Organization
The campaign organization communicates the candidate's
message to the voters, highlighting his or her strengths and
downplaying his or her weaknesses.
American presidential campaigns represent the state of the art of modern electoral campaigning. They are able to attract the best people and put the most recent techniques into play. Modern political campaigns have many areas of responsibility including political, field, communications, new media, research, outreach/coalitions, data/voter file, scheduling and advance, operations, get out the vote, legal, and finance. Ultimately the success of a campaign depends on the qualities of the candidate, but a candidate's campaign team can make a difference.
From the campaign manager or state
director
and top staff in headquarters to the field organizer toiling away in a
ramshackle office in a small town, to the unheralded
intern or the volunteer making calls at a phone bank, a campaign
depends
on people willing to work long hours for modest or even no pay.
Because of the demanding nature of the job, many campaign staffers are
in their 20's and 30's, but there are also the "gray hairs" who can
call on their experience working on a succession of presidential
campaigns. Any candidate has a trusted inner circle of advisors,
some of whom
may not even be part of the campaign staff. Senior advisors make
greater or lesser contributions to the campaign. The
candidate's spouse sometimes is quite involved in the campaign.
Campaigns seek endorsements from current and former elected officials,
and these individuals, depending on their inclination, can also play an
active role in the campaign.
Campaigns also have a stable of consultants and vendors to help with specialized tasks such as polling, fundraising and paid media.1 From an historical perspective, campaigns have become increasing professionalized in recent decades, and they are using increasingly sophisticated means to communicate with voters, ranging from micro-targeting to social media.
Pre-Campaign to Post-Campaign
Even before the campaign
starts, a potential candidate usually has a political organization, be
it a leadership
PAC,
a
Section
527
organization,
a
501(c)(4)
or
a
re-election
campaign.
In the pre-campaign period, that is the period prior to the midterm
elections, the
glimmerings
of campaign organizations start to take shape. As a
next step a potential candidate may opt to form an exploratory
committee or he or she may directly form a campaign committee.
The first staffers get to work setting up headquarters, sometimes in a temporary space. The location of the national headquarters can make a difference. Recent campaigns suggest there may be an advantage to being situated outside the Beltway; Obama (Chicago), George W. Bush (Austin) and Bill Clinton (Little Rock) all located outside Washington, DC. In 1999, when Vice President Al Gore's campaign appeared to be floundering he shut down his DC headquarters and moved all those willing to go to Nashville. The outside the-Beltway approach to campaign headquarters is likely to continue as campaigns set up shop in 2015.
Fundraising is a key part of the early months, and the campaign strives to bring in the resources that will enable it to compete. While money is important to building a campaign organization, it cannot in itself guarantee success.
The organization grows, perhaps opening a few state
offices. The strength and presence
of a presidential campaign in the fifty states is very uneven.
During
the primaries, over a period of many months or even a
year, campaigns develop sizable organizations in the key early states,
while in later states a campaign may be active for just a few
weeks or not at all.
If a campaign lags, the candidate may eventually decide to make some
changes and bring on new people to try to revive the effort.
Shakeups in a campaign are usually not a good
sign. Although John McCain was able to survive the near implosion
of his
campaign in 2007 and Newt Gingrich managed the same feat in 2011, for
Hillary Clinton, the replacement of her campaign manager in Feb. 2008
may have come too late.
In the weeks before voting in a particular
state primary or caucus, the campaign implements a get-out-the-vote
plan, and volunteers may come in from around the country to help.
If a candidate achieves success in one of the early states,
the result can be an influx of
people, money, and interest that challenges the ability of the campaign
to
make
effective use of it. More staff are brought on.
Once the nomination is secured or in view,
the campaign will bring on additional talent as it builds out a
national
organization. The campaign will also place its own people in key
positions at the national party committees (DNC and RNC) as well as
naming people to work with the convention committees. Some staff
will be assigned for the vice presidential nominee, and he or she will
also bring some of his or her own people.
