If you recall the historic 2008 Presidential election, Senator Barrack Obama burst onto the scene with the simple goal of seeing how they would do in the first three contests: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. They would use the outcome of these three races to determine the feasibility of a further Presidential race.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign had an air of inevitability and the Obama campaign had no qualms about acknowledging the size of the fight ahead. What made the 2008 race special was that the Obama campaign put together a brand new style of winning strategy that focused less on winning states and more on adding up delegates from each state. For example, winning a particular state by 15,000 votes may be meaningless if the top two vote getters split the delegates from the state evenly, even though the press will announce the winner and give the front-runner in that state momentum. This is what happened in New Hampshire. Many states are not winner take all. Obama understood that his primary campaign came down to a matter of delegate math.
His campaigns approach to the General Election was the same. Working toward a magic number of 270 Electoral College votes, they calculated states known to go Democratic and combined with ground teams in several swing states, but also chose a few traditionally Republican strongholds with the goal of turning them blue. They started this strategy by banking on states that went Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 and then registering new voters in swing states and battlegrounds. For example, much was made of the contentious 2000 Bush v. Gore. Florida became the state that led to the final Bush victory. However, what the Obama campaign realized is the value of small states. Al Gore lost Tennessee, Arkansas, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. These are states that went for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. If Al Gore had won just one of these states the presidency would have been his.
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