David Plouffe Interview

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L.G.: As reporters, we love covering campaigns, and especially presidential campaigns, because they're just a great source of gossip and behind-the-scenes drama. How did you stop that? Everybody was amazed at how little that was occurring from the Obama campaign.

D.P.: I think, first of all, we attracted the kind of people that weren't in it for themselves, they were in it for the cause. And that can't be overstated enough. Then I think, you instilled from the get-go, we don't tolerate, we don't want our business out there publicly. But I think without that core group of people, who had the right reasons for being there, who were very loyal, we couldn't have done it. We had a really great esprit de corps, and I think the culture of the organization from the get-go was, a leak could not be tolerated, it wasn't who we are. Any time there was a story we didn't like, we let it be known, so we did take some corrective action. And I think eventually that really became known throughout the organization—that we don't leak. Even as we grew, when we added staff it was a challenge, but there was enough of us being around through the primary that our culture is what people became indoctrinated in. It was a big deal. This isn't through some perverse desire for secrecy. I do think the press plays a very important role, so we were free with the information we thought needed to be. But the way we made decisions and processed stuff, if it didn't really serve voters, if it didn't really serve us, we tried to be careful about that.

L.G.: You personally had a limited degree of contact with reporters.

D.P.: I did talk to reporters, but only when we thought it served a purpose. I did plenty of it, but I didn't spend my day on the phone with reporters, unless our press folks or I thought it served a purpose.

L.G.: At one point during the primaries, you sent out a memo which had a great impact, and what you said was, that it was virtually impossible for Hillary to catch up.

D.P.: Yeah, we did that in mid-February, and I did a conference call with reporters. That was out of character for the campaign, and for me, because we were fairly provocative. We thought the race was not being covered in an accurate fashion. It was being covered as a dead heat, and the reality was, we had turned a corner on the campaign, where it was extraordinarily unlikely that we would not win. So we thought it was important to send that message to the press, and to the superdelegates, at that point it was more and more about superdelegates. And we needed it to take hold—in fact, this was not a tied race, we had gained a foothold that was going to be very hard to shake loose.

L.G.: You'd obviously had the insight early on that caucuses were going to be extraordinarily important, and I just wondered how surprised you were that the Clinton campaign did not seem to appreciate that?

D.P.: Well, we were surprised because at some point it became likely that it was going to be a battle that went on for some time, and delegates that are gained through a caucus are no different than through a primary—so every contest mattered. What was interesting was, if you look at the contest in February and March, the caucuses of Minnesota, Colorado, Nebraska, Washington State, and almost all those states, our initial research, whether that be polling or voter I.D. work, showed us losing. Because it was the people who had gone before, and Hillary Clinton was the established candidate, so we had to expand the electorate, which was no easy task. It was made easier because they ceded the field to us for a long period of time. I think if they had contested those caucus states, we might've won those caucus states but we wouldn't have won them 55-35. As we all know now, the only way to rack up delegates is to win by a landslide. A close outcome yields an equal delegate count. So, it was those landslides, 60-40, 65-35, that gave us that delegate lead. We might've still won those caucuses, but I guarantee if they had contested them vigorously, our margins would've been shrunk. And that's the tale of the campaign. Otherwise we didn't rack up the huge landslide. We did in some of the primary states for sure, Virginia was a big win, Wisconsin was a big win, but those caucuses provided us a huge delegate lead.

L.G.: Did the loss in New Hampshire to Hillary have the effect of energizing the campaign?

D.P.: Well it did. It was a blow obviously. I think it was a real test of our campaign and our candidate. I think at the end of the day, voters want to see their next president struggle a little bit through this process, and if we would've won New Hampshire, we would've been like a comet streaking across the sky. I think they wanted to see Obama have to fight for it, struggle for it, and I think in many ways, we were better off for having lost New Hampshire. It's harder to see it in that moment—but it gave him a little more texture, and voters could say, okay, how do you respond to adversity, a tough situation? I think at that moment, the night of January 8, most political observers in the press thought Hillary Clinton was going to be the nominee, and that we were kind of a one-trick pony. We won Iowa, that was a nice political sideshow, and now order had been restored. But, yeah, I'm really proud how we fought back from that and were able to win the nomination.

L.G.: Perhaps the media, which is so focused on what's in front of their face—I say that with all due disrespect to myself—didn't realize what you were doing on the ground in these other states, coming up.

D.P.: I think that's right. All the focus about February 5—and  February 5 for us was always a matter of survival—was that it was a day that was built for Hillary Clinton and we did better on February 5 than we could've ever imagined, I mean, we won more states and more delegates, but there was very little attention paid to what comes after February 5, and we won 11 in a row and we won almost all of them by landslide margins. That's why we built up a delegate lead that was never going to be given up.

L.G.: They obviously had Harold Ickes, who was supposed to be this huge expert on the rules and on how primaries proceed in the Democratic Party. Were you surprised they kind of dropped the ball on that?

D.P.: We were surprised. I'd read various accounts that Harold tried to bring to everybody's attention that this was going to become a delegate battle. I think they were much more tactical. The press narrative of the day was important to them. We were surprised.

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