Every four years political scientists predict the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, looking at such things as the current president’s job approval rating and the state of the country’s economy. The predictions suggest that the campaigns themselves don’t matter, that the results are predetermined by conditions outside the control of the presidential campaigns. These predictive models are often correct; in a symposium published in October 2008, seven of the ten participating political scientists predicted that Senator Obama would be elected president on November 4, 2008.¹ However, predictions ignore the actual campaign events that impact the outcome of the election. While the state of the economy and President Bush’s approval rating were clearly factors in the 2008 elections, there were many other factors that affected the outcome. As the preceding chapters have shown, the 2008 elections were as much influenced by the campaigns themselves as by the political and economic environment in which they occurred.

Election Rules Matter

The Democratic and Republican parties have one fundamental difference in the way they select their respective party’s presidential nominee. Democrats require that delegates to the national nominating convention be allocated proportionally within each state. For example, if a candidate gets 50 percent of the primary or caucus vote, the candidate gets 50 percent of the delegates to the convention from that state, and other candidates contesting the primary or caucus get delegates equal to their percentage of the vote, as long as they get at least 15 percent of the vote. For Republicans, there is no such proportional rule but rather, in many states, a winner-take-all system. That is, a candidate who gets a plurality of the vote in a primary or caucus gets all of the delegates to the convention from that state. The difference in the rules means that Republican candidates seeking the presidential nomination find it easier to amass convention delegates than Democratic candidates do. We can see how this played out in the 2008 nomination process. On Super Tuesday, February 5, twenty-two states had Democratic primaries or caucuses, and twenty-one states had Republican primaries or caucuses. Going into Super Tuesday Senator John McCain had ninety-three delegates, and former Governor Mitt Romney had fifty-nine delegates. For the Demo crats, Senator Obama had sixty-three delegates, and Senator Clinton had forty-eight delegates. With so many delegates at stake on February 5, either of the front-running candidates in both parties had the opportunity to come out of February 5 still in contention for the party’s nomination.

However, because of the difference in each party’s nomination process, the results were very different for the Republicans and the Democrats. As a result of the Republican Party’s winner-take-all rules in a number of key states, Senator McCain emerged on February 5 with 704 delegates, over half the 1,191 needed for the nomination. Former governor Romney had only 247 delegates, despite having won 31 percent of the vote in Florida (compared to Senator McCain’s 36 percent), 34 percent in Arizona (compared to Senator McCain’s 47 percent), 34 percent in California (compared to Senator McCain’s 42 percent), and 29 percent in Missouri (compared to Senator McCain’s 33 percent).²

On the Democratic side, with no winner-take-all provisions, the results after February 5 were quite different. Senator Clinton emerged from the February 5 primaries and caucuses with 814 delegates, only slightly more than Senator Obama’s 766 delegates. If the states that were winner-take-all for Republicans on February 5 were also winner-take-all for Democrats, Senator Clinton would have had almost twice as many delegates, 1,026, as Senator Obama, 554. As a result of the election rules, Senator McCain was able to wrap up the Republican nomination on March 4, while Senators Obama and Clinton continued to fight for the nomination all the way through the primary season. Election rules also played a role in the brouhaha over the delegates to the Democratic convention from Michigan and Florida, as David Dulio explains in Chapter 12.

Election rules also matter beyond the presidential nomination process. As Chris Sautter illustrates in Chapter 10, election rules and election laws affect how elections are administered and how votes are counted. Despite the passage of the Help America Vote Act, enacted in the wake of the 2000 presidential election and the subsequent Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, there are still widespread discrepancies among the states in registration procedures, voting mechanisms, and other aspects of election administration. Each of these affects election outcomes. For example, four months after the November 2008 elections, the outcome of the Minnesota Senate election still had not been resolved.

