The other week, a group from United Minds & Prime visited the headquarters for the Obama election campaign in Chicago. The office is located in a skyscraper alongside Grant Park, the same park where Obama gave his victory speech before a jubilant crowd following the 2008 presidential election. There are no signs on the exterior of the building, so for those who aren't in-the-know, it's hard to imagine that on one of those floors, the most systematic election campaign of all time is being prepared.
Obama is the first sitting president who has decided to locate the headquarters of his re-election campaign outside the capital, Washington. The reasoning behind this is said to be that those working on the campaign will have a better idea of the prevailing mood in the country.
But the campaign will also be historic both in its scope and through the use of new technology. "Our efforts on the ground and on technology will make the 2008 campaign look prehistoric," said Jim Messina, Obama campaign manager, in an interview in Newsweek. [1]
It sounds like an exaggeration, but comparisons show that something special is going on: Obama already has over 300 people working full time on his re-election campaign. There are more than twice as many people as George W. Bush had at the equivalent time before the 2004 presidential election, and almost ten times as many as Bill Clinton had at the equivalent time before the 1996 presidential election.
The Bush campaign staff was proud that in January 2004 they had conducted a total of 52 courses for election campaigners across the United States. In the state of Iowa alone, the Obama campaign conducted 57 training courses for election campaigners during a single week in December.
It is rumoured that Obama's re-election campaign will be the first campaign ever to succeed in collecting over a billion dollars in campaign funds. Messina has dismissed this information as "bullshit", but it is clear that major efforts are under way to attract money. The job of collection manager has been assigned to Matthew Barzun, who has been recalled from his less important job as U.S. ambassador to Sweden. It was Barzun who made our visit to the campaign headquarters possible; although unfortunately, he was not around on the day we visited.
The operations are shrouded in secrecy. To enter, we had to pass a security and identification check. In principle, photography is forbidden, but our escort gave us permission to photograph some signs.
What we saw when we entered was a large open-plan office. We found out that the average age of an employee is young; 27 years old. Various groups work on different states, which can be seen through the flags and maps that are hanging up. There is a department that works exclusively with technology and another responsible for design. The Obama merchandise that is produced and sold is thought-out to the smallest detail. Famous graphic designers have been commissioned to create an aesthetically pleasing visual campaign. (Foreigners are not actually allowed to purchase anything since the proceeds go to the campaign and foreign contributions are prohibited.)
"When we opened the office in April 2011, there were 15 people," explains Kevin Charles Good, deputy chief of staff for fundraising. "Now we are growing all the time and soon there will be 600 of us who will sit here," he says.
But the headquarters are just one aspect of the campaign organisation. There will be a campaign office in every state, with local employees. In most states, Obama has already hired local campaign workers, giving him a considerable time advantage over the Republican candidate. In addition there is an army of volunteers.
The Obama campaign says it has a strategy for 50 states, which means it will campaign in all states, even those where the Republicans are strong. The reasoning behind this is said to be that the Republicans will be forced to allocate campaign resources to the "wrong" states, so that the opposition will have fewer resources available to redistribute to strategically important areas.
In practice, however, the majority of campaign resources will be invested in a small number of states. Thanks to how American politics works, it is already possible to estimate that in practice, the election will be decided by around a dozen "swing states", where the opinion polls are inconclusive. Strategically important states are Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Iowa.
The work that the Obama campaign is doing at this stage pertains to a large degree to identifying supporters and potential voters in these key states. Among other things, the foundations of this are the registers which were compiled before the last presidential election. In the United States, the possibilities for registering opinion are much greater than in Sweden, which means that campaigns can have detailed information on individuals' opinions and preferences.
New technology makes it easier to collect and cross-check information, but also to make messages more individual. A gun owner with a Jeep in Virginia is attracted by different virtues than a liberal teacher with a Volvo in New Hampshire.
To ascertain what different individuals want to hear, the campaign is busy developing a computer program for "micro-listening".The programme will cross-check data about voters to adapt messages and personalise every contact that each voter has with the campaign. Personalised messages can be crucial in attracting more people to vote for Obama, but also in convincing more people to become volunteer workers.
In cities like New York City and Chicago, the Obama campaign is looking, in particular, for donors and volunteers to assist in other states.
