Posted on Sun, Nov. 09, 2008
Inside story: How Obama won Florida
BY MARY ELLEN KLAS
Inside a converted cigar factory in the heart of Ybor City, a group of Barack Obama staffers hunch over their laptops in intense, nearly silent concentration. This is the nerve center of Obama's Florida operation, and the election is four days away.
Steve Schale, 34, Obama's state director and the brain behind the campaign, glances over the rows of lawyers, researchers, communications staffers and field directors who are putting into action the campaign's final-hours effort to get out the vote.
''It's my job now to just get out of the way,'' he says.
He has scratched out a prediction on a piece of paper: Obama takes Florida, 50-46 percent. But the crumpled scrap he carries with him belies his greatest fear: that the Illinois senator loses Florida, and in doing so, the White House.
In the previous four months, the campaign registered 200,000 new voters in Florida, opened 50 state field offices, recruited 600,000 volunteers and allocated $40 million to fight John McCain. Under Schale's direction, it amassed a grassroots organization so far-reaching that even Republican strategists say it will change the way politics is practiced in Florida.
''They've done everything right and very few things wrong,'' said Sally Bradshaw, former campaign manager for Republican Gov. Jeb Bush and now a political consultant. ``They've figured it out. They've broken the code.''
The strategy not only helped Obama rebound from his primary-inflicted wounds to win Florida, it brought him victories in key Republican strongholds such as the I-4 corridor and gave him better margins than John Kerry's 2004 campaign in 36 of 38 counties.
(The Miami Herald requested behind-the-scenes access to both camps in the final days of the Florida campaign, in hopes of telling the inside story from whichever side was victorious. The McCain campaign declined. The Obama campaign agreed, as long as it was understood the story wouldn't appear until after the election.)
For Schale, the waning days of the campaign have come down to this: ``We have tried to anticipate anything and everything and we don't take a damn thing for granted.''
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
Obama's Florida strategy was thorough and simple: ask every supporter to help, give every volunteer a job, register every eligible voter, get ''sporadic'' voters to the polls, and bring the campaign to every pocket of the state.
The campaign did it by dividing the state into five regions, or ''pods,'' each with its own staff and message geared to regional concerns. It harnessed social networking on the Internet and cell phones to allow grassroots organizers set up their own voter registration drives, home-grown phone banks and text messaging chains.
''If this works, it's hard to think this isn't the academic model of the future,'' Schale muses on the Saturday before Election Day. ``We started out with the premise that, with our volunteer numbers, there was no reason we couldn't organize anywhere in Florida.''
Florida represents a convergence of the national campaign's community-organizer approach and Schale's view of the state, shaped by two years as political director for House Democrats in which he helped reverse the party's decline by wresting nine legislative seats from Republican control.
Now Schale, who grew up in St. Augustine, also wants to exorcise the demons of Florida's troubled election history, including the 2000 debacle that gave George W. Bush the White House and made Florida ``the punching bag of the nation.''
He has persuaded the Chicago staffers that Florida can be competitive. Voter registration numbers have shifted Democratic in Miami-Dade, Pinellas and Sarasota counties. Local races in Hernando, Marion, Citrus, Lee and Pasco counties have netted wins for Democrats. And in 2004, 1.6 million Democrats didn't vote, including 600,000 African American voters.
Obama's national advisors seized on the number. They 'saw this universe of `sporadic' voters as a remarkable and untapped potential,'' Schale says.
Schale warns though that capturing those votes won't be easy. Florida is ''a big, crazy state fraught with all kinds of historic land mines -- like dating a girl who's broken up with guys 100 times before,'' he says. ``And it's very expensive.''
But as soon as Schale took the job, he realized it was more than a campaign. When the staff announced the opening of its Florida headquarters in Ybor City, there were no celebrities, not even any elected officials -- but 400 to 500 supporters showed up.
''For a fricking office opening!'' Schale recalls. ``Clearly, something was happening here.''
TURNING OUT THE VOTE ***
It's 9:52 p.m. on Nov. 1 and the Florida team is in the middle of a nationwide conference call with 22,000 staffers. Obama calls in, moments before taking the stage for a rally in Springfield, Mo.
''I just wanted to call tell you how proud I am of you,'' Obama says. ``Your hard work is extraordinary. Four months ago were behind in most of these battleground states. We now know we can register voters. Our greatest challenge is turning them out.''
He urges everyone to double their efforts. ''We can all get sleep afterwards,'' Obama says. ``I want everybody out in the field. We've gone too far for us to come up short.''
It is vintage Obama. The staff has grown accustomed to a pat on the back, then a request to do more -- both in Florida and nationally, says Angela Botticella, Florida's field director.
''We don't stop when we ask you to vote. We ask you to talk to your neighbors, or start a phone bank, or knock on doors or donate food,'' says Botticella, 25 and a California native.
''It's about turning conversations into relationships,'' she says.
In Florida, that means 1,414 ''Neighbor to Neighbor'' teams with a total of 22,000 volunteers. They are trained to tell people where to vote, which days they can vote and to follow up, relentlessly. Once identified, the campaign knocked on their doors or called their homes until they voted.
''It's pretty incredible,'' Botticella says.
Schale's strategy of dividing the state into five regional pods, each with its own focus, message and staff, is intended to center attention on regional issues often lost in the larger campaign.
In Miami, the campaign showcased health care and Cuba. On the Space Coast, it wasObama's plan for protecting NASA from budget cuts, and in the Panhandle, the campaign pitched a proposal to end water wars with Georgia that are crippling the seafood industry.
Targeting turnout is so important that Paul Tewes and Steve Hildebrand, two of Obama's national strategists, were dispatched to Florida in the final weeks help the effort.
Tewes, seated at his computer in the ''boiler room'' with the rest of the team's Florida brain trust, wonders aloud: once early voting ends, can the campaign get home-bound voters and any others who missed the absentee ballot deadline to complete in-person absentee ballots on Monday?
Tewes orders up 67 different computer sorts -- one for each county -- to find out who to target. ''Every opportunity we can get people to vote, we do,'' Tewes says.
The effort results in volunteers bringing ballots to hundreds of voters at home and even in hospital beds.
COUNTING TO 270
Tewes and other Obama strategists didn't need Florida's 27 Electoral College votes to reach the 270-vote threshold for winning the election -- but they really wanted them.
Putting Florida in play forced McCain to compete in an expensive state he expected to win. And the strategy provided the Obama campaign with an insurance policy.
''What we realized early on was we had multiple combinations to 270,'' Tewes says just before the polls close on Tuesday.
No other state got as much attention from the national campaign as Florida, he says. ``We had a consistent and steady presence here.''
The prominent Obama presence in Florida offered a psychological boost too: It energized the grassroots, showed Democrats the fight is on, even in the state Gore narrowly lost, and it made Florida a pivotal player on the national stage.
''One of the reasons we are where we are is we never gave up on Florida, and the other guys took it for granted,'' says David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist in the campaign's final days.
VOTE EARLY
Top Florida staffers, laptops and Blackberries at the ready, hold a conference call 30 minutes after Obama's call. The topic: early voting.
Jackie Lee, general election director, opens it up: ''This was an amazing day,'' she says. ``We still have people waiting to vote in these polling locations and, I'd like to say, these are our people.''
The staff members offer anecdotes: In Tampa, people stood in line in the driving rain and others brought towels to dry them off. One couple returned with 50 Burger King sandwiches for the line; in another, people brought pizzas.
Boticella, the statewide field director, congratulates the regional ''pods'' that have met their get-out-the-vote goals for the day. Volunteers targeted more than 350,000 voters on Saturday, distributing Obama door-hangers with each voter's polling location.
She moves to the next challenge: connecting with people who need rides to the polls on Sunday, another highly orchestrated effort. Team captains for each neighborhoodwill arrive at staging locations at 9:45 a.m., with the first shift of canvassers scheduled for 10 a.m. and a second at 3:30 p.m. Field directors must fill out spreadsheets detailing all the outreach.
