Yes They Can (They Think)

❧ For the past year, the Obama team has been focused on just one thing: its zealous pursuit of base voters—particularly young people, once their most ecstatic supporters, now perhaps dangerously apathetic. Here's an inside glimpse into a plan (and a mindset) that come Tuesday will be proven either genius or delusional.

October 31, 2012
By Reid Cherlin

President Obama appears under the hot lights, trotting up the steps to the stage and flashing that blinding grin. Hello Virginiaaaa!, he is shouting. He leans low over the podium for emphasis, stiff-arming the air next to him. We don't quit! Together we're fighting our way back! The marching band thrums; the multiracial crowd goes bonkers. Blow-dried correspondents from the local news station go Live at Five, placards waving giddily behind them. This is the reelection, the way you always see it, rally upon rally upon rally, in swing state upon swing state.

Then there's the back and forth of tweets and press releases, the boom and bust of the cable-news controversy du jour, the gauze-filtered appearance with a morning show anchor to come out in favor of gay marriage or the DREAM Act or to explain away a gaffe. The swooning and fulminating that follows. The three debates, the micro-dramas onstage, the gnashing and wailing after. This is what has preoccupied reporters and pundits and surrogates all year. It's what decides the race, supposedly.

Except none of that is the real campaign. That is the in-flight entertainment.

The real campaign is startlingly simple: it is the Obama team's fanatical pursuit, behind the scenes, diagram by diagram, plan by plan, of what politicos call the "base vote." These are the Democratic leaners who will be deciding not between Obama and Romney, but between voting for Obama and not voting at all. Starting in the spring, the Obama campaign launched elaborate efforts to reach the different communities of such base-voters in every key state: African-Americans, Latinos, women, gay men and women—each is now getting bombarded with tailor-made messaging and organizing. A barbershop and beauty shop program for black voters, for example; visibility at Pride events for LGBT voters; Spanish-language radio ads for Latinos. As a strategy, it's a rabbit-from-the hat kind of move, trying to pull votes out of nowhere. During the long, lean months of summer, when anxious Dems were fretting about a reelect stuck in low gear, during the sudden reversal in the early fall when all of us were focusing on Romney's aimlessness and Obama's seeming invulnerability, and now again with everything tied up, this, just this, is what consumes the strategists in Chicago. Just the base vote. (Even a catastrophic super-storm hasn't altered their plans: "As we continue our daily updates on the state of the ground game, we want to turn attention to the African American vote," read a memo from the campaign, as much of the Eastern Seaboard remained without power)...

Read on at GQ ➝