Back when Rudy Giuliani was a presidential candidate, he used to knock his Senate rivals, in both parties, for never having “run” anything. People like John McCain and Barack Obama, Giuliani said, had been lawmakers, not executives.
Now, as it turns out, the public didn’t much care, and voters in both parties for the first time in U.S. history nominated sitting senators to face off in the general election.
But in some ways, Giuliani’s criticism underestimated something: Obama is effectively the CEO of a massive national enterprise, with a huge budget and enormous staff.
Behind the headlines about the unprecedented success of Democrat Barack Obama’s fund-raising machine lies a more prosaic truth — his campaign will need every penny of its $300 million goal to bankroll an unprecedented 50-state general election campaign with a massive army on the ground.
His campaign already has by far the largest full-time paid staff in presidential campaign history, and unlike Republican rival John McCain’s, continues to grow by the day.
National polls show the race remains close between Obama and McCain, but the Obama campaign is paying closer attention to polls in more than a dozen states that show Obama has a chance of winning in November. The states were won four years ago by President Bush, in many cases by huge margins. In theory, at least, Obama’s effort could nudge states such as Virginia, Indiana, and North Dakota into the Democratic column and produce a surprising Electoral College boost. […]
Obama, meanwhile, is already running uncontested television advertising in seven of the historically Republican states and is sending in large paid staffs.
“Between the Obama staff and the Democratic Party staff there will be several thousand” paid operatives on the ground deployed across the country, deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand told the Boston Globe. “I don’t want to get too specific; it gives away strategy.”
The “50-state strategy” includes paid staff in literally every state, but it’s not surprising that the Obama campaign will emphasize key battlegrounds, meaning a campaign with “large-scale operations in 22 states, medium operations in many others, and small staffs in only a handful of states.”
Obama and the Democratic Party have about 200 paid staffers working in Florida and more on the way, 90 in Michigan with plans to expand to 200 by August, at least 200 each eventually in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and 50 in Missouri with plans to expand to 150, according to published reports and interviews with Obama campaign officials. Hildebrand said state organizations should be at full strength by the end of August.
Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that in May the campaign had a payroll of about 900, not counting nearly 500 part-time workers who were paid stipends. As of May 31, the Obama campaign staff was well over twice the size of the Bush reelection campaign staff in 2004 and nearly three times the size of McCain’s current staff, and has expanded significantly since.
Through the end of May, the Obama campaign had spent $35.7 million on salaries and benefits, triple the $11.9 million spent by the McCain campaign, according to tabulations by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group.
“The climate has made millions of Americans who haven’t been involved in a political campaign ever in their lifetimes very active,” Hildebrand said. “We estimate that 70 percent of our grass-roots volunteers haven’t worked in a campaign before…. We’re somewhere just shy of 2 million volunteers, and we think we can potentially triple that on Election Day.”
There’s never been anything like this. Time will tell if translates into a victory, but Obama has clearly put together an unprecedented operation.
Veteran Democratic operative John Sasso, who backed Hillary Clinton’s campaign, explained the benefits of Obama’s model: “People tend to believe information delivered by people they know and who live in their neighborhood more than an ad they see on television or what some third party from out of their state is telling them. It can really change the electoral map.”
Stay tuned.