The Obama Rules

[Promoted - Pete Snyder, a colleague of mine, combines his pollster, campaign and social marketing hats to offer this very good analysis of the 2008 Presidential campaign and election.  Jon Henke]

There is no doubt that this year presented the toughest political climate for Republicans since Watergate; indeed, this campaign has been an uphill fight for McCain or any GOP nominee. That said Barack Obama, David Axelrod and their team deserve a huge amount of respect and credit for running a nearly flawless campaign.

They didn’t fight today’s war with yesterday’s weapons and most importantly their campaign was based on a superior strategy. For the purposes of this column, let’s forget about the issues, let’s forget about the climate and let’s ignore message for a moment. The simple fact is that Obama and his campaign chiefs understood two of the most significant (but little talked about) changes of this campaign cycle:

1. The Election Timetable fundamentally shifted from being just about Election Day or even the last 72 hours (as was the rule of thumb for decades) to being decided as early as six weeks in advance.
2. Due to the seismic changes in how voters get and process information that we marketers have seen for quite some time, just like consumers, the voter is now in control and, thus, would be open to making their voting decisions earlier than ever.

Combined, these two critical assumptions that turned conventional campaign wisdom on its head, helped provide Obama with a major strategic advantage over McCain. Here’s how:

Starting with Obama’s huge upset in Iowa , the ensuing Hillary-Obama 50 state death match altered the rules of the game. As many of us know, historically only a handful of early primary and caucus states would decide this thing in about 45 days (usually less than 1% of all voters in the country) and most Americans wouldn’t feel compelled to engage until Fall.

Instead, this clash of the titans drove millions of Americans off the sidelines to the polls because for the first time in a primary their vote actually could make a difference.

The Obama camp recognized that something very different was going on here. They threw out many of the old political adages and assumptions, including the grand daddy of them all, Americans don’t “tune into” elections until after Labor Day. Obama’s campaign geared their online and off-line engagement and advertising to build on this unprecedented early interest and mobilized it into an effective ground game to get out their vote.

While the McCain campaign came back after a near death experience, still his path to the nomination was easier and wrapped up nearly 3 months before Obama crossed the magic delegate threshold. In standard campaign transition form, McCain rested, reshuffled his campaign staff a second time, worked on replenishing his coffers and set his sights on the convention and the traditional post-Labor Day blitz.

Obama acted quite differently. Having flip-flopped on his promise to abide by campaign finance laws (which proved to be one of his shrewdest and smartest moves), Barack went for broke. His campaign started pouring millions of dollars into opening scores of campaign offices in all 50 states, many in areas that Democrats hadn’t contested in decades. In the traditionally GOP-favoring Colorado, Obama set up 59 campaign offices to McCain’s 13. Why did he take this expensive gamble? Because, as many of us know, due to the Internet and rise of social media, this was the first time where it actually made sense to run a 50-state campaign. For at least the past eight elections, each party would focus their efforts in getting out the vote in their respective solid “D” or solid “R” states and pour hundreds of millions of dollars fighting it out over a handful of “battleground states.”

Now, everyone counts, and given the power of social media everyone who has the interest has the ability to influence and mobilize their network of friends. A blue dot in a sea of red (or vice versa) could now make a real impact, both vote-wise and dollar-wise, to a Presidential campaign. Obama got this and McCain really didn’t.

By tapping into peer networks and creating a 50-state infrastructure, Obama was able to exponentially increase his campaign’s capacity for action. The hierarchal, campaign HQ centered model limits the amount of work that can be done by a campaign. Empowering volunteers involves a trade off, less control for more activity. This can run contrary to natural “Republican” command and control tendencies, which is one of many, many reasons why the left is far ahead of the right in embracing the power of social media. Obama took that gamble, less operational and message control for more wattage of overall impact in the same way that leading branding, companies and causes have had tremendous success tapping into the power of Word of Mouth. In doing so, his campaign went from having just one spokesperson, to having an army of spokespeople. The move proved to be a good one. Aside from the additional activity it allowed, empowered volunteers are also much more invested in the success of a campaign. It Obama’s case, it showed.

In an equally risky, yet ultimately effective move, Obama’s campaign took to the airwaves during the summer months in an unprecedented way. Over the summer alone, Obama and the DNC outspent McCain and the GOP by nearly 10 to 1 in Virginia, a reliably red state in Presidential elections since voting for LBJ in ’64. This strategy paid off by shaping early opinions (and thus, polls) about Obama, driving dollars and volunteers into his campaign and forcing McCain to spend precious resources in a state he expected to have in the GOP column.

More importantly, Obama realized that the defined “time” of the Election Timetable fundamentally changed. For decades, campaign models were built upon the premise that you raised all of your dollars and put all of your infrastructure including TV advertising and direct mail towards a call to action driving turn out for 12 hours or so on November 4th. In 2000, Karl Rove swore that Republicans would never lose the ground game after the Bush team took a lead into Election Today and were blindsided by the huge surge in voter turn out by Al Gore. Rove changed the Election Timetable from 12 hours to the last 72 hours, thus creating the effective and much heralded (or reviled depending on where you sit) “72 hours program” that has dominated the efforts of both parties for the past three campaign cycles.

As the blogosphere undoubtedly understands, much has changed over the past six years in how consumers, let alone voters, gather and process information and then make decisions. Voters have more access to information than ever before and more touch points and influencers in their lives that ever before. Oftentimes, this causes consumers and voters to make decisions on brands they like, products they want to buy or candidates they want to support much earlier than they did in years and decades past. The engagement and interest in Campaign 2008 never really subsided; in fact it continued to grow.

As a former pollster, across the board I saw the “undecideds” shrink much earlier than in past cycles. Voters were making up their minds earlier than in the past. Virginia allowed early voting six weeks in advance. By the time “Election Day” actually rolled around, nearly 35-40% of the entire electorate of America had already voted. Because both consumers and voters are now in control, in many places it’s no longer Election Day, its Election Month.

Obama geared his campaign strategy around these two massive shifts and reaped the rewards.

The coup de grace: when the global economic collapse hit over five weeks ago it stopped the clock for the media making it virtually impossible for a competing story to garner any major attention, thus freezing McCain in time. This is not to say that Obama and all of his advisors are geniuses and McCain and all of his campaign chieftains are incompetent. That is hardly the case. There are a lot of talented operatives more seasoned than I am over at his campaign in Arlington and McCain is a true hero and is about as skilled a politician as you can find. At times, they used brilliant tactics and knocked Obama off-balance late in the summer and through the GOP convention. But, when it comes to strategy, the McCain camp was out-thought and out-gunned. The campaign had no over-arching narrative and was built on an outdated model. Indeed, it was much smaller than the man it attempted to represent.

The much-heralded 72 hour campaign is dead. Election Day is no longer. Until we figure that out and recognize that consumer, thus, voter behavior has changed drastically in the last few years and fully embrace the tools and methods to reach them, we’ll be continuing to fight tomorrow’s wars with yesterday’s weapons.

Pete Snyder is the Founder & CEO of New Media Strategies. He also is a former GOP Pollster and Media consultant.