I am Alex White, a progressive campaign strategist, writer, social marketer and policy activist.
In 2012, I spent over two and a half months working full-time as an Organizing Fellow with the Obama for America campaign. Based in Boston Massachusetts, the campaign’s focus was winning the next-door battleground state of New Hampshire. Working full-time on the campaign gave me an incredible opportunity to experience first-hand how the famed Obama [...]
Read any number of journalist or blogger commentaries over the last several years and you will have seen the infiltration of marketing terms like “brand”, “positioning”, public relations, image management and more. Obama is the most recognisable example of this “political brand” phenomenon, but we’ve seen it elsewhere: New Labour under Tony Blair (Gordon Brown [...]
I had the great fortune to work for the Obama for America campaign for two and a half months in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I believe there are many elements of his campaign that unions could learn from. Of course, the organising model that Obama adopted was based on Marshall Ganz and Saul Alinsky. Nevertheless, [...]
My article about the Obama campaign was published on the ABC’s The Drum site. I have reproduced it below. If you believed the recent spate of articles focusing on Barack Obama’s high-tech campaign, you could almost believe that his unprecedented electoral success was down to his ‘Big Data’ team and cutting edge web developers. Certainly, [...]
More than two years of campaigning boils down into Get Out The Vote, the final week of the election — specifically the final Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. The Obama campaign has put together field organisation that is unparalleled. This morning, I helped get off a team of over 60 volunteers from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who are [...]