CNSTAT

1. Public polls missed the mark

Public polls took a beating from Republicans this year, most of whom insisted they were inflating Obama’s numbers to discourage GOP voters.

(VIDEO: Messina: Cell phones fouled polling)

But in the end, many of the public polls showed a very tight race nationally, although some of public surveys did show Romney leading in the final weeks of the campaign.

And Messina isn’t letting the pollsters off easy.

“Most of the public polls you were seeing were completely ridiculous,” Messina said. “A bunch of polling is broken in the country.”

With the data-heavy operation, Messina said the campaign could consistently see where the public polls were going wrong. The campaign calculated the early vote split within 1 percentage point and the Florida results with .2 percentage points, Messina said.

He pointed most squarely to the lack of cellphone users included in most public polls.

Federal regulations prohibited using an automated dialer to contact cellphone users for polling. Instead, a live person must dial and talk to the potential voter being polled and that makes conducting polls with cellphone users more expensive.

As a result, many public polls leave cellphone users out of their samples.

Messina said the growing popularity of cellphones as the only point of contact for young voters and minorities left key constituencies for Obama out of the polls and skewed the numbers for Romney in some samples.

“Cellphone usage has changed the industry,” Messina said.

Messina suggested that pollsters should look to actual state-generated voter registration rolls to identify voters and contact them instead of using their own samples.

“That’s why some polls looked so difficult for the president, because they were under-polling the electorate for the president,” Messina said.

2. Hire smart people

Messina got a piece of advice from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: Hire smart people. And not necessarily political types.

“You want smart people, who you are going to draw what you want and they’re going to build it. Messina said Schmidt, who served as a campaign adviser, told him.

So Messina set out to lure data-savvy campaign workers like chief technology officer Harper Reed, who had never worked on a campaign before. As a result, the 60-member tech team was able to build new tools such as Narwhal, which let it unify all kinds of information about voters and volunteers.

“It would start with hiring really smart people regardless of their age, [giving] them a budget and support and hold them accountable to deadline and they will build you some really great things,” Messina said of the book he would write about running a technology-driven campaign.

The data crew crunched numbers, including running thousands of statistical models to track polling information, door-knocking, spending and advertising.

“Analytics was a department in the campaign that used data across the campaign to make everyone’s job easier,” Messina said.

The technology team was able to build “Dashboard,” a program that allowed the campaign to track a number of metrics. And it put all of the data at Messina’s fingertips.

The tech folks also used data points to model the most effective fundraising appeals. To convert those into cash, two fundraising appeals were sent: one using traditional direct mail requests and another with a tailored data request.

The data-driven fundraising appeal outperformed the other by 14 percent, a remarkable difference when every dollar in the campaign matters.

The biggest undertaking was a system that would allow people to identify their Facebook friends who were potential swing voters and personally encourage them to go to the polls or volunteer.

The first response was that such an undertaking would be expensive, Messina said.

“I complained about how expensive it was and then we went and built it,” he said.

3. Mass marketing is over

The Obama campaign reduced some of the mass marketing of candidates that was a hallmark of previous campaigns, Messina said.

A decade ago, the average voter got most of their information from the evening news, Messina said. Now, the average voter gets their news from 15 different sources, he said.

Like the individually targeted fundraising appeals, the Dashboard system also allowed them to generate tailored voter appeals.

The campaign shifted some of its resources to online advertising, an arena that provided more targets and a wealth of specific users.

“Television is still the dominant media, but I think online will catch up very quickly,” Messina said. “I think it already is for young voters out there. The next presidential, whoever has my job the next time, is going to have to decide what percentage you spend online.”

The shift to online was even more dramatic between 2008 and 2012, Messina said. On Election Day in 2008, the Obama campaign sent out one tweet on the social networking site Twitter.

In 2012, the campaign not only had a Twitter team but also had a Facebook and Tumblr, as well as additional online social media presence.

And the online engagement paid off: The campaign raised $700 million online this year, $200 million more than the previous election.

4. Spend early before the flood takes over

One of the biggest missteps Republicans have pointed to in Romney’s campaign was the flood of attack ads during the summer months that eviscerated the GOP nominee’s business record and went unanswered.

Messina said the Obama campaign made the calculated decision to spend early, even if that meant being outspent at the end of the campaign.

Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign frequently insisted that voters weren’t paying attention and that they would spend where it counted — that is, more heavily at the end.

But Messina points out the flood of advertisements, fueled by heavy spending from Democratic-aligned super PACs, allowed Democrats to define Romney before he could define himself. The negative images stuck.

“We believed that late TV didn’t matter as much as early TV and it turns out we were right,” Messina said.

Messina gave credit to Romney’s campaign for a fundraising operation that raised more big-dollar checks, but cautioned that also meant most of the Republican’s money was tied up with the national party. And Romney relied more on his the super PACs than Obama did, Messina said.

“It was a crutch for them,” Messina said.

5. Door knocking is the voter contact of the future

Despite all the gee-whiz gadgets drawing media buzz, Messina insisted that the most important element of any campaign is old-fashioned door-knocking.

“There is a magical place that you can reach every voter: the door,” Messina said.

The campaign found that it was important to engage supporters, even those who weren’t likely to support Romney, to keep the base involved in the conversation. It launched a barbershop and beauty shop engagement effort in important places like Ohio, where African-American turnout was up 4 points from 2008 and held the key to victory.

“Too many Democrats just put Barack Obama’s picture on a piece of paper,” Messina said. “You must have an ongoing conversation about why they should support the president, why they should get out and vote.”

