The document (which you can read here) starts, as all campaigns start and all campaign plans should start, with the numbers. We made a graph that breaks down how the consultants figure Nunn gets to the magical 50-percent-plus-one number — that is, a majority of the votes in the race.
The memo doesn’t mention it, but there were about 7.2 million people over the age of 18 in Georgia in 2010. Of that number, about three-quarters are actually registered to vote, though as the memo notes, that figure varies. The campaign figures that 5.3 million will be registered by November.
This is the first assumption made in the document, and a key one. It’s critical to know how many people are registered to vote in the state with some certainty, since all of the other numbers flow from that.
For example: The memo assumes 52 percent turnout in November. Applying the 52 percent to that 5.3 million number gives you a total voter pool of about 2.75 million. To win, a candidate in a two-person race needs 1.38 million votes. So the Nunn camp set her target at 1.4 million, to provide a cushion. That’s more than most Democrats not named Obama have gotten in the state; usually, the memo says, Democrats get about 1.2 million votes “with strong campaigns.”
Next, the memo outlines where those 1.4 million votes will come from. One key argument is that the campaign hopes to “discourag[e] the kind of Republican surge we saw in 2010,” to keep the vote total at about 2.7 million.
The large slices are groups that went with Democrat Roy Barnes’ gubernatorial bid in 2010: 412,000 white Democrats and 700,000 black Democrats. The former figure was 23 percent of the demographic’s vote; Nunn’s team figures they can hit 40 percent, adding another 160,000 votes or so. Add in another 150,000 black votes from a surge in interest (not to mention a competitive top of the ticket with Jason Carter running for governor) and another 50,000 votes from Latinos, Asians, and “young urban whites,” and they’re over the 1.4 million mark.
Literally everything else in the document is about making this plan come true. It’s pages and pages of identifying constituency groups and figuring out who good surrogates will be and so on — but it all flows from the campaign’s expectation of who’s actually going to come to the polls.
via How to read the leaked Michelle Nunn campaign plan – The Washington Post.
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