Nancy Scola is a reporter covering technology for Politico Pro.

Uber had a PR problem last summer: The only thing expanding more quickly than its ride-on-demand business was its reputation as a price-gouging bully too casual about vetting its drivers. Streets around the world—from Paris to D.C.—were clogged with irate taxi drivers protesting the car service’s cut-rate pricing and loose regulation; many cities—and sometimes even entire states—had banned the app, often citing safety concerns; several Uber drivers were accused of sexually assaulting their passengers. The popularity of its product wasn’t the problem—the public perception of it was. All of the company’s explosive growth was at risk of being undone by a guerilla attitude, embodied by its scrappy 38-year-old C.E.O and his defensive “us against the world—and Big Taxi” mentality.

Such instincts might make sense for a startup. But CEO Travis Kalanick’s constant punching upward was landing poorly as Uber became a Goldman Sachs-backed company worth an estimated $40 billion. Indeed, Kalanick said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September, the public was beginning to see the six-year-old company as “the big guy, or The Man.” That meant “you have to approach things differently and you have to communicate differently.” So how should Uber change?


The answer: Launch a political campaign.

And there’s perhaps nobody in the United States today with more experience managing the transition from outside change-agent to establishment at whiplash speed than David Plouffe. He was the architect of the long-shot bid to make Barack Obama the president of the United States and ended up spending two years as Obama’s closest advisor in the White House.

The Uber.com blog post announcing Plouffe’s hiring as senior vice president for policy and strategy in August talked about “Uber the Candidate.” That was a little awkward. What exactly was it being elected to? (Think for a moment about environmentalists pitching “The Ocean the Candidate.”) But those involved in the process say that much of the rest of the translation from the political to corporation realm is working well.

Today the 47-year-old Plouffe is spending his time flying back and forth between the east and west coasts, doing what Google Chairman Eric Schmidt calls running “the same kind of insurgent campaign he did in 2008 for a Silicon Valley tech company.” Monday through Thursday, at least, are spent at Uber headquarters in San Francisco’s Mid-Market section. Weekends are in Washington, D.C., where his wife and kids are finishing up the school year. His mission is to do away with the company’s bro-ish image and turn it into a viable company that, while still as imperfect as any candidate, is ready to contribute to the United States’ future prosperity. He’s known as Uber’s “campaign manager.”

The playbook is familiar to anyone who paid attention to Obama for America. Start by turning your campaign into a cause. Find a theme—for Obama it was Change We Can Believe In and a dash of Hope. For Uber it’s, well, Change We Can Believe In with a dash of Choice. Then build an inspiring narrative around said theme. Speak to your core audience wherever they might be, whenever possible via the beautiful efficient directness of email. Nudge them toward being fired-up advocates, partly by equipping them with the hand-selected facts. Fight only the battles that count. Mine your data for all it’s worth. Piece together a plan and stick to it, ignoring the noise.

Then go to sleep, wake up, and do it again. And again. And again. And again. Until the world sees it your way.

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Plouffe was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and like his eventual boss, Kalanick, he left college to pursue a passion. For Kalanick, it was 1998, UCLA and the burgeoning Internet start-up world. For Plouffe, it was 1989, the University of Delaware and Democratic politics. Plouffe started out as “field scum,” as he has recalled being called as an on-the-ground organizer for Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin. He went on to develop a reputation as a master of methodical plotting. Plouffe wasn’t the one who came up with wild ideas. He wasn’t so sure Obama’s running for president was such a great thing, to pick one example. But Plouffe was the one who figured out how to turn those ideas into something that could work.

When Plouffe joined Uber in September 2014, he took charge of all the company’s political work, branding and communications. Many of the faces advising the company are familiar to the White House veteran. The same month Plouffe officially started work, it launched UberMilitary, a commitment to turn 50,000 members of the military community into Uber drivers. Obama’s former defense secretary, Bob Gates, and retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen sit on its board.

