Mobilizing the ’08 base without ’08’s Obama-mania won the day. 5 key decisions for Obama

President Barack Obama’s 2008 victory may have been built on inspiration, but his 2012 campaign was a billion-dollar triumph of perspiration and electoral engineering likely to leave a larger political footprint on the American political landscape.

Necessity — in Obama’s case, the need to mobilize the ’08 base without ’08’s Obama-mania — spurred invention and a sense that planning, not serendipity, would win the day.


( Also on POLITICO: Obama's win: 12 takeaways)

Obama’s Chicago-based team created the most sophisticated voter targeting and identification operation in history, a turnout effort that trounced Mitt Romney’s ground game, and a merciless, months-long campaign to portray Romney as hopelessly out of touch with the interests of working voters in battleground states.

“They were like a football coaching staff that puts their team in a position to win, no matter what the opposition does,” said Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau, who heads the American Bridge 21st Century super PAC. “They got a four-year head start on infrastructure and strategy. It was amazing. If other incumbents follow their plan, I can’t see how you’d get another one-term president.”

A top Obama adviser added, “2008 was great and magical, but by 2012 we had four, five years to learn from our mistakes.”

( PHOTOS: World reacts to Obama's win)

Here are five decisions, most of them made months — even years — before the votes were cast, that led to Obama’s decisive Electoral College victory on Tuesday.

1. Investing millions in voter ID and field organizing from 2009 to 2012

On Tuesday, political reporters and many in the Romney campaign were peering into a black box of confusing anecdotes and data from swing states. In a room in Obama’s Chicago headquarters, the president’s “analytics” team calmly delivered packets of data to the campaign’s boiler room predicting outcomes in battleground states that proved, in many cases, to be 0.1-to-0.5 percentage points off the actual votes cast.

That gave Chicago a critical edge. Like generals with good intelligence, Obama campaign officials could move resources quickly around the battlefield — like the late deployment of volunteers to critical Cuyahoga County in Ohio.

( See also: 2012 election results map)

And it never would have been in place without years of planning by Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina, White House adviser David Plouffe, field impresarios Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird, and deputy campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon.

Obama’s campaign probably spent $200 million to $250 million — a quarter of every dollar collected — to create a state-of-the-art voting profiling operation that allowed it to more accurately assess the electorate than standard polling.

That effort was linked to a vast network of state-level Obama organizers who knew their turf like a good cop knows the beat.

Messina told POLITICO the signature moment of the campaign came when he ran into a middle-aged woman during a visit to a Columbus, Ohio, field office six weeks before Election Day.

“I know everybody in my neighborhood — the ones that will always vote, the ones who don’t — and what it takes to get them to vote,” the woman, a committed Obama volunteer since 2007, told him. She added, with a chuckle: “They just shipped in a Romney staffer a couple of weeks ago. … Who do you think is going to win around here?”

2. Front-loading attacks on Romney in swing states

In May 2012, Obama’s brain trust faced a distressing set of circumstances. Cash was tight and the online fundraising juggernaut of 2008 hadn’t yet materialized (the pace of donations would perk up a few weeks later), leaving a campaign that had expected to be swimming in cash without much in reserve.

But Chicago needed to define Romney’s record at Bain Capital and his deeply damaging opposition to the auto bailout before millions of dollars could be poured into pro-Romney ads in Ohio, Virginia and other battlegrounds. The longer they waited, the less effective the attacks would be, and the steeper the cost of reserving time in expensive ad markets.

Obama’s aides were frustrated with the GOP primary debates, which didn’t vet Romney in their view. Polling and focus groups showed that voters still had no real impression of Romney, giving Obama’s team a narrow window to portray him as an out-of-touch rich guy, the key to stemming losses from disenchanted white working-class moderates.

