The Chicago-based team that helped Barack Obama secure a second term in the White House raised $700m online – 70% of the total – exceeding even its own record-breaking heights of 2008.
Jim Messina, the campaign manager of Obama for America, the president's re-election team, said that online fundraising had surpassed the historic sums raised four years ago by more than $200m. He said that the massive cash-raising operation underlined that the future of political campaigning was digital.
"Campaigns will spend more and more of their money online every cycle from now until it reaches parity with television advertising," Messina said
That emphasis, Messina said, had allowed the Obama re-election campaign to combat the hundreds of millions spent on negative TV attack ads by Mitt Romney and his Super Pac supporters. TheRepublicans "will look back on their campaign and realise that we beat them at the doors, and that really matters."
The Romney campaign's overwhelming focus on television, as opposed to online advertising and neighbourhood organising, led it into its biggest mistake of the presidential race, which Messina believes was the TV ad that misleadingly implied that Jeep was transferring its factories to China. The ad backfired, forcing Romney onto the defensive for the final two weeks before election day in the crucial swing state of Ohio, where Jeep is based.
One of the best pieces of advice Messina received when he began forming a team almost two years ago came from the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt. Don't hire political people, Schmidt cautioned.
Messina followed the tip, putting into one of the most positions – that of chief technology officer – the heavily tattooed, pierced and bearded Harper Reed, whose previous experience included working for a crowdsourced T-shirt maker. "Harper thought we were crazy aliens from Mars, and we thought the same about him; we spent a year learning each other's language," Messina said.
Under Reed's direction, Obama for America steered political campaigning away from the traditional focus on a single medium – television – and towards a new concept: that voters should be followed wherever they went online. Rather than put most resources into a single website portal – MyBarackObama.com as in 2008 – dedicated sub-teams were created specifically to develop a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, the thinking being that the campaign had to reflect the fact that modern voters receive their political news through multiple outlets including social media.
Obama for America also targeted voters to an unparalleled degree, using digital technology pulled together in a new toolset called Dashboard. Messina told Politico that under a programme they dubbed "Operation Vote", the team split the US electorate up into eight key groups including young voters, women, African Americans and Latinos, and honed the messaging specifically to each.
In the end, though, Messina said it all came down to the most traditional idea of all – communicating with individual voters on their doorsteps. The campaign built a network of local offices across the key swing statesunmatched by any previous election, which allowed them to develop close relations with voters at neighbourhood level.
Messina said that was the main takeaway of 2012 for the political campaigner. "In the future, campaigns are evolving in many ways into the campaigns of the past, door knocking is going to be more important than ever."
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