News & Events

Tuesday, March 31, 2009
by: Bob Gilbert

How law professor Mark Alexander and his students accurately calculated in 2006 that Sen. Barack Obama could win the presidency.

Nearly 50 years ago, historian Theodore H. White wrote The Making of the President, 1960, a chronicle of the nuts-and-bolