The executive campaign committee for Team Obama — David Plouffe, Jim Messina and David Axelrod — joined by campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter, held a conference call with reporters on Thursday afternoon to review the results from Tuesday night’s presidential election, and a couple of interesting nuggets came out of the half-hour call.
One is that of all the vast statistics coming from the exit poll data, the piece that Plouffe and Axelrod were most interested in touting was the fact that President Obama received votes from 56 percent of the public who identified themselves as moderate. Plouffe said that was particularly important, since pre-election polls and the exit poll showed Mitt Romney winning that battle, which many analysts thought was the key to the whole election.
“What’s clear is his position on taxes, on education, on some of these social issues that really spoke to these voters,” Plouffe said, referring to Obama winning crucial swing-counties known for being stocked with moderate voters, like Hillsborough County (where the president did even better here than in 2008).
The other salient item was Plouffe’s push back of the notion that their brilliant model used to get out the vote under challenging circumstances could easily be duplicated by any Democrat in 2016.
“You can’t just transfer this,” he said insistently. “People aren’t going to spend hours away from their families and their jobs contributing financially when it’s hard for them to do it, unless they believe in the candidate.”
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2012.
