How Obama won. Excellent New Yorker essay by Ryan Lizza

[jefferson_dem]

Battle Plans
How Obama won.
by Ryan Lizza November 17, 2008



Last June, Joel Benenson, who was Barack Obama’s top pollster during his Presidential run, reported on the state of the campaign. His conclusions, summed up in a sixty-slide PowerPoint presentation, were revealed to a small group, including David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, and several media consultants, and, as it turned out, some of this research helped guide the campaign through the general election. The primaries were over, Hillary Clinton had conceded, and Obama had begun planning for a race against Senator John McCain.

There was good news and bad in Benenson’s presentation. Obama led John McCain, forty-nine per cent to forty-four per cent, among the voters most likely to go to the polls in November, but there was also a large group of what Benenson called “up-for-grabs” voters, or U.F.G.s, who favored McCain, forty-eight per cent to thirty-six per cent. The U.F.G.s were the key to the outcome; if the election had been held then, Obama would have probably lost.

Benenson, who is fifty-six, is bearded and volatile. He speaks with a New York accent, and in the movie version of the Obama campaign he might be played by Richard Lewis. He is considered the star pollster in the Democratic Party. Like several of Obama’s other top advisers—David Axelrod; Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who is his new chief of staff; Bill Burton, the campaign’s national press secretary—Benenson was deeply involved in helping Democrats win in the 2006 midterm elections, an experience that put the Obama team more in touch with the mood of the electorate going into 2008. (The top strategists for Clinton and McCain had not been involved in difficult races in 2006.)

The data from Benenson’s June presentation contained some reasons to be optimistic. The conventional wisdom was that Obama, as the newest of the candidates, had an image that was malleable and thus highly vulnerable to negative attacks. But that was not what the polling showed. As the presentation explained, “Obama’s image is considerably better defined than McCain’s, even on attributes at the core of McCain’s reputation,” such as “stands up to lobbyists and special interests,” “puts partisan politics aside to get things done,” and “tells people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.”

For Obama aides, who viewed McCain as the one Republican with the potential to steal the anti-Washington bona fides of their candidate, Benenson’s polling was revelatory. “Voters actually did not know as much as I think the press corps thought they did about John McCain,” Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Obama, told me. “What they’d heard about McCain most recently, and certainly during the primary process, was that he was like every other Republican—fighting to sound more like George Bush.” Benenson said, “What we knew at the start of the campaign was that the notion of John McCain as a change agent and independent voice didn’t exist anywhere outside the Beltway.”

Another finding from this initial poll had clear strategic implications: the economy concerned the U.F.G.s more than any other issue, and on that question neither candidate showed particular strength. In addition, the U.F.G.s were fed up with Washington and, especially, with George W. Bush. Based on those insights, Benenson came up with some recommendations, among them “Own the economy” and “Maintain an emphasis on changing Washington.”

As a practical matter, this meant that, after the Democratic National Convention, in Denver, the campaign would do all that it could to focus attention on economic matters. It had no idea, of course, how fully both the economy and John McCain would coöperate with that goal.

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_lizza?printable=true

[myrna minx]

1. K&R.

[Fluffdaddy]

11. Ditto

[HughMoran]

2. Hmmmm, interesting

Looks like we picked the right strategy, then the stars aligned and made it seem even more like genius.

[NYC_SKP]

3. The single Obama trait most often indicated among people I've met...

that seems to have had an impact on them.

That he speaks to us in a comforting, comprehensible, and familiar manner, using "we" instead of "I".

Of course, the team and strategy were awesome, but without those qualities he might not have had such a great team or been able to lead them as well as he did.

Polls cannot measure some of the most important features of a campaign or candidate.

This presidency promises to be like none we've seen before.

[ErinBerin84]

4. Ryan Lizza looks sort of out of it and wild eyed without his glasses

He has started wearing them again recently though, heh. Am I the only one who noticed this? It was like the weird period when Chuck Todd had pink eye and wore glasses to cover it up or something. I read that Ryan Lizza is going to do a book on the campaign, should be interesting.

[Cha]

5. Rec'd! Thanks

Jefferson.

[crispini]

6. Tasty details! Thanks for posting!

:kick: and R

[BrklynLiberal]

7. K & R for later reading..

[proud patriot]

8. k and r

good reading

[DeepModem Mom]

9. K&R

[Imagevision]

10. Are you saying Palin didn't cost Mccain votes?

[cooolandrew]

12. Very good article and very promising in what lies ahead.

[THUNDER HANDS]

13. Obama has a weird style about him

he comes across as a regular person and an extraordinary person at the same time, and I'm still not sure how he manages to accomplish this.


Everyone else in politics, and I mean everyone, with the exception of one other politician (who is also black) manages to do this. That other politician will be a big national star in about eight years.