Background

Throughout the first half of 2007 pundits speculated when Former President Clinton would join the fray and campaign for his wife. The Hillary for President team had carefully told her story without him on stage and waited as long as they could before calling him off the bench.

As the race tightened the decision was made to Bring Back Bill. The Granite State had provided a huge boost to the first Clinton Presidential campaign and it seemed natural that New Hampshire be the first site for joint campaign appearances.

The Need

The Campaign needed TV network images of overflow crowds at these events ---two rock stars on the same stage, with the audience nostalgic about the 1990’s and excited about how she could build on the lessons from these good times. But this was not enough in New Hampshire. The stakes were huge and the campaign needed to quantify support among those in attendance at these staged events AND gauge the opinions of those New Hampshire voters who declined to attend.

Our Solution

We wanted to build crowds and count supporters. We used an interactive automated call to voters in the Manchester area to announce the Clintons’ joint appearance on his first major campaign swing. Senator Clinton personally invited New Hampshire voters to join them—to reinforce the notion that he had joined the campaign on her terms and would not be overshadowing her. Mrs. Clinton asked for a response (via telephone keypad) so that the advance team could plan for the expected crowd, and where necessary, enlist the field staff in finding more bodies for the risers behind the stage. Senator Clinton also asked whether she could count on the support of the voter on the call. After each call, we provided the results to field staff for use in their ongoing appeals to uncommitted voters and follow ups to supporters about ways to get involved in the campaign. All told, we made 3 rounds of calls for this Bill’s Coming Out tour (Manchester, Keene and Nashua.

Results

The crowds were huge and local and national news coverage of these events was glowing---the campaign had” threaded the needle” by reintroducing former President Clinton without upstaging Mrs. Clinton.

Our keypad responses to Senator Clinton’s questions of New Hampshire voters yielded helpful results – more than 8 700 people with valuable information on whether they were committed to Senator Clinton. The Field staff followed up with these self-identified Hillary supporters in expanding the network of activists in New Hampshire.