''Tomorrow, make sure your turf is laid out and you're not waiting until the last minute,'' Botticella warns. ``Daylight savings time begins tomorrow. We get an extra hour of sleep.''
The room erupts in applause. ''I want everyone out of their offices by midnight tonight,'' she says. ``A lot of people didn't sleep last night...We need to be rested for Tuesday.''
Schale was among the late-night crew on Friday. At 2:06 a.m. Saturday, he sent an email -- part pep talk, part appeal -- to the campaign's 600 paid staffers in Florida.
''Together, we have done some amazing things,'' he writes, detailing the voter registration drive that exceeded that of any battleground state, ``and gave the Democratic Party its largest voter registration advantage in 12 years...We took a state that Barack trailed by ten points in June and six to seven points in September and made it the central battleground for the White House.''
As little as six weeks earlier, the path to victory seemed dicey at best. Obama had been campaigning for months in Florida and was still down in the polls. McCain was surging, with Sarah Palin as his newly announced running mate.
Obama came to Tampa to prepare for the debate, and the campaign held a midday rally at a baseball stadium in Dunedin. Schale worried then that voters wouldn't fill the place, but two hours before the event, 12,000 people were inside with another 12,000 waiting to get in.
''I got the sense then we were going to be OK,'' Schale says.
In his email to the staff, he urged focus to the end: ``If we all do our jobs for three more days, our man will win. It is just that simple.''
FINAL FLORIDA RALLY
It's Monday in Jacksonville, less than 24 hours before polls open, and Obama has finished his final Florida campaign rally. He heads backstage for phone calls, lunch and a staff briefing.
In a dressing room, Schale and Obama huddle over the campaign director's Blackberry. It shows that 39 percent of Florida's electorate has already voted. Black turnout is particularly encouraging: 50 percent of the registered black voters in Orange County, for example, have already cast ballots. Of the 4.4 million early voting and absentee ballots, Democrats have cast 350,000 more votes than the Republicans. In 2004, John Kerry was 150,000 votes behind.
''That's a good sign. Turnout's been terrific,'' Obama says.
Schale tells him the last early voting ballot cast in Broward County was at 2 a.m. Monday ``and there was a woman...''
Obama interrupts and turns to his team of traveling advisors -- Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod and Linda Douglass. ''Did you hear about this?,'' he asks. ``A woman whose husband was in hospice, he dies while she's in line and she goes ahead and votes anyway.''
His staff shakes their heads, ''Oh, my God,'' they murmur.
Obama agrees. ``We hear stories like that all the time.''
TRUSTING THE PLAN
Schale has spent Election Day in the Tampa ''boiler room'' recording robo calls and, making final tweaks to the plan but there is little left he can do.
The plan is in place, he thinks. We have to trust it.
Then he offers a little prayer for mercy: ``Please let it end soon.''
At 11 p.m., he wades into the crowd at Tampa's Waterside Marriott. Now Pennsylvania has fallen to Obama. As has Virginia. And Florida. And the White House.
''We changed America. We changed Florida. It's a better place to be because of it,'' he exclaims.
Jan Greene, 60, stands in the cheering throngs. A native of Marlborough, Mass., she is among hundreds of out-of-state Obama supporters who streamed to Florida in the final weeks, staying in the homes of strangers, working the phones and neighborhoods to help turn the Florida vote.
As Obama begins his acceptance speech on TV, Greene stands at the edge of the ballroom and sobs.
''I have five bi-racial sons,'' she says, sopping up tears with an already soaked tissue. ``Forty years ago I was a flower child and I thought then this was going to happen. This is what America is supposed to be and I was so afraid it wouldn't be. I cannot believe it.''
It takes 12 hours more for Schale to believe it too. After a wrap up conference call Wednesday with his state staff, he returns to his office with his team. ''We did it,'' they tell each other.
''I hope the legacy of this is confidence,'' Schale says. ``We really can win the state.''
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