During the presidential campaign, it was big news when Oprah Winfrey stumped for Barack Obama.
But campaign manager David Plouffe revealed Monday she wasn’t there to garner votes, she was there to amass e-mail addresses for the campaign’s massive contact list.
“The narrative at the moment in the media was this could be a big mistake because Oprah’s support may not transfer to votes,” Plouffe recalled at a book signing hosted by Politics and Prose. “Of course not, we knew that, we didn’t think anybody was going to vote for us because Oprah was in Iowa. What we did know was that we could send Oprah to Iowa, have 22,000 people attend events, which is an enormous number in the state of Iowa, and of course with the data these days, we knew who they were that night.”