The smart, mostly young people gathered in Uber headquarters and fired up about changing the world were familiar, he has written. So was the fight. Plouffe wrote in his 2010 campaign memoir, The Audacity to Win, of the moment when Obama decided to leap into the race: “We’d strap on the armor, battle our way across the country-side, and see what we could accomplish.” Four years later he would write, “It will be a privilege to jump in the foxhole” with Team Uber. (Uber’s new campaign openness, though, only goes so far: The company declined to make Plouffe available to speak for this piece.)

Many expected that Plouffe would focus on Uber’s local battles where city after city were objecting to Uber’s not following generations-old rules on hired rides. After all, he was the one who plotted Obama’s remarkable path to victories in the Democratic primaries, from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina. But he had to build a team.

In October, LinkedIn messages popped-up in the inboxes of political researchers for a “Director of Research and Rapid Response,” a Plouffe deputy to marshal evidence to help smooth the feathers Uber can “ruffle” doing what it does. Campaign experience was required.

The crisis communications help, meanwhile, couldn’t come soon enough. In late November, an Uber executive at a New York City dinner party waxed about the appeal of investigating critical journalists. Buzzfeed reported it. Kalanick and the exec apologized, even as bloggers and journalists took aim, leveling another round of criticism about the company’s arrogance and combativeness.

Yet since then, as Plouffe has settled in and grown his team, a remarkable thing has happened: The company’s won a string of good press. There are signs that Plouffe’s strategy is working—at least somewhat.

There has been praise for the announcement that, after resisting efforts to share the considerable quantity of digital rider-data it collects with cities, it would indeed do so with Boston. There’s a new partnership with Carnegie Mellon University for opening a center to work, among other things, on developing automated cars. The New York Times ran a headline recently that read “Hard-Charging Uber Tries Olive Branch.” Then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick issued a last-minute proposal that would create a legal framework for Uber and other so-called ride-sharing in the state. On that, some see Plouffe’s fingerprints: As a campaign consultant, Plouffe had helped make Deval Patrick governor.

Plouffe has stuck out his own head to push academic-style research front and center. Plouffe oversees a team that its leader, a PhD economist named Jonathan Hall, explains exists to conduct “high quality-research to study Uber’s impact on the world.”

Recently, Hall’s team recruited to their effort another Obama aide, Princeton University labor economist Alan Krueger, to study the Uber driver labor pool. Krueger, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, overlapped Plouffe’s tenure in the White House for more than a year, and Krueger recalls Plouffe fondly as “an avid consumer of data.” Back then, the White House economic team fixated on the idea of the trend toward flexibility of the U.S. economy: Obamacare meant that the need for health insurance no longer had to lash workers to employers, for example, and a growing class of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and military spouses needed work that fit their circumstances better than a place-based 9-to-5. Now, Krueger’s report found that many of the whopping 160,000 drivers using Uber were drawn to the work-when-you-want model for just that sort of adaptability.

And two days after Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, Plouffe revisited MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to tout the Krueger report. The focus on drivers while sitting under the lights was strategic. They are to Uber what young folks were to Obama ’08: its core constituency, its base, its early converts deeply invested in the enterprise’s success. Their happiness is key, especially as—potentially disastrously for Uber—courts in Massachusetts and Boston consider whether Uber should have to start treating its “driver-partners” as what was, in the old days, known as employees.

Plouffe said that day that he was “retired” from politics, but if the cable TV sets were the same as the old days, so was the language. “We had some stumbles, as you know,” Plouffe told the hosts. “You need to learn from those. But what we need to do is basically do a good job of talking about the good we’re bringing to cities.” Innovation was how you lift up whole industries, said a steady-gazed Plouffe who went on to rat-tat-tat talking points about Uber serving under-served areas and the environmental benefits of pulling cars off the road. And about the ride-tracking that has people worried about their privacy? Well, that can be a strength. It gets them to cooperate with police with GPS-tracking when incidents do take place.

One does not go on “Morning Joe” during SOTU week to go unnoticed. But Plouffe has largely picked lower-profile ways to cultivate the growing pool of Uber drivers collecting across the country. Plouffe’s Obama strategy didn’t depend on sending the candidate shaking every hand in Hardin County himself. It was building a distributed network, in which those of the ground saw themselves as the stuff of the campaign—what Plouffe has called “becoming a movement.”