Campaign Strategy Matters

In Chapter 2 David Winston discusses the role of election strategy. Certainly the 2008 presidential election illustrates the importance of strategy, and how strategy can affect the outcome of the election. It was widely assumed at the start of the 2008 presidential election that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. She was a former first lady, had played a prominent role both nationally and internationally during her husband’s administration, and had been reelected to the Senate from New York for a second term with 67 percent of the vote in 2006. Both she and her husband were prolific fund-raisers who seemed perfectly able to raise the prodigious amounts of money that were projected to be necessary to compete for the nomination. Senator Clinton’s main competitors for the nomination were expected to be Senator Barack Obama, who, while having received some buzz as a result of his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, was a first-term senator who had never been tested in a major competitive race, and former senator John Edwards, who no longer had a political platform and had been the vice presidential nominee on the Democrats’ losing ticket in 2004.

Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol epitomized the conventional wisdom surrounding Senator Clinton’s candidacy when he stated in December 2006, that “if [Hillary Rodham Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then . . . Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.”³ While Kristol’s prediction that Senator Obama would not win a single primary may have been more extreme than some others, his assumption that Senator Clinton would be the nominee was in line with the opinions of other political commentators as the 2008 nomination period began.

The Clinton and Obama teams made two fundamental strategic decisions that clearly impacted the outcome of the Democratic nomination. First, the Clinton campaign, like many political commentators, assumed that Senator Clinton was the front-runner and that the nomination would be decided on Super Tuesday, February 5, because of the front-loading of the nomination process. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, planned for a long, drawn out competition, and put staff in states to organize far in advance of the state primaries and caucuses. As a result, when the nomination was not wrapped up on February 5, the Obama campaign was much better positioned, both organizationally and financially, for the long nomination contest that followed. The second strategic decision that impacted the outcome of the nomination was the Obama campaign’s decision to organize in caucus states, even in states that were traditional Republican states, while the Clinton campaign essentially ignored all but the Iowa caucus, focusing instead on large primary states that would likely be battleground states in the general election.

These two strategic decisions combined played a tremendous role in the outcome of the Democratic nomination, particularly because of the party’s nominating rules, discussed above. For example, New Jersey, with 107 delegates at stake, and Idaho, with just eighteen, held nomination contests on February 5. Senator Clinton easily won New Jersey’s primary with 54 percent of the vote, yet, because of the proportional rules of the Democratic Party, she received fifty-nine pledged delegates, while Barack Obama received forty-eight delegates. Barack Obama received 79 percent of the vote in Idaho’s caucus and picked up fifteen of the state’s eighteen delegates. Senator Clinton received a net of eleven delegates in New Jersey, while Senator Obama received a net of twelve delegates in Idaho. While Senator McCain easily carried Idaho in the general election, confirming the state’s Republican voting pattern, the Republican-leaning states still sent delegates to the Democratic nominating convention, and Senator Obama’s strategy of campaigning in those states for the nomination enabled him to slowly build a delegate lead over Senator Clinton.

Following the February 5 primaries and caucuses Senator Clinton lost twelve straight nomination contests. The fallacy of her assumption that winning large states would enable her to win the nomination was acutely evident in the first elections she won after February 5. Senator Clinton won the Ohio primary over Barack Obama by ten percentage points—54 percent to 44 percent—yet received only nine more delegates than he did. In Texas, which Senator Clinton also won, but only by three percentage points, Senators Clinton and Obama each received ninety-two delegates. Senator Clinton’s focus on large states may indeed have built the groundwork for success in those states in the general election, but her strategy of ignoring small and Republican-leaning states during the nomination process, coupled with the proportional rules of the Democratic Party, cost her the opportunity to contest the general election.

Senator Clinton’s fund-raising strategy also exacerbated her problems, as we saw in Chapter 4. Because Senator Clinton assumed the nomination would be decided on February 5, she focused on raising the bulk of her campaign funds during 2007, and asked donors to max-out their donations to her in the maximum allowed amount of $2300. As we saw in Chapter 4, the conventional wisdom going into the 2008 nomination period was that candidates would need to raise $100 million to be competitive in the primaries and caucuses. Both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama raised about $100 million in 2007. However, because Senator Clinton concentrated on maxing out her donors while Senator Obama raised his money in smaller donations, when the nomination process extended past February 5, Senator Obama could go back to his donors and ask them to continue to contribute to his campaign, while Senator Clinton had to cultivate new donors, and even loan money to her campaign to keep it afloat during the extended nomination process.

