More Details On Obama's General Election Strategy

Posted by Ashish on 06.25.2008

Obama focusing on traditional red states and grassroots persuasion...

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe gave a presentation today on their general election strategy. Main things to take away from it:

-- They really feel like they can pick off small Republican states like Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota. The thinking is that Obama is already close in those states and already has offices and organization in place in all three states while McCain has nothing. Plouffe also suggests that Bob Barr could get 6%-8% of the vote in Alaska, and most of that would come out of McCain's end (he also said Barr could get up to 4% in Georgia). They also are keeping the same line of thinking in these states that worked for them in the primaries -- that organization matters most in small states. In Montana, good organization can easily net you an extra 10,000 votes which could very well swing the state. This emphasis on smaller states helped Obama beat Clinton who ignored most of them, and the same thing could happen to McCain if he ignores them.

-- They also feel they can win Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia, three other red states. The reasons are mostly the same. They have offices, hundreds of volunteers, and big organizations set up in those states already from the primaries while McCain has basically nothing set up in them. Plus, Indiana is close to Obama's homestate of Illinois which is an advantage, and North Carolina and Virginia have thousands of unregistered African Americans that the campaign thinks they can register.

-- The Obama campaign is using a model similar to the state-of-the-art Bush campaign of 2004 where a lot of emphasis is put on grassroots persuasion. Basically, they hope to get supporters in neighborhoods all over the country to simply spend the next few months trying to win over 10-15 of their close friends. The thinking here is that a supporter in, say, rural Indiana understands what his neighbors and friends respond to better than, say, Obama's national headquarters in Chicago. If that supporter in rural Indiana talks to his neighbors and friends for the next few months, speaking to them in whatever language they best react to, bringing up issues they care about, etc., it will result in winning over a lot of new people. Bush did this with great success in 2004 and Obama did it with great success in the primaries. This is where the huge enthusiasm gap between Obama and McCain will play out. Obama has more people who are excited about his campaign and thus more willing to volunteer to go out and spread his message to others. McCain doesn't have that and will have to spend money on TV ads and such to get his message out. Of course, he will likely have less money to use than Obama.

Basically, to summarize, the Obama campaign's strategy is to do what they did in Iowa, but on a national scale. That wasn't possible in the primaries because votes were held weekly. But in the general election, the campaign has months to organize properly. What Obama did in Iowa was use the high enthusiasm of his supporters to build a grassroots movement, build a massive organization that had the best Get Out The Vote operations, and get tons of new voters involved, specifically young people. Now, on a national scale, Obama wants to use the enthusiasm gap to build grassroots persuasion all over the country, continue to build on the massive organization he already has set up from the primaries with an emphasis on Get Out The Vote operations, and then try to register tons of new voters, specifically African Americans and young people.

-- Plouffe also basically came out and said that McCain wasted the last three months because he didn't build the type of organization that could match Obama's massive 50 state organization. This has been one of the main knocks against McCain as he had so much time out of the spotlight to work on these like building organization, and just decided not to for whatever reason.

Thanks to Noam Scheiber for a lot of these details.