JOE SCARBOROUGH: We’re obviously going to be looking at strategy. Republicans are going to be talking about what Mitt Romney did wrong. Let’s talk about not only what the President did right, but what David Plouffe and the rest of that campaign did right. You know, again, the targeting, the focused approach. You know, I’ve always talked about what Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove did in 2004. Boy, what happened last night was nothing short of remarkable because the campaign events, they weren’t that exciting. You look at the faces in the crowd, people weren’t as moved by the President. But you know what? Emotion, at the end, didn’t matter. The hard numbers did.
MARK HALPERIN: The President said in his speech last night, “I have the best campaign staff ever.” And that, maybe, we take as hyperbolic. It may turn out to be factually true. They did a bunch of stuff which they teased out but some stuff they hid. My colleague Michael Scherer has a piece coming out on TIME.com and TIME magazine, inside some of the targeting they did that they didn’t show. They didn’t want the Republicans to know. I had one Republican source who signed up for a lot of their stuff to see what they were doing and their targeting of getting these voters out, in the nine states that mattered, not wasting time in the other states, reaching out to their base, they may be, we may decide, the best campaign of all time.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Steve Schmidt, you agree?
STEVE SCHMIDT: Absolutely. I think that the job that David Plouffe and David Axelrod did is — they go down in the history and in the books the greatest campaign consultant duo that ever lived.
MARK HALPERIN: And Jim Messina, the campaign manager, I’d add in there.
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MARK HALPERIN: Two things the President’s campaign assured us would be true were true. One was that they had the mechanics to get out their vote in the battleground states and the other was the undecideds would not break decisively towards Mitt Romney.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: So we talk all the time about what these campaigns were telling us all along. Everything the President’s campaign staff was telling us was true. And an awful lot of what Mitt Romney’s campaign staff was telling us, was, in effect, whistling past the graveyard, hoping against hope that they would get a wave.
MARK HALPERIN: The President’s campaign was confident throughout, the most confident campaign I’ve ever covered. They said the President has small but durable leads and when we look now at the results versus the final polls, people thought, “Well, maybe they’re skewing too much towards the President.,” because of the two factors I said, their turnout I said and the undecideds going partially for the president. They over-performed in most of these battleground states.
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MICHAEL STEELE: Do you think, if they had, the Romney team, had approached the idea of not necessarily Pennsylvania per say, but a number of other states to stretch out the Obama team and their effort a little bit more than they had, to sort of, to tap into and get them off of how they were micro-targeting those districts, that that would have made a difference in places like a Florida or a Virginia that they wound up losing instead of winning?
MARK HALPERIN: This is the first presidential campaign that any of us have ever seen where resources weren’t an issue for either side. And I think if Governor Romney would have gone earlier into a state like Pennsylvania, the President’s team would have been as competent and efficient at analyzing how do we get to 50 percent + 1 in Pennsylvania with the kind of targeting. For instance, in Virginia, they targeted women voters very effectively, talking about women’s reproductive freedom and other issues. I think they would have done the same thing in the Philadelphia suburbs.
