“Thank you for joining us this morning. I know it’s been a long night for you.”
The senior Romney adviser nodded, “That’s for sure.”
“So, what exactly happened last night.”
“Well, the Obama people had their firewall in place, but it turned out to be a Maginot Line.” (This was a slip. Of course, in staff sessions, they always referred to the Obama firewall strategy as the Maginot Line, but to say it in public was something of a gaffe, since carrying the analogy forward cast the Republicans as the Nazis.) “We always thought we could outflank them.”
The night had begun well enough, from the standpoint of Obama’s supporters. The early returns from Virginia looked good, and much more important, so did Ohio. North Carolina went for Romney, which was disappointing, but not unexpected. With Obama’s leads in Wisconsin and Iowa holding, and Nevada comfortably in the Obama column, things were looking excellent. Colorado took a while to fall in place, but it too went for Obama. The firewall held, and then some. There were just those three states that were still too close to call.
“We always figured that the election would be decided in the last 48 hours. We knew we’d have a lot of money to spend on a last minute ad blitz.” (Was that another slip? What was it with all these Nazi words. Really, I need to get home and get some sleep, thinks the Romney guy.)
“But you’ve been running ads for months now. Why did you think that ads in the last few days would suddenly make a difference?”
“Well, you see, we felt that the maximum effectiveness of a late ad campaign would be to sway two and a half or three percent of the voters. So if we could stay within five or six percentage points in the final weekend, we could pull it out. But there were two conditions for us to achieve that level.”
“Two conditions? What were those?”
“Well, it had to be a state that didn’t have early voting. If you run ads and half your audience has already voted, those ads aren’t going to be as effective as they should be. And, most important, it had to be a state where we hadn’t run a lot of ads before. After a while, people just tune them out.”
“And you hadn’t been running ads in Michigan and Pennsylvania?”
“No, we hadn’t. We pulled our ads in those states in September. And everybody thought that we were giving up on those states, but we weren’t. We knew that if we pulled our ads, the Obama campaign would allocate their resources to their firewall states, and we could come back into those states on the last weekend, and clean up.”
“And clean up you certainly did. We called both Michigan and Pennsylvania for Romney this morning at about 4 am. And what about Florida?”
“Well, we always knew Florida was going to be close. We just hoped that we’d end up on top.”
“Any special strategy there?”
“Not really. Governor Scott did some good work, though.”
