http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16115_Page2.htmlCHICAGO — Nearly two years ago, Barack Obama muscled his way into the top tier of presidential contenders by breaking fundraising records.
When the 2008 campaign books are closed, the Democratic president-elect will shatter another record by coming close to, or capturing, the title of the first billion-dollar candidate.
That’s roughly how much the Obama finance team will have raised for his campaign, convention, transition and Jan. 20 Inauguration events.
The vast majority of the donations were generated during the unusually long primary and general election campaigns.
A financial disclosure report scheduled to be released Thursday is expected to show that Obama raised more than $100 million in the final month of the campaign, campaign aides said.
That will bring the grand total for his campaign to more than $750 million — more than the combined sum raised by President George W. Bush and his Democratic rival, John F. Kerry, in the record-setting 2004 campaign and nearly as much as the total raised by all the presidential contenders then.
The Obama team also helped raise more than $50 million for the Democratic convention’s host committee in Denver and more than $100 million for the Democratic National Committee. He’s still raising money for his transition and Inauguration. Four years ago, Bush raised $40 million for his Inauguration.When a veteran Republican fundraiser was asked if the GOP ever thought a Democratic contender could raise that much money, the answer was a simple and emphatic “No!”
The success of the Obama machine is sure to be studied by academics and copied by future candidates. But it’s unclear if it’s a model that will work for everyone.
Obama’s achievements stem largely from two choices: He cast a wider net to attract donors during the crowded Democratic primaries and caucuses, and he was willing to hand over some control to both small and large donors.
Traditionally, large donors are asked to write checks and attend ballroom or cocktail events organized by the campaign. In Obama’s camp, about 70,000 supporters opened their own fundraising pages on the campaign’s website.
Those fundraisers — both big and small — and other backers were given the freedom to organize their own events, operate their own blogs and engage in other activities that gave them a deeper sense of being part of the campaign.
The upshot was that giving money was no longer a passive event but an active one, often prompted by events on the campaign trail, according to Joe Rospars, the campaign‘s director of new media.
Blizzards of donations hit the campaign as supporters vented when things turned nasty, cheered when things went well and raced to the rescue when their candidate seemed in peril.
Obama raised more money after he lost to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the New Hampshire primary than he did when he won the Iowa caucuses. The campaign’s most lucrative 24-hour period — a $10 million haul — came during the Republican National Convention, between the back-to-back speeches of GOP presidential nominee John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin. The cash came in without any prompts from the Obama campaign.
Each stage or event in the campaign built on each other. As a consequence, the freshman senator from Illinois who began his presidential quest in January 2007 with a combined 20,000 names on his online and direct mail lists ended it with 10 million names, according to campaign officials.
Of those, nearly 4 million became donors. Most gave more than once, creating a steady stream of income that the Obama campaign could depend on throughout the campaign.
Of course, no one knew how well things would go when the campaign first launched.
Julianna Smoot, a former fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was tapped to become the campaign’s finance director. In an early organizing meeting, campaign officials set a goal of raising $75 million for the nomination race.
“That’s ridiculous” was Smoot‘s first thought, she recalled in an interview. At the time, Obama’s biggest single fundraising take was an event for his Senate race that netted a meager $30,000.
Smoot began working the phones to recruit experienced fundraisers who hadn’t already been scooped up by the Clinton campaign or other big-name Democratic contenders. Among her early scores was Alan Solomont, a Boston philanthropist and health care investor.
She also dipped into her donor list for the DSCC in search of new presidential-level players. Matthew Barzun, a Kentucky businessman, and Christine Forester, a San Diego businesswoman, were among the new recruits.
“I absolutely loathe fundraising,” said Forester, who did modest fundraising for Democrats Kerry and Howard Dean in 2004. When a friend asked if she’d get involved this cycle in a much bigger way, she recalled saying, “The only thing fresh around is Barack Obama.”
About two weeks later, she got a call from the campaign urging her to join, she said in an interview. Today, Forester is listed on the Obama website as a fundraiser who generated more than $500,000 in campaign cash. Barzun also went on to raise more than $500,000 for the campaign.
Obama’s old friends from Harvard Law School and a rising generation of African-American investment bankers also jumped on board. When Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and Indiana’s Evan Bayh took a pass on the presidential race, Smoot quickly swooped in on their donors.
She also sought to exploit the curiosity being generated by Obama’s rising star in the party and his promising historic candidacy. Unlike in the Clinton campaign, Smoot sent word that all donors were welcome, even if they’d committed to other contenders.
That helped draw a big crowd to an early campaign event in California at the home of film producer David Geffen that netted $1 million and tons of free publicity.
Meanwhile, Rospars began building the online community.
“There was this big wave of potential because of the draft Obama movement,” Rospars recalled in an interview in the now-Spartanly staffed and furnished Chicago campaign headquarters. “We were trying to catch up with them.”
On the first day the official website was unveiled, 1,000 grass-roots groups sprung up in Iowa, New Hampshire, Idaho, Virginia and other states.
Rospars also rewrote the playbook for online organizing.
In 2004, supporters of candidates organized local gatherings through the MeetUp website. This cycle, the Obama campaign tracked and announced those grass-roots events on its own site.
Supporters’ blogs and You Tube postings were also brought inside the campaign through the website, where the online team could help consolidate the energy and contacts generated by them.
Rospars’ team, meanwhile, was constantly testing different versions of its call-to-action pages, including requests for donations and voter registration. Did more people respond if it included video or text? Should the sign-up prompts be on the right column or in the center? Should they have a “learn more” button or direct sign-up?
Once they discovered the most effective version, they replaced all the others with it. Among their lessons: Video can sometimes be a distraction rather than a help.
Smoot studied the 2004 presidential campaign fundraising trends, most notably former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards’ catapult to the top tier of the race after beating expectations by raising $7.4 million in the first quarter of 2003.
Smoot set a goal for Obama of $12 million in the first quarter of 2007. The sum, she concluded, would be a good down payment on their annual goal and, like it was for Edwards in 2003, a signal that Obama was a serious candidate.
When the reports were released, Obama stunned his competitors by raising more than twice that, about $26 million, and matching Clinton’s primary contributions. Of that total, nearly $7 million came from small, online donations.
To nurture that support, Rospars coordinated summer training seminars for online activists and organized a national voter canvassing day in July. For that event, the campaign shipped boxes of DVDs, sign-up sheets and other materials to supporters in all 50 states.
“We wanted them to know that we were serious about them being part of the campaign,” he said, and that “they didn’t have to wait for the carnival to come through town to get on board.”
At the suggestion of the campaign’s more experienced donors, Smoot also organized two training programs for her newer bundlers, the surrogate fundraisers who tap into their own circle of friends and family to generate donations to the campaign.
Her finance teams were divided by regions and began holding regular phone conferences to announce their fundraising figures — a tactic that piled some pressure onto the regions to keep pace.
Solomont was a leader of the New England steering committee. From February 2007 to October 2008, the committee held 167 fundraising events. The group, which ultimately included more than 700 members, raised $30 million from its region.
But Solomont seems most proud of another statistic: Members of the New England finance team also hit the campaign trail, knocking on doors and making phone calls in 28 states.
“It was more engaging, more participatory, more inclusive,” said Solomont, who was a leader on Kerry’s fundraising team four years ago. “It was about more than the money.”
