Thoughts On The McCain Campaign Changes

Posted by Ashish on 07.02.2008

What does it all mean?

John McCain is basically starting over now. Despite winning the Republican nomination months before Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, McCain wasted his time and did not really do much of anything. And now, he has scrapped his big "campaign innovation" having 11 regional managers and instead pushed some of his top people out of the way to make room for several members of Karl Rove's team that helped lead George W. Bush to victory in 2000 and 2004.

The new man in charge, Steve Schmidt, bluntly told McCain roughly 10 days ago that he was going to lose the election unless he made major changes. From all accounts, the horrible speech McCain gave the night of Obama's nomination win (remember the green backdrop?) served as a wake up call to many in the Republican party that McCain didn't really know what he was up against and needed to make serious changes. Those changes have now been made.

With several Karl Rove proteges now at the helm of the McCain camp, we can probably expect to see the campaign not only get much more aggresive in terms of attacks ads, but also put more focus on organization. For all the knocks against Rove for playing dirty politics, he also put HEAVY emphasis on grassroots organization and targeting voters in key states in a very sophisticated manner. That's what Obama has been doing for over a year now but McCain never seemed that interested in doing.

The big question is how much damage has now been done by not doing all of this earlier? Obama has his entire political machine in place and battle-tested. He has hundreds of thousands of volunteers ready to go and they already got experience running against a political machine much stronger than whatever John McCain has. Obama has offices set up everywhere, his paid staffers are now incredibly battle tested. Everyone on his side from the top down to the bottom is in place and already doing what they've been doing. McCain is now starting over essentially from scratch. It will probably be August before he has the offices and staff he needs in place.

Schmidt's warning that McCain is on the brink of losing the election this early is a sign that they basically need to run a near flawless campaign from here on out. McCain is already incredibly boxed in because he only has two states where he can play serious offense (Michigan and New Hampshire) while having to play defense in at least nine states (Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana). It creates a situation where the slightest mistake could lead to a huge fall.

People may hate the Karl Rove way of doing things, but it does get results, and not only due to the heavy reliance on attack ads. McCain's camp was going to get slaughtered if it continued with the type of organization they currently have. The new guys will build a better grassroots organization for the McCain campaign and that in and of itself will make the campaign stronger.

Read the New York Times article on this for more details about the McCain campaign changes.