The McCain campaign’s strategy for winning the nomination was to “lock up the big money early, round up the best organizers, secure the shiniest endorsements, and win the label ‘inevitable.’”⁴ As shown in Chapters 4-5, when McCain’s fund-raising faltered in the first two quarters of 2007, his nomination strategy changed. According to Chuck Todd in How Barak Obama Won, “McCain essentially filed for Chapter 11 and did a massive reorganization. He drastically reduced his staff to a small band of campaign operatives determined to win the nomination one early primary state at a time. There was one great illustrative moment in the summer of 2007 of this new campaign, postreorganization, when McCain carried his own bags in an airport while traveling alone to a campaign event in New Hampshire.”⁵ The McCain campaign strategy paid off; he won the New Hampshire primary, and two months later sewed up the Republican nomination.

While McCain’s initial approach to winning the Republican nomination was unsuccessful, his opponents’ inability to catch fire with Republican primary voters enabled McCain to win the nomination without much of a fight. Of course, the Republican Party rules for amassing delegates, discussed above, also helped. Winning the nomination in early March, three months before the Democratic nomination was concluded, should have been a strategic advantage to the McCain campaign. However, some political observers argue that the McCain campaign, for whatever reason, did not take advantage of its early head start on the general election. Talking about the March to June period, Chuck Todd observes “this should have been the time for the McCain campaign to ratchet up his national organization, hone his general election message, begin the VP vetting process, and raise the boatload of money he would need to keep up with the financial juggernaut that was and still is Barack Obama. As it turns out, McCain apparently did very little of those things.”⁶

While political observers question the McCain campaign’s strategy during the spring of 2008 after he became the preemptive nominee of the Republican Party, they also question his general election campaign strategy, or even whether he had a campaign strategy. In commenting on McCain’s decision to “suspend” his campaign in early October and return to Washington to participate in congressional and administration discussions of how to solve the economic crisis, Evan Thomas writes that “to most commentators, the bizarre rush back to Washington seemed gimmicky—one more tactical gambit in a campaign that seemed to lack any coherent or consistent strategy.”⁷ Chuck Todd also argues that the McCain campaign was without a general election strategy. “Whether it was the pick of Sarah Palin as running mate, the decision to suspend the campaign, or the introduction of ‘Joe the Plumber,’ [described in Chapter 7 of this book] the McCain campaign used a series of tactics with no overall strategy.”⁸

Strategically, as mentioned above, McCain’s campaign managers wanted to position him as the front-runner for the nomination, and then, in the general election, run “a traditional political campaign, going negative and sticking to the sound bites.”⁹ However, McCain had always been somewhat of a maverick, hanging out with reporters on his Straight Talk Express bus during his 2000 presidential campaign, jousting with the Republican Party on campaign finance reform, and reaching across the aisle to try to forge a compromise on immigration reform. Some question how comfortable McCain was with the strategic decision to run a traditional campaign in 2008. For example, when he first visited his campaign headquarters in Virginia in the early months of 2007 (before the reorganization), his comment was “it’s awfully big.”¹⁰ Some observers argue that McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as a running mate was a reaction to how his campaign positioned him. “Muzzled and ordered to behave like a regular politician (run negative ads, avoid reporters, just read from the damn teleprompter) McCain had rebelled in his way by picking a fellow subversive.”¹¹ We may need to wait until McCain himself reflects on his campaign to know if these speculations are true. However, a strategic decision to run the campaign in a manner uncomfortable to the candidate clearly could have strategic implications for the success of the campaign.

