel you were being treated unfairly? How was that different or similar to times you were being treated? Was the way you were treated same or different than your coworkers?’ It was designed to provoke in-depth responses.” The journal entries eventually added up to more than fourteen hundred pages of raw material.

The second phase of the project took place in early June. Benenson and business partner Danny Franklin conducted nine focus groups, three in each of the three locations. Each focus group was limited to just three participants and lasted two and a half hours. These “triads,” as they were called, were divided by age and gender: men over fifty or under fifty; women over fifty or under fifty. The sessions allowed for an even deeper conversation about issues the participants had described in their journal entries. “They shared a strong sense that America was changing in a way that was out of their control,” Benenson said. “They felt the old rules of the economy and how you got ahead didn’t apply anymore. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t recognize new rules in the economy. They weren’t sure there
were
new rules. How to get ahead was more perplexing to them. The ground rules had disappeared and they didn’t know what the new ground rules were.

“On the broadest scale, they were really struggling to keep what they had. They were more worried about sliding down the economic ladder than moving ahead. All they wanted was to be able to get out what they put in, and they weren’t sure they could.” Benenson said a woman in Denver told them, “As a
parent you want things to be better for your children. I know my parents did when I was brought up. I don’t think most kids are going to be able to buy a house. I think it’s going to be really a struggle to be able to do that. So the dream is going to have to be modified. Something is going to have to change dramatically.” A Columbus man said, “I’m sick of debt affecting how much disposable income we have. I just want it all paid off.” One of the most compelling insights was the degree to which the concept of the American dream did not mean as much for younger workers as it did for older ones. “The language around the American dream wasn’t carrying the same resonance,” Benenson said. “Some of the symbols of achieving the American dream were becoming burdens—owning that house with the big mortgage was expensive; owning two cars and more debt; having your kid go to college. The cost and burden of taking out those loans was making a lot of Americans ambivalent. They weren’t sure a college education was worth it.”

In early June, Benenson’s team produced a forty-five-page document summing up the findings. There were a variety of implications for the campaign. People prized reciprocity—the idea that hard work would be rewarded—but felt it was no longer part of the basic bargain in society. They wanted to be part of something bigger but saw the sense of community slipping away. They put a higher priority on economic security than on taking risks; just maintaining that security was worth celebrating. As he was finishing, Benenson conducted a benchmark survey that reinforced the conclusion that Obama’s message had to be as forward-looking as possible. He had to draw a contrast based on values and visions for the future, not debate what he had done right or wrong. Benenson said, “What we learned in 2011 made us pretty confident that the president’s economic values and vision were a lot more aligned with where swing voters were and where most Americans were than anyone in the Republican field,” Benenson said. “We didn’t have any false sense of confidence. We knew it would be a close race. But we never deviated from that kind of approach and that kind of strategy.”

•   •   •

Throughout the spring and summer of 2011, the campaign also conducted other research projects, including a series of more traditional focus groups, to probe political attitudes about the economy, the president, and the Republicans. David Binder ran the focus groups, as he had done in 2008. Binder was the inexhaustible traveler of the Obama research team, originally recruited by Axelrod and, by the assessment of his colleagues, a gifted moderator. Axelrod especially liked that Binder was not a pollster. Pollsters sometimes came to focus groups with an agenda, to confirm what they found in their polls, and their questions sometimes prodded the participants to confirm the numbers. Binder didn’t mix
quantitative and qualitative research. He was there to tease out what people were really thinking. In the early stages, Axelrod wanted Binder to keep the focus as broad as possible, to allow the participants’ true feelings to bubble up naturally. At this stage he did not want a directed conversation about specific issues. The challenge this time was far different from that in Obama’s first campaign. “In ’08 when we do qualitative research, there’s more of the sense of how do we create excitement about this person that’s running? Is he risky, and if so, what can we do to bridge that concern that we’re trying somebody a little bit too new?” Binder said. “That obviously was not the case this time. This time there’s a record to run on that will be attacked, and the methodology’s more along the lines of determining to what degree can people reenlist with the president who has potentially disappointed them. It’s a very different kind of questioning and probing—kind of emotional investigative.”

Over time, Binder’s research produced three broad findings about how people felt about the president. The first was, predictably, the enormous dissatisfaction with the state of the economy. This overwhelmed everything else. Debt and deficits would later become a bigger concern for many of the people, but through most of 2011 the economy dominated discussions. Anxiety about the economy pervaded the conversations—concerns that jobs were not coming back fast enough, that salaries weren’t going up, that the housing crisis wasn’t over, that people felt underemployed. “It was basically a sense that the country wasn’t moving forward to the degree that they had hoped, and for some people they felt that the president promised better,” said a campaign official.

The second finding was that people had not given up on Obama. Their initial buy-in on his character had not been compromised. They knew his biography. They admired his family. They remembered that each night when he was in Washington he had dinner with his wife and daughters in the White House residence. To some extent the groups were skewed; Obama haters were never included in the groups, so the full fury of anti-Obama sentiment that had fueled the Republican victory was missing from these groups. But those voters were already lost to the president. The question was how many of his 2008 supporters were in danger of defecting. What Binder found was that while there was anxiety about the president and his record, there was almost always the thread in the conversations that voters remained open to him. “They wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt,” Binder said. “And part of that was only because they felt he was trying. And when we asked, ‘Well, what have you seen to indicate that he’s trying?’ then they would—even though they’d just [finished] bad-mouthing Obamacare—they said, ‘Well, he’s trying to do something about health care.’ So you find all this conflict, internal conflict among the voters.”

But if Obama’s 2008 supporters still gave him the benefit of the doubt, they nonetheless had serious reservations about him. His heart may have been in the right place, they said, but was he up to the job? That was the most troublesome finding. Voters questioned whether he really understood how to get the economy moving. They worried that he did not have policies that would work. They feared that the problems were bigger than he was—which was such a profound change from the way they had viewed him in 2008, when they saw him as a transformational figure who was going to be able to radically change Washington. They did not see him as weak—the killing of Osama bin Laden had helped remove that issue from the election—so much as they sensed that he lacked the experience to make Washington work. They recognized, particularly after the debt ceiling fight, that he faced stubborn opposition from the Republicans, that the Republicans were more to blame for the standoff than was the president. But they wanted a president capable of finding a way around that obstacle. “We heard that quite a bit, that he didn’t have enough experience to know how to deal with the job,” one campaign official said. “And a lot of it I think was you have to knock heads together with Congress, and Obama didn’t seem to know how to do that. . . . People brought up Lyndon Johnson, which was interesting. You don’t expect a focus group to say he needs to be more like LBJ, especially given the age group here. But it was amazing, some people saying LBJ had it, he knew how to twist an arm in a way to get what he wanted. And Obama doesn’t seem to do that.” Another campaign official said, “I’ve never had so many damned references to Lyndon Johnson in my life. All the bloody time. It became like an inside joke, how many times is LBJ going to come up? We were trying to find a way to use Republican obstruction as more of a weapon and people would concede it. ‘Yeah, they’re horrible, they’re terrible, but he’s the president, he should be able to figure out a way to get around it. It’s your problem. You’re the one who wanted the job.’”