Obama campaign manager: “engaged” voters are key (audio)

Jim Messina spoke to Iowa Democrats at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and I blogged about it and posted the audio. Here’s a key snippet: 

• “The national polls don’t matter to us.  We don’t look at them in Chicago.  We focus on the 18 states we have to have to win this election.”
• “We care more about the enthusiasm gap in the campaign in the daily polling than we do the head-to-head.”

This morning, when Messina called into the Radio Iowa newsroom to do an interview, I brought up those two points.

On ignoring national polls:

“We look at state-to-state how we build a campaign and get to 50.1 and what you see in the public polls is the president has a lead in Iowa. But again, we believe this will be a close election and it’s going to take every single vote we can get,” Messina said.

On measuring enthusiasm and ignoring head-to-head, Obama versus Romney match-up:

“What’s really true is that the head-to-head match up tells you very little about what’s going on. What’s more important is how engaged your voters are and whether they’re engaged in the campaign.”

I asked Messina if there’s any Electoral College Scenario that doesn’t include Iowa and the dynamic of having the presidential race as the only statewide contest on the November ballot.  AUDIO of the entire Q&A with Messina, runs 5 minutes.