Campaign Messages Matter

Having a campaign message and having a message that resonates with voters is important to the success of a campaign. As Glen Bolger points out in Chapter 3, campaigns never know when voters are paying attention to the campaign, so when they do, the message they hear should be the one the campaign wants them to hear. The best way to ensure that is to have a focused message. When Obama announced his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, in 2007, and when he spoke at Grant Park in Chicago after he won the election on November 5, his message was remarkably similar. The message of the Obama campaign was change. What change meant may have been tweaked somewhat during the campaign, but anyone who was paying even minimal attention to the 2008 presidential election understood that the overriding message of the Obama campaign was change.

Senator Clinton also had a clearly defined message for most of her campaign: experience. The Clinton campaign illustrates the importance of both having a message and having a message that connects with voters. The Clinton campaign had a message, but it did not resonate with voters. In a year when the incumbent president had approval ratings in the low thirties, at best, when many people in the United States had grown tired and frustrated with the war in Iraq, and when every day posed new economic problems, voters didn’t want someone with experience; they wanted a change from the existing political situation. In 2004 a message of experience would probably have been successful, but it wasn’t in 2008.

Senator McCain struggled throughout his campaign, particularly the general election campaign, to find a message at all. He too tried to emphasize his experience in public office through his long Senate career, and prior to that his service to the United States in the military, but he too was unsuccessful in connecting his message to the American people. The McCain campaign was complicated by his support over the years of much, though not all, of the Bush administration policies. His message of experience, in contrast to Barack Obama’s inexperience on the national stage, as a first-term senator, was undercut when he named Sarah Palin, the first-term governor of Alaska, as his vice presidential nominee. It became much harder to criticize Senator Obama’s lack of experience when the Republican Party’s nominee to serve a “heartbeat away from the president” had arguably even less experience than Senator Obama. David Axelrod, the chief strategist for the Obama campaign, described the choice of Palin as “message suicide . . . the McCain campaign had spent the month of August trying to persuade voters to choose experience over celebrity,¹² then in one fell swoop they throw experience out the window.”¹³

Campaign Organization Matters

Despite the advances in technology in the past decades, there is still no substitute for a strong grassroots organization. Both Glen Bolger in Chapter 3 and Paul Herrnson in Chapter 8 point out that voter contact is crucial in a close race. No one recognized this better than Barack Obama in 2008. Because of his background as a community organizer, Obama wanted to run a “ground up rather than a top down” campaign.¹⁴ The Obama campaign had thirty-seven field offices in Iowa prior to the Iowa caucus, more than any other presidential campaign.¹⁵ Evan Thomas describes the strength of the Obama campaign organization as follows:

The power of the Obama organization could be measured: doubling the turnout at the Iowa caucuses, raising twice as much money as any other candidate in history, organizing volunteers by the millions . . . At the end of August (2008), as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever , the Red Cross responded. We’ve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross web site in less than 15 minutes.¹⁶

In contrast, the McCain campaign’s organization was not as strong. “In many states, the McCain campaign was out-organized as well as outspent by Obama.”¹⁷ In Chapter 12, David Dulio points out that the strength of the Obama organization continued into the general election. Looking at Michigan, Dulio notes that by mid-June the Obama campaign had field offices set up around the state, and the number of offices increased threefold between mid-June and mid-July. Dulio also finds that the Obama field operation in Michigan towered over the McCain operation, something that was true in other states as well.

The Obama campaign is credited with being in the forefront of new media in the 2008 election. However, new media was not just used to showcase the campaign’s expertise in cutting-edge technology; rather, new media was key to the campaign’s organization. “We never do something just because it’s cool . . . we’re always nerdily getting something out of it,” said Sam Graham-Felsen, the Obama campaign’s blogger.¹⁸ For example, the “Obama ’08 iPhone application . . . revealed a sophisticated data-mining operation. Tap the top button, ‘call friends,’ and the software would take a peek at your phone book and rearrange it in the order that the campaign was targeting states, so that friends who had, say, Colorado or Virginia area codes would appear at the top. With another tap, the Obama supporter could report back essential data for a voter canvass (‘left message,’ ‘not interested,’ ‘already voted,’ etc.). It all went into a giant database for Election Day.”¹⁹

As both Leonard Steinhorn and Alan Rosenblatt point out in their chapters in this book, the Obama campaign invited supporters to be a part of the campaign organization. Be it through online social networks, texting, emails, or other new communication techniques, the Obama campaign encouraged its supporters to adapt the campaign to each supporter’s interests, and use those interests and connections to spread the campaign’s message and organization. Campaign organization was no longer one-dimensional or two-dimensional, but, as Alan Rosenblatt points out, three-dimensional.

