is that how many you had? a million. we had somewhere around that. but the clinton campaign is building on what we had. kevin, in hindsight now, what missed opportunities did your ground game have for mitt romney? one of the things you remember in 2012, we were going against the legendary dan pfeiffer and his turnout team. voters have to be motivated to not only vote for their candidate, but they have to go and find ten friends or ten relatives to also come out and vote for them. so, while we did have a lot of voters who said, yes, i m for mitt romney, we didn t have the same type of intensity that we needed that that same voter would go knock on five doors or make ten phone calls and bring another group of voters to the polls. dan knows you particularly have states like florida and ohio that are deadlocked that is the difference between winning and losing. but, dan, can you just give me the nuts and bolts of this.
to tilt it back in her column the clinton campaign is targeting african-americans. vote like we never voted before. i feel good about seeing all of the young people here who remind me of another period during the early days of the civil rights movement. they know their lessons. they know their stories. they re going to turn out and vote. reporter: further west on i-4 there are traditionally redder areas like sanford in seminole county. donald trump and his surrogates have made more than a dozen appearances along the i-4 corridor since the convention. they re hoping to surpass mitt romney s already solid win here in 2012. by riling up a base frustrated with washington. this is a movement, this is an incredible movement of the people of the united states who want integrity restored to the government. reporter: our next stop is orlando. and it s the biggest city on the
obama. what did you do differently than campaigns before you and what worked so effectively? what was most important about what obama did is our campaign married science. we had sophisticated data analysis allowed us to know where our voters where and where they lived and what issues they cared about. you knew somebody s address and you knew for the first time whether they were democrat or republican and who they had voted for and how often they had voted. what did you know about them? you had known if they voted in democratic primaries in the past and where they lived and other data you had about them and whether they would support mitt romney or john mccain and set a score for each voter and if they reached a certain score, you would target them. all the data saying the world is great, but it won t help you unless you have the volunteer army to do it. our campaign spent two years in 2012 recruiting volunteers. to do the same thing too, get people to go call them and go door to
trump pretty much all the time. so the been very hard for any candidates to articulate but not ben carson. until carson started to emerge. but you really haven t seen much from anybody in the last three months except for trump. but carson s an interesting there s two theories on donald trump. theory a, media creation essentially in a kind of like compulsive affect of cable news, they kept covering him and he rose to prominence. theory b, organic support for what the man stands for among the republican base. the ben carson thing because he was able to burst through without the kind of obsessive coverage would seem to be a point in favor of the theory b, which is what i take it your position is. yeah. and i wouldn t even say the theory b because is about his positions as much as personality. one thing that s clear right now is that the carson voters and trump voters, they re distinct in the republican party. there s not the huge overlap that everybody presumed there
i was just out west and found a group of young republicans who were truly irritated and frustrated about what s going on in washington. so i think there is a 30 to 40-year-old element out there, male and female, that sees what s happening and would like to recapture the party, open the tent, invite women, hispanics and others in, but they don t know how to get around this leadership we have in washington right now. all of it. whether it be the ultra right leadership represented by the tea party or the leadership that seems to have abandoned the republican party represented by people like john boehner. you re right. it s a suicidal party right now. all right. colonel lawrence wilkerson, thank you very much. thanks for having me. joining me now to discuss the state of the race and the fallout from tonight s gop debate announcement republican strategist katie packer who was deputy campaign manager for mitt romney s 2012 presidential campaign and msnbc contributor sam seder, host of