During a regularly scheduled Wednesday strategy meeting, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod and another veteran Obama consultant, Larry Grisolano, made a bold suggestion reminiscent of the audacious days of 2008: Instead of waiting to save cash, spend more than $100 million in negative ads immediately, a political sneak attack in the early summer that would keep Romney on the defensive through the fall.

There was only one problem — and Obama himself raised it during a meeting in the White House a few days later. “What happens in the fall if we run out of money,” the president asked Axelrod, Stephanie Cutter, Plouffe, Messina and others.

We’ll probably be able to raise the money we need, he was told — but there were no guarantees.

“Go for it,” Obama said.

“Those things hit like a bomb,” said a Democratic strategist close to the campaign. “Romney was never able to recover.”

3. Introducing the American Jobs Act

Obama never thought Congress would actually pass it — but the ambitious jobs bill the White House unveiled in September 2011 played a vital role in the build-up to the 2012 campaign.

Obama’s job approval rating, which had peaked in the 60s during his first months in office, had plummeted to the high 3os by mid-2011 due to a stubbornly high unemployment rate and the widespread perception that his focus on passing health care reform had sacrificed job creation.

The $447 billion measure was dead on arrival. And House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) rejected White House requests to host a joint session address on Sept. 7 because it conflicted with a GOP presidential primary debate, forcing Obama to deliver the address a day later.

But for a president with an apathetic base, it was an effective rallying tool and showed his allies, especially in Big Labor, that he was spoiling for a fight with Republicans over the issue of jobs and employment.

“People don’t rally around a tax cut,” said an Obama insider. “They need something more tangible, something to rally around. The jobs bill was really important for us in that regard.”

A few days after his speech, Obama told college students in Virginia that “Every single one of you can help make this bill a reality. … The time for hand-wringing is over. The time for moping around is over. We’ve got to kick off our bedroom slippers and put on our marching shoes.”

The bill languished, but his approval ratings began a slow, steady climb culminating in the 50 percent approval marks he reached before balloting began on Tuesday.

4. Ignoring Romney’s Rust Belt head fake

Over the summer and fall, Romney wanted to expand his electoral map. After the fateful first debate in Denver, he began to show signs of threatening a trio of big Midwestern states assumed to be in Obama’s bag: Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

With a growing fundraising advantage, the Romney-Ryan campaign announced it would begin making six-figure ad purchases and began campaigning more intensively in those suddenly vulnerable states, giving it a late claim of momentum.

Obama’s campaign was already overextended from the early ad blitz and the expensive voter operation.

So Messina — after reading a package of polling data and voter-ID analytical studies that showed them with slim but durable leads — decided he should hold onto the cash, opting for a few token ad buys rather than a full-blown counterattack.

“That was one of the hardest calls I had to make. The Romney guys and the guys from Restore [Our Future, the Romney super PAC] were in those states,” Messina told POLITICO. “We took a deep breath and decided he was never going to win Michigan, not after the car stuff, and the other ones would hold, too.”

The money went to North Carolina and Florida instead — with the president pulling off a near-upset in the Tar Heel State and what looks like a hairsbreadth victory in the Sunshine State.

“It was a lesson in the discipline of data,” Messina added. “Always depend on the ground [operation].”

5. Staying in Chicago

One of the first campaign 2012 decisions Obama made was to stay on the wind-scraped shores of Lake Michigan.

Part of the decision was predicated on replicating the mojo of 2008 — but it was mostly about keeping Washington and the Beltway media a two-hour flight away from the campaign’s peaceful Midwestern sanctum.

The move had some obvious drawbacks: Weary consultants complained about the strain, and decisions took longer with Obama and his campaign staff 700 miles apart.

But for a campaign obsessed with avoiding distraction and interference, it worked.

“For two years straight, we had a strategy and stuck to it,” Cutter said. “That wouldn’t have been possible if we ran this campaign from Washington — the chatter and quarterbacking would have been too much. Even from Chicago, there were some days I wouldn’t even turn on the TV because I didn’t want it to distract us.”