Campaign Management Matters

In the last three presidential elections we have seen clear examples of the importance of campaign management. In the 2000 and 2004 elections the Bush campaign was managed by a staff that had been with Governor George Bush in Texas, ran his presidential campaign in 2000, and ran his reelection campaign in 2004. The discipline this core group brought to the campaign led to a well-run and well-managed campaign that developed a strategy and message early in the election, and stuck with it throughout the election. In 2004 Senator Kerry changed his campaign team three times, and the changes resulted in a faltering campaign strategy and message.²⁰

In 2008 it was the Democratic candidate who ran the more disciplined campaign. The Obama campaign had the same senior staff from beginning to end, and maintained a strategy and message discipline that was admired by both Republican and Democratic political operatives alike. Following the November 2008 election, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, once viewed as a brilliant political strategist for regaining Republican control of the House of Representatives after forty years of Democratic control, said the following of the Obama campaign: “I have to say, as someone who cares how you organize campaigns . . . I will be spending a lot of time over the next year studying the [Barack] Obama campaign because I think it’s a watershed campaign . . . I think it’s a marvelous case study in 21st century use of technology and the oldest traits of strategy and discipline combined together in a very powerful forum.”²¹

Neither Senator Clinton in the primary nor Senator McCain in the primary or general election came close to the consistent campaign management and organization of the Obama campaign. The Clinton campaign seemed beset by personnel clashes almost from the start, with Mark Penn and, to some extent, former president Bill Clinton advocating one strategy and Harold Ickes and Howard Wolfson, among other advisers, arguing a different strategy.²² Penn was described as “more or less in constant conflict with Hillary’s other advisors.”²³ One top adviser described the early primary campaign as “a terribly unpleasant place to work. You had seven people on a morning conference call, all of whom had tried to get someone else on the call fired, or knew someone on the call tried to get them fired. It was not a recipe for cohesive team building.” ²⁴ After months of internal disagreements Senator Clinton fired her longtime adviser and 2008 campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, shortly after the February 5 primary, and later Mark Penn resigned from the campaign. Joshua Green, writing about the internal workings of the Clinton campaign in the September 2008 edition of The Atlantic Monthly (and documenting his account with memos from the Clinton campaign), describes Clinton’s campaign as “undone by a clash of personalities more toxic than anyone imagined. E-mails and memos . . . reveal the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that produced an epic meltdown.”²⁵

The McCain campaign didn’t fare much better from a management standpoint. As shown in Chapter 4, John McCain, like the Obama and Clinton campaigns, assumed he would have to raise about $100 million in 2007 to be competitive in the 2008 nomination process. When the campaign raised only $12 million in the first quarter of 2007, the fund-raising operation was revamped, but the second quarter figures were just as disappointing, reporting only $11 million raised in the second quarter of 2007. The situation led to backbiting among the campaign’s top advisers. “The crystal palace [so named because of its size and its location in Crystal City, Virginia], in the winter of 2007, turned into a snake pit. The Weaver-Nelson [John Weaver, a long-time McCain aide, and Terry Nelson, political director of the Bush Cheney campaign in 2004, and early campaign manager for the 2008 McCain campaign] camp blamed Davis’s [Rick Davis, who had managed the 2000 McCain campaign] people in fund-raising for not drumming up enough money; the Davis camp blamed the Nelson-Weaver management for spending money they didn’t have.”²⁶ The warring among the staff continued into the primaries, just as it did on the Clinton campaign. “[McCain] hated to fire anyone from his staff. Not unlike Senator Clinton, he resisted stepping in to make personnel decisions, even when they were overdue.”²⁷

In July 2007 the McCain campaign drastically cut its staff and moved the skeletal staff it still had to concentrate on the New Hampshire primary. McCain won the nomination, but some argued that he then squandered the time between March and June, when the Democratic nominee finally became known. In July 2008 McCain again shook up his campaign organization, and while some argue that Steven Schmitt, the new campaign manager, brought message discipline to the campaign, others questioned the strategy and message that Schmitt promoted.

