A Different Kind of Offline Campaign

Many of the tactical postmortems on the Obama campaign have been focused online. But it's worth remembering that that is only one piece of the puzzle. The fact is that Obama ran a better kind of offline campaign. A couple of parts really stand out from the Lloyd Grove interview of David Plouffe:

L.G.: How much money is allocated to the various units of the campaign? One always hears that paid advertising takes significantly more than 50 percent—putting commercials on the air, radio, and television. Can you break down the percentages?
 
D.P.: Well, we spent obviously a lot of money on TV, but as a ratio of our spending, it was much lower than historically is done, and that's because we spent a lot of money in the field and on the ground. And, in fact, when we did our baseline budget, the field was fully funded because we thought it was very, very important. If we were to raise excess funds, we bolstered the field a little bit, but it went in advertising. Our first priority was the ground operation because we thought that was essential to us winning. It's very much, I think, a unique approach. In a lot of campaigns, the media gets funded first, then if you have extra money that comes in, you bolster the field and things of that sort. And we kind of did it in reverse.
 
L.G.: Can you give me a rough breakdown of percentages?
 
D.P.: Well, no. I would say that it's lower.
 
L.G.: One always hears historically it's almost 70 percent that goes to media.
 
D.P.: Right, the playbook is 70 to 75 percent, and we did much less than that. Under 50 percent.
 
L.G.: What gave you the chutzpah to think you should break the model, and spend more than 50 percent on non-media?
 
D.P.: First of all, we knew that we had to get really good turnout, and that we thought a human being talking to a human being in a state is the most effective in communication. So we needed an organization that was able to facilitate that. Secondly, a presidential campaign is a very well-covered enterprise, people are talking about it all the time, they see it on the newscast, they're reading about it online. In many respects, advertising in a senate race or governor's or congressional race can have more impact because those races aren't front and center for people. I always believed that advertising was very, very important. I think we went right in and it was very helpful—makes it meaningful because people have 100 percent knowledge of the candidate and are following pretty closely. So I thought we could afford to trim a little bit. Now we ended up raising a lot of money, so our point levels were very big in September, October, but we could've won without that. Then the McCain campaign likes to say, "we were outspent, that's why we lost on TV"—and I think that's complete malarkey.

Paid advertising can have a dramatic impact on high valence issues that are getting short shrift in the media. I've seen this enough to not be a hater on paid advertising. That said, even Senators and Governors races have enough of an earned media component these days to dilute the value of TV ads even in downballot races.

When you're spending 70% or more of your budget on any one thing, be that advertising, field, salaries, online, etc., that does not make for a very well balanced campaign. At some level, a certain laziness about how to spend money kicks in. Since the basics of a campaign -- staff on the ground, websites, office space -- come relatively cheap compared to points on TV, there is a much greater tolerance for waste on the airwaves than there is in any other area of the campaign. A lot of this, particularly at the local level where candidates are even more reliant on consultants, is driven by consultants preferring commissionable advertising over non-commissionable field efforts. Morton Blackwell has been preaching this gospel for years.

So Obama decided to something radical in the context of traditional campaigns. They decided to construct their entire budget around field. This proved to be a wise investment, as it was the nose-to-the-grindstone focus on caucus states that won them the primary and their massive investment in field in the general that shifted the electorate 3-4 points in their direction. That turnout wasn't dramatically up from 2004 misses the point. Every serious person who's looked at this agrees that their turnout was way, way up, and ours was down. So: a relative wash in overall vote count but a sea change beneath the surface.

Should TV people have something to fear? Ultimately, David Axelrod was not lacking for funds. If given a choice between a bigger piece of a smaller pie and a smaller piece of a much bigger pie, TV consultants would be stupid not to take the latter. But that will require a fundamental shift in how we look at Republican campaigns: from staid, establishment-only affairs towards a more freewheeling, participatory, and bottom-up culture consistent with our capitalist philosophy. And it will require different types of candidates, not just a change in tactics.