Electing a president: Five insights from Obama campaign manager Jim Messina
Conventional wisdom held that Team Obama would not be able to generate the turnout numbers in 2012 that it had in 2008. What campaign manager Jim Messina did to reelect the president.
President Barack Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina sits in a motorcade vehicle before departing for the the University of Denver for first debate of the 2012 presidential election.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
Washington
Depending on one’s politics, Jim Messina is either a conquering hero or a figure of intense envy.
Either way, the manager of President Obama’s successful reelection campaign was the man of the hour in Washington Tuesday, when he sat down for a chat with Politico’s Mike Allen before a standing-room-only crowd.
Mr. Messina’s story begins with the president asking him to build a grassroots-oriented campaign. By doing that, Messina said, “that’s how we got to turnout numbers that a whole bunch of people spent 18 months telling me we couldn’t get to.”
Specifically, Republicans and other political observers insisted the Obama campaign would not be able to turn out minorities, women, and young voters in numbers that matched the 2008 campaign.
Amid high unemployment and sluggish economic growth, the enthusiasm just wasn’t there, Team Obama kept hearing. Many public polls seemed to bear that out. But the result proved otherwise.
“We built the biggest grassroots campaign in modern American political history,” Messina said.
So how did that work, exactly? Here are five takeaways from Messina’s remarks:
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