Conclusion

As the contributors to this book argue, campaigns matter. While the economic crisis in 2008, the unpopular war in Iraq, and President George Bush’s low approval numbers clearly contributed to a political environment favorable to any Democratic candidate, the strategic decisions and messages of the Obama campaign undoubtedly contributed to his election as the forty-fourth president of the United States. The early start of the 2008 presidential election, at least two years before the actual election, enabled Obama to slowly improve as a candidate. This was particularly true of his debating skills. In reviewing a tape of his performance in a debate during the summer of 2007, Obama commented, “It’s worse than I thought.”²⁸ However, in an interview with a Newsweek reporter in May 2008, Obama commented that “in each successive debate [in 2007] my performance had improved to the point where in the final four or five debates before Iowa, I felt that I was performing on a par with Hillary.”²⁹ Given the long nomination process that was to follow, and the many more debates with Senator Clinton, it is no wonder that by the time of the general election debates in October, Obama was prepared. The long, drawn out nomination process enabled Obama to hone his skills as a campaigner and his campaign to refine its operation. The length of the campaign mattered, and in the end probably helped Obama.

Obama’s “tortoise and hare strategy” during the nomination process allowed him to slowly rack up delegates until he had a lead that Senator Clinton could not overcome.³⁰ His fund-raising strategy of appealing to small, medium, and large donors ensured him a steady stream of funds throughout the primary and general elections, enabling him to forgo public funding in the general election, and vastly outspend Senator McCain and the Republican Party. His use of new media, blended with his fund-raising and organizational strategies, allowed him to successfully contest traditionally Republican states such as Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, and Indiana. The Obama campaign will be studied and analyzed by political operatives for many years because what the Obama campaign did in 2008 mattered, and led to the election of the first African American president of the United States.

Notes

1 James E. Campbell, ed., “Symposium: Forecasting the 2008 National Elections,” PS: Political Science & Politics 41, no. 4 (October 2008): 681.

2 In the other two winner-take-all states on February 5, Connecticut and New York, McCain received a majority of the vote: 52 percent of the vote in Connecticut and 51 percent of the vote in New York.

3 William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, December 17, 2006, as reported in the Washington Post, December 28, 2008, B2.

4 Evan Thomas, A Long Time Coming (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 33.

5 Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, How Barack Obama Won (New York: Vintage, 2009), 6.

6 Todd and Gawiser, How Barack Obama Won, 16.

7 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 137.

8 Todd and Gawiser, How Barack Obama Won, 18.

9 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 95.

10 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 33.

11 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 124.

12 The McCain campaign had run an ad mocking the large crowds that had greeted Obama during his European trip in July, likening Obama to celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears. For more on the “celebrity” ad, see Chapter 7 of this volume.

13 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 168.

14 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 13.

15 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 12.

16 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 109.

17 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 172.

18 Sam Graham-Felsen, speaking to a Newsweek reporter. Thomas, Long Time Coming , 107.

19 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 107.

20 For a more detailed account of the Bush and Kerry campaign organizations, see David A. Dulio and Candice J. Nelson, Vital Signs: Perspectives on the Health of American Campaigning (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2005), 156-160.

21 Newt Gingrich, “First Person Singular,” Washington Post Magazine, January 18, 2009, 20.

22 For a more complete account of the Clinton personnel and strategy conflicts, see Joshua Green, “The Front-Runner’s Fall,” Atlantic Monthly, September 2008, www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200809/hillary-clinton-campaign.

23 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 64.

24 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 22.

25 Green, “Front-Runner’s Fall.”

26 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 35.

27 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 38.

28 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 14.

29 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 208.

30 Thomas, Long Time Coming, 66.