Jim Messina, the campaign manager who helped steer President Barack Obama to victory last November, said Wednesday that without college students on the trail, his candidate may not have won the White House.
The former deputy chief of staff Messina said in Funger Hall that the door-knocking, voter-registering generation of volunteers was instrumental to the campaign that made history not just because of votes but also how it rallied supporters.
He touted the reelection team for overhauling traditional campaigns: putting an end to mass marketing and instead personalizing voter pitches with information from the internet. The campaign utilized that “big data” to predict voter behavior, which Messina heralded as a game changer for future national campaigns.
“Big data is here,” Messina said. “I could tell exactly who was undecided. I could tell you exactly who of your friends on Facebook was undecided.
Smartphone applications and Obama’s appearance on Reddit, which crashed the website, were proposed and engineered by campaign staffers under the age of 25, he said.
Messina is now one of the chief lobbyists for Obama’s legislative agenda and serves as national director of the political action committee Organizing for Action. He touted the transition of Obama’s campaign staff and ideas from on the ground to on the Hill, and called it an unprecedented effort.
“We are turning the campaign into a C-4 nonprofit organization to advocate directly for the president’s legislative agenda,” Messina said in an interview with The Hatchet, before being interrupted by a call from the White House. “No one has ever done this before, and we all want to stay involved and continue to see the change we worked so hard for.”
Before the 200-student crowd, Messina also shared anecdotes from some of the most tense moments in the White House, including the morning after healthcare reform passed Congress.“I stood up and told the president it would take six months [for health-care to get a vote] and 14 months later I walked onto the basketball court and said, ‘Mr. President, after 78 years of trying we have the votes to pass universal health-care,’” Messina said.
