Political Capital in the 21st Century: Presidential Grassroots Lobbying Organizations in the Obama Administration

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This article advances the study of presidential leadership by analyzing the circumstances under which Organizing for America/Organizing for Action (OFA) mobilized core supporters of President Barack Obama for policy purposes using digital tools and other resources developed for the president’s election campaign. I argue that the policy mobilization efforts of such presidential grassroots lobbying organizations (PGLOs) are constrained by electoral opportunity costs and innate factors which lead PGLOs to be most effective at maintaining the support of presidential copartisans in Congress. These constraints are used to develop several hypotheses about the timing and frequency of OFA grassroots lobbying mobilization efforts, which are tested using a dataset of 245 OFA mobilization requests to supporters sent via e-mail from January 2009 through January 2017. The resulting analysis finds support for several of these hypotheses, as well as the proposition that PGLO grassroots lobbying efforts carry electoral costs. Furthermore, it supports the claim that OFA leadership were most willing to pay the costs of lobbying mobilization when President Obama’s copartisans set the agenda in Congress under unified government and OFA mobilization of Democratic “super-activists” could have most easily kept presidential priorities under consideration. Rather than judging them on their ability to mobilize the mass public and coerce opposition legislators to side with the President on key votes, I argue that these findings support a reevaluation of OFA and similar groups' effectiveness on the basis of their ability to unify and motivate the president's co-partisan allies in Congress.