To that end, a week after “Morning Joe,” on January 29th, an email went out under Plouffe’s name with the subject line, “Choice is a Powerful Thing.” It celebrated another numbers-driven study, this one conducted with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). It told drivers, whose emails are collected during registration process, that, “Every day, the work you do as an Uber partner helps save lives. You’re bettering your community and helping people make the responsible choice not to drive drunk.”

Indeed, Uber has rather belatedly come to realize that all that data it collects can be its greatest asset. After all, no one else in the world has it. For the MADD-Uber study, MADD had to ask the state of California for historical data on alcohol-related crashes. But Uber had the data on how people are driving today. Plouffe has pounced on the drunk-driving issue. On planning calls Plouffe was “incredibly passionate” about the possibility of driving down drunk driving, recalls Amy George, MADD’s senior vice president of marketing and communications.

A slightly more cynical companion take? Rider safety is a weak point for Uber, with reports coming in from India and elsewhere of sexual assaults in Uber’d cars. Uber’s work with MADD shifts the focus from those relatively rare occurrences to the far more common problem of getting in the car after imbibing.

What the MADD-Uber study found, among other things, is that alcohol-related crashes have dropped in California cities following the introduction of its UberX anyone-can-drive option in those places. ProPublica reported that the study was mistaking correlation and causation; a “puff piece,” the taxi industry’s Sutton called it, capitalizing on a national trend away from drunk driving. Uber, meanwhile, isn’t backing away from the findings. Jonathan Hall, the policy research lead, says the same effect shows up again and again in the data.

But even the blowback isn’t a terrible outcome for Plouffe: The public is now debating just how much Uber drives down drunk driving.

The doubts about Uber’s new research agenda are driven in part by the idea that researchers are just checking the boxes for the company for their own profit. It’s not a completely unfounded idea. MADD gets $1 donations from Uber riders who chose to enter a contribution code, though the group says that that hasn’t yet amounted to more than $100,000 since the program began this summer. Krueger completed the economic study on Uber’s drivers under contract with the company, though he had full discretion over its contents, and the first time he can remember speaking with Plouffe about it directly was at the press briefing releasing the report. But Uber is not stupid: Its researchers had analyzed their own data on driver earnings and satisfaction, and it suspected that a deeper analysis would likely reveal good things about the company.

Uber, to be sure, has woken up to the fact that it has more to offer than just money: a chance to participate in understanding and shaping how people will move themselves around in the future. MADD says it is eager be along for the ride as Uber expands into the drunk-driving hot beds of suburban and rural America. Krueger, meanwhile, is the kind of guy who can get excited about new data sets. Getting his hands on Uber’s driver data, Krueger says, “seemed like a great opportunity to peer inside this burgeoning sector of the economy.”

Still, not everyone’s convinced that the company is growing up. Dave Sutton is spokesperson for “Who’s Driving You?” an anti-Uber push by a group of fleet owners called the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association. “Clearly Mr. Plouffe has made the company a little less tone-deaf, and responds more like an adult” to criticism and complaints than other Uber executives, says Sutton. “But there’s still a brutal culture emanating from it. It still does what it does.” He scoffs at all the campaign talk. To him, it’s wrapping the flag around bad behavior on things like liability insurance, background checks and professional licensing.

“They’re not in a political campaign,” says Sutton. “They are a business that is trying to do business by avoiding key safety costs.”

Plouffe, though, is building momentum on his side—hoping that his many new projects can keep at bay the critics like Sutton and beat “Big Taxi.” It’s a more winnable campaign than it looked just six months ago—and perhaps one that will be bigger than most people today can imagine. The year 2012 marked the first presidential campaign where candidates spent more than a billion dollars. With Uber, Plouffe now potentially has a war chest many times that size. Making Uber into a logistics service for a new era—an almost physical Internet for the planet—could have an impact that would outlast many presidential administrations from now. It’s possible, depending on how the coming years unfold, that the world might conclude that getting Barack Obama elected President of the United States wasn’t the biggest thing that David Plouffe ever did.