Obama’s last campaign: Inside the White House plan to sell Obamacare

By Ezra Klein and Sarah Kliff, WashPost, Updated: July 17, 2013

Deep inside the White House, in a bare room that the chief of staff uses for meetings, David Simas is still thinking about turnout.

Turnout has been Simas’s job for years now. As director of public-opinion research and polling for President Obama’s reelection campaign, Simas was at the center of the effort to find and persuade young and minority voters to go to the polls like they did in 2008.

Many doubted the Obama campaign’s contention that it could recapture the 2008 electorate. Simas’s data, however, convinced the campaign that was possible. And when the smoke cleared, young voters and minorities did show up to the polls, and Obama won.

Now Simas, a sad-eyed Massachusetts native with a facility for PowerPoints, needs to reach those same groups again — with a much harder ask. This time, he doesn’t just need them to vote. He needs them to buy health insurance, and, in some cases, spend hundreds of dollars a month for it. If they don’t, the new insurance marketplaces — the absolute core of Obamacare — will be filled with older, sicker people, and premiums will skyrocket. And if that happens, the law will fail.

(More here.)