The campaign found that the best way to contact voters wasn’t through out-of-state workers but via local residents who know their neighbors, individual issues and how they historically vote.

Messina told a story about a friend in Wisconsin who used Dashboard to target just two voters in his neighborhood, one to chase after a stray absentee ballot and another that provided specific talking points.

He explained his friend was able to help get the absentee ballot in the mail, and after using the specific talking points walked away feeling encouraged he had won another voter over.

That was possible because of the size of Obama’s grass-roots operation, Messina said.

“This has to be about the grass roots, we have to go back and run a campaign about the grassroots,” Messina said Obama told him. “We built the biggest grass-roots campaign… We built the kind of campaign that made people want to volunteer.”

6. Independents are not swing voters

The old adage is that independents truly swing between the parties. And that if they haven’t made their mind up by Election Day, they’ll be more likely to go to the challenger.

But Messina insists those days are over.

The campaign went through and individually scored every voter in swing states based on their voting history, past support and likelihood to support Obama again, Messina said. Much of the data used for scoring was based on door-knocking (“How fast did they slam the door?”) and phone calls by the campaign, he added.

“We ended up being able to build support scores for every voter in battleground states from 1 to 100,” Messina said.

Instead, Messina argued that the new swing voter is truly a moderate. And many of the unaffiliated independents are former Republicans who left the party unhappy with the tea party takeover.

Because of that, Messina said part of the Republican post-election soul-searching will involve looking at those groups, like Hispanics, that the GOP lost.

“The future demographics in this country are changing in a way that’s going to make their current electoral math difficult for them if they don’t,” Messina said of the Republicans.

7. Early voting is important

Messina knew Obama was going to win a few days before Election Day.

Early voting totals confirmed Obama was the favorite, and pre-Election Day ballots are going to be increasingly crucial as more states adopt them, Messina said.

First, the campaign set out to register thousands of new voters, Messina said. Then it set out to have historic early voting turnout.

“We ran a huge field campaign on the ground to do this,” he said. “We could see our electorate early voting at the rates needed. We started to say if that’s true, we’re going to be OK.”

8. Message matters

Through all of the lauding of Obama’s precision voter micro-targeting and reams of data, Messina insisted that none of that would have mattered without a compelling message and messenger.

“The messenger matters, and we had a better messenger,” Messina said.

And for each voter who used the Dashboard system or encouraged their friends to vote through Facebook, it was because they supported Obama, not some data program.

“You can build a whole suite of analytics… but it all comes back to the campaign, it all comes back to having a message that matters,” Messina said.

Even with the most sophisticated voter outreach programs in the world that can identify that one voter who might be sympathetic to Obama in one town in Ohio, it wouldn’t matter if the campaign couldn’t reach them.

“What campaigns are evolving to is the campaigns of the past, door-knocking is going to be more important than ever,” Messina argued.

That fact makes figuring out how to most effectively use data in the future more complicated, Messina said. He said that it doesn’t make sense to just sell a campaign’s data to the next candidate — or the party — because that candidate wouldn’t have the same connection to voters, rendering the date potentially useless.

The Obama campaign tried to transfer their organization to congressional candidates in the 2010 midterm races but found that it didn’t work.

“We learned this to our surprise in 2010, you can’t just hand it to the next candidate, they have to their own connection,” Messina said. “I don’t think the president is in the business of selling things.”

9. Romney wasn’t the best GOP candidate

Messina cited a number of problems with the Romney campaign, most importantly with the candidate himself.

Asked who he thought would have been the strongest general election foe against Obama, Messina answered: “I think we were honest about our concerns about Huntsman, and I think Jon Huntsman would have been a top-tier election candidate.”

Huntsman served Obama as U.S. ambassador to China and briefly ran for the GOP nod before dropping out after the New Hampshire primary.

“As someone who helped manage his nomination for ambassador, he’s a good guy,” Messina said.

When asked by POLITICO’s Mike Allen if political reasons helped motivate Obama’s appointment of him as ambassador, Messina demurred.

“I thought he was a committed American who would serve our country well and he did,” Messina said.

Messina didn’t cite the Romney campaign’s failure to answer the summer attack ads as the biggest mistake made by the Republican. Instead, he pointed to the television ad they ran in Ohio claiming Jeep was sending jobs to China.

“They ended up spending the last 14 days of the election on the defense, and day after day they had to answer for their ad,” Messina said.

As for picking Paul Ryan, Messina insisted that the vice presidential nominee did little to help the candidate in states where it mattered, pointing out that Obama won the Republican congressman’s hometown.

“I do think he added something to the national ticket Romney didn’t have,” Messina said.

10. Obama for America has a future

The future of Obama for America — the official name of the campaign — remains a question mark, Messina said.

By law, the campaign itself has to be dismantled and campaign funds can’t be spent for non-campaign expenses. But Messina envisions a world where the campaign apparatus still plays a role.

Messina appeared to dismiss heading back to the White House, where he already served as deputy chief of staff. But he left open the possibility of remaining with a Chicago political operation. It’s likely such an operation would try to use its organizational strength to back the president’s agenda, he said.

The campaign conducted a survey of supporters to ask what they would like to see the operation focus on. After the 2008 election, the campaign held online town hall meetings to get a similar sense of what supporters wanted and Messina said some of the results pushed them to enter fights that he was otherwise inclined to stay out of.

“Like get involved in local elections and recall elections in Wisconsin because our people wanted us to,” Messina said.

But regardless, he sees a future for the grass-roots operation.

“You can’t run two presidential campaigns from the grass roots and say now we’re going to run this from D.C.,” Messina said.