But Obama coasted to a re-election victory last week.
How did he do it?
Simple. As a former community organizer the Obama White House understands voter identification and mobilization like no other.
They understand you don’t need a majority of the people behind you to win — all you need is to get more people to the polls than the other guy.
That starts with identifying everyone who supports you. The Obama campaign made that priority number one.
“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,” POLITICO reports.
“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.”
As he laid out in his 2005 book, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe took simple neighborhood-level political organizing and replicated it by an exponent of thousands to carry Obama to two historic election wins.
According to Obama adviser Jim Messina one Columbus, Ohio woman told him: “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?”
Do you know your neighborhood?
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