For those who lament the Obama administration's lack of marketing of legislation and policy, and poor communication strategy bungling their successes, it should come as a welcome change to hear that OFA, formerly Organizing for Action and now Organizing for America, has put the full force of its efforts into doing just that with Obamacare. They have pretty much abandonded the idea of getting any positive press from national media (save for perhaps the LA Times which has published some good accounts) and instead are targeting small, local markets. The strategy is to shift the focus from Washington DC and national media and change the conversation in local markets where people get their news from.
In the past month, Obama and his Cabinet have hit nine of the top 10 cities with the highest concentration of the uninsured, while senior administration officials have held almost daily reporter conference calls in nearly a dozen states to challenge Republican governors who refuse to expand Medicaid.
Obama’s political arm, Organizing for Action, is taking a similar approach, holding protests — some attended by only a dozen or so people — that win coverage on the local pages of the nation’s small-town newspapers.
The effort mirrors how Obama’s presidential campaigns operated. Pay special attention to local press because that’s where far more people who Obama wants to target get their news.
The centerpiece of the local strategy is the White House’s campaign against Republican governors or legislatures in 24 states that have declined to accept federal money to open up Medicaid to 5.4 million people. With a faulty website, the White House has lost much of the high ground to push back on Obamacare attacks over the past two months, but the one exception is the GOP resistance to expand Medicaid access, said a senior administration official.
On the local media calls, administration officials quantify the impact state by state. In Nebraska, for example, the White House targeted Republican Gov. Dave Heineman, saying his refusal to expand Medicaid leaves 48,000 residents without access to affordable coverage.
On conference calls they stress the difference between scoring short term political points vs. helping tens of thousands of uninsured or underinsured people over the long term..
On a call with grass-roots volunteers to celebrate their work during the government shutdown last month, OFA Executive Director Jon Carson pointed to a string of positive local media mentions as evidence of the organization’s success — as well as a robust digital engagement strategy that ultimately convinced more than 1 million people to tweet at elected officials
“We were absolutely dominating and driving local media and, as we’ve talked about so many times, that is what members of Congress pay attention to,” Carson said. “They see what’s going on in social media, and when they see that local evening news, when they see that local paper, when they see that we can hold them accountable, they understood that this had to end now.”
The effect of the media's obsession with the botched website rollout and mostly non-existent health insurance scares for a tiny sliver of the population cannot be overstated. The advantage Democrats had over Republicans in generic polling after the government shutdown debacle going into 2014 elections has
evaporated as a result. Hopefully this push will shift things back in the right direction.