David Plouffe Interview

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L.G.: Clearly. Walk me through the different units of the campaign. There's the ground game, media, communication—just tell me how you thought of the organization.

D.P.: There are the states, which were always critical, and within the states, there's a state director, the ground game, and people doing press in the states. We viewed the campaign as essentially 16 different campaigns, because every state is different. We had communications people in Chicago, we had research people in Chicago, we had a big new media and technology department in Chicago. We had a fundraising department, we had a scheduling and advance department, which is critical because we obviously had Obama and Biden and their staffs out there every day. We had a vice presidential staff, we had an operational staff that administered the campaign. Those would be the main areas.

L.G.: How much money is allocated to the various units of the campaign? One always hears that paid advertising takes significantly more than 50 percent—putting commercials on the air, radio, and television. Can you break down the percentages?

D.P.: Well, we spent obviously a lot of money on TV, but as a ratio of our spending, it was much lower than historically is done, and that's because we spent a lot of money in the field and on the ground. And, in fact, when we did our baseline budget, the field was fully funded because we thought it was very, very important. If we were to raise excess funds, we bolstered the field a little bit, but it went in advertising. Our first priority was the ground operation because we thought that was essential to us winning. It's very much, I think, a unique approach. In a lot of campaigns, the media gets funded first, then if you have extra money that comes in, you bolster the field and things of that sort. And we kind of did it in reverse.

L.G.: Can you give me a rough breakdown of percentages?

D.P.: Well, no. I would say that it's lower.

L.G.: One always hears historically it's almost 70 percent that goes to media.

D.P.: Right, the playbook is 70 to 75 percent, and we did much less than that. Under 50 percent.

L.G.: What gave you the chutzpah to think you should break the model, and spend more than 50 percent on non-media?

D.P.: First of all, we knew that we had to get really good turnout, and that we thought a human being talking to a human being in a state is the most effective in communication. So we needed an organization that was able to facilitate that. Secondly, a presidential campaign is a very well-covered enterprise, people are talking about it all the time, they see it on the newscast, they're reading about it online. In many respects, advertising in a senate race or governor's or congressional race can have more impact because those races aren't front and center for people. I always believed that advertising was very, very important. I think we went right in and it was very helpful—makes it meaningful because people have 100 percent knowledge of the candidate and are following pretty closely. So I thought we could afford to trim a little bit. Now we ended up raising a lot of money, so our point levels were very big in September, October, but we could've won without that. Then the McCain campaign likes to say, "we were outspent, that's why we lost on TV"—and I think that's complete malarkey.

L.G.: You think it had more to do with the good luck you had with the economy tanking and the fact they didn't really have a ground game?

D.P.: Well, and they careened from message to message, strategy to strategy. We had one message, one strategy. We won all three debates. When was the last time one candidate won all the debates? Maybe Clinton in '92, although I think one of them was a tie. We had big moments in the campaign.

L.G.: So David, as far as you're concerned, you're still in Spin Alley, huh? Still telling me Obama won the debates.

D.P.: Yeah, he did, and that was incredibly meaningful to us! McCain, he suspends his campaign around the economic issues, we don't. There's no doubt our voters liked our stability and punished McCain for his erratic-ness.

L.G.: Just to go back a little bit, you didn't know Obama until you worked on the Senate race with Axelrod. At what point did you think this guy was presidential horse flesh?

D.P.: Well, my sense is we had this conversation about whether he was going to run or not, and I had a pretty high degree of confidence that he had the intellect and the character and temperament to be a very good president. The bigger question was, could he be a good presidential candidate, because that's the horse of a different color—the grueling nature of it. He hadn't spent any time in Iowa, New Hampshire, didn't have a fundraising base. He had young kids—he wouldn't see them very often. Those are the big questions. Could he transact this brutal obstacle course at the presidential campaign? These presidential campaigns are very grueling obstacles and I think they're pretty revealing. I just grew to have an immense amount of respect for how he dealt with it, so the question was, could he be a good presidential candidate and could we, in improbable circumstances, announce his presidential campaign against a dominant front-runner like Hillary Clinton?

L.G.: When were these discussions?

D.P.: It was after the 2006 election. And you know it was definitely seat of the pants, because he hadn't spent any time in 2005 or 2006 thinking about this, discussing this, doing the things people do who plan to run for president. It was a startup in every sense of the word.

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