Before the 2008 presidential election Obama urged his supporters to create a profile on MyBarackObama.com. Prior to this year's presidential election, the Obama campaign will not build up its own social network but will instead take advantage of sympathisers' existing networks on Facebook. By logging in to Facebook, sympathisers will have access to the tools needed to help contribute to the campaign. In return, the campaign will gain access to sympathisers' Facebook contacts, as well as all the information that the campaign workers enter about the voters they contacted.
Today, the Obama campaign has more than 25 million friends on Facebook. With access to all these friends of friends, the campaign has a huge scope.
One key difference compared to 2008 is that significantly more Americans have access to smartphones; about 44 percent, according to Nielsen. This makes the mobile phone an essential tool for almost everything, from fundraising to door-to-door campaigning in order to mobilise new voters.
Mobilisation is crucial in American elections because voter turnout is lower than in Sweden. The Obama campaign will take great efforts to attract new groups of voters, in particular in strategically important states. A key group is Latin Americans, who may be crucial in states like Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado.
In the Republican primary election campaigns, the immigration issue has received a lot of attention, which the Obama campaign intends to take advantage of. Many Latin Americans have recently moved to the U.S., and they therefore dislike any policy designed to "clamp down on" immigration. It may be particularly effective to adapt messages to this group, especially in terms of language.
The overall impression given by the preparatory work involved in the Obama campaign is remarkable. A well-organised campaign will, however, never be able to replace a persuasive message, and this is where Obama currently faces his major challenge. The message he will go forward with for this year's presidential election will not be as optimistic and future-oriented as last time, when he spoke of "hope" and "change". It will probably be about negative aspects of the Republican candidate.
Obama is fighting an uphill battle. The enthusiasm he is attracting is not nearly as strong as before the last presidential election. This is reflected, among other things, through the fact that the Obama campaign's fundraising during the last quarter did not meet its target. In fact, in the equivalent period before the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush managed to raise more money, despite his campaign never having the same opportunity to receive small sums from many contributors.
Critics of the Obama campaign feel that there is too strong a focus on technology and that it is not adequately based on what people think and feel. If voters are sufficiently dissatisfied, no technology in the world will be able to rescue the president.
One major aspect of the Republican primary election process is the existence of formally independent organisations, the so-called Super-PAC's, which, due to a ruling by the Supreme Court can spend unlimited amounts on political advertising. Experience shows that negative advertising is effective in shooting down political opponents, even if candidates prefer not to be seen as the messenger themselves. It will most likely be quite a dirty election campaign, with both camps trying to lower their opponents' credibility. How this will affect the outcome of the election is difficult to predict since the equivalent conditions have never existed before.
It will nevertheless be an exciting election, both from a political and communicative perspective. New methods will be tested on a large scale, and the experience gained will act as a precedent for how campaigns are built up in the future - both political campaigns and campaigns with completely different purposes.
What communicative conclusions can be drawn already, and are applicable to a wider perspective? We can think of three:
- The Obama campaign will use data to identify potential voters and approach them with customised messages, as no prior political campaign has done. The challenge is to filter the relevant data, analyse it and draw conclusions that can be translated into concrete actions. Gathering knowledge is of no use if it can not be translated into actions that contribute to the goals of the campaign being achieved. In the short term it will be expensive for others to copy the Obama campaign's approach, but the campaign still represents a shift from obtuse mass marketing to interactive communication with individuals.
- The 2012 presidential election campaign will be the first "smartphone-election campaign", and as the television fundamentally changed the conditions for marketing and campaigning, the smartphone will do so too. We are moving from communication with households to communication with individuals, from a world where moving images could only be seen on the big screen, to a world where moving images can be seen almost anywhere. This is important, since moving images often make a stronger impression than text.
- Technology increases transparency, which in turn increases the need of being able defend past views and actions. Voters understand that nobody is perfect, but you still have to constantly be prepared with a good answer. In this new "transparent" reality, politicians will be examined closely, and political candidates will have to be able to evaluate themselves with the pre-emptory goal of being prepared for what the opposition can find out about them. In a world where video endures and can be sent between mobile phones, the ability of pre-emptory evaluation becomes something required by party colleagues and allies at the very least. The price of undiscovered scandals is too high, and the time for rulers with huge personal secrets is up.
[1] Andrew Romano, 2. January 2012, Yes We Can (Can’t We?), Newsweek and The Daily Beast