In the Fall, out in the states, three entities
help bring a presidential candidate's message to the voters: (a) the
candidate's campaign
organization; (b) the unified effort designed to elect party members at
every level from the court house to the White House (known as the
coordinated
campaign for Democrats and the Victory campaign for Republicans); and
(c) the state party. In the case of an incumbent president, the
White House is also closely involved. Additionally, there are
independent but allied groups that reinforce the campaign's
messages. Electoral
math and the quest for 270 electoral votes dictate that a presidential
campaign should focus its resources on certain states, while other
states may
be largely bypassed.
Once the election is over, the process of packing up and winding down the campaign, built up over so many long months, takes place, bringing with it a sense of nostalgia. Many members of the winning campaign team find places in the inaugural committee or on the transition, while hoping for jobs in the administration. For members of the losing campaign it is also time to dust off the resumes and try to figure out what to do next.
Campaign Management
A campaign manager needs to be able to make tough
decisions, often
working with limited resources in a tight time frame. Usually the
manager does not make the big strategic decisions; although he or she
weighs in on them, his or her task is to implement the
strategy. That requires creating an environment where the staff
are working towards the goal of electing the candidate, not battling
and sniping amongst themselves.2
To
be
effective,
a
campaign
must
be
organized
so
as to present a
consistent message. It would not work for one campaign staffer to
say one thing and another to say something contradictory. Thus
there
is a process to ensure that communications are approved. As an
example, reporters out on the campaign trail may find that campaign
staff will not answer basic questions, instead referring them to proper
channels. At the same time, the campaign must be flexible enough
to respond to changing circumstances and to present a message that is
not so scripted it is devoid of life and interest. Although Mitt
Romney strove to build a "nimble" campaign in 2011, by Fall 2012
tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts and such famously had to be approved
by 22 people.3
A
consistent
message
is
important,
but
if
the
message
is not working, the campaign must be
willing to change it. Sometimes just a little tweak or refinement
will do the job, and other times a major overhaul is required.
Data and analytics have come to assume an increasingly important role
in modern campaigns because they allow a campaign to test and refine
its messages.
Review of 2012
The 2012 campaign showed the tremendous advantage an
incumbent can
wield. This was also true for President George W. Bush in
2004. The
groundwork for Obama's re-elect was laid starting with the
establishment of Organizing for America at the Democratic National
Committee in January 2009. President Obama formally launched his
re-election effort on April 4, 2011. Meanwhile, Romney only
became the
presumptive nominee following the withdrawal of former Sen. Rick
Santorum on April 10, 2012. During the primaries after the
Romney campaign
completed a primary or caucus, key staff moved on to other state
contests. The strategy worked, but left little
infrastructure for the general election campaign. Not until June
did the Romney
campaign
really begin to bulk up its staff for the Fall. The Obama
campaign
thus had a year or more head start and was able to build up an
unprecedentedly large and
sophisticated organization.
A
heavy
emphasis
on
metrics
and building the ground game produced
results for Obama. The Romney campaign was vastly outmanned by
Obama's team
and never really caught up.
Notes
1. Al Shaw, Kim
Barker and Justin Elliott. "A Tangled Web:
Who's Making Money From All This Campaign Spending?" ProPublica.
March
21,
2012.
2. Joshua
Green. "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up." The Atlantic, Feb. 12, 2008.
3. In a Jan. 2011 article
Time's Michael Scherer quoted Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom:
"Last time, Mitt's
campaign was like IBM. This time, if he runs, he wants to be like
JetBlue... Which is to say, more nimble and more efficient and
ready to respond." (Michael
Scherer. "Mitt Hits the Road Again."
Time. Jan. 20,
2011).
Daniel Kreiss. "Seizing the moment: The presidential campaigns'
use of Twitter during the 2012 electoral cycle." in New
Media
&
Society. Sage Publications. Dec. 5, 2014
- Useful Links
- American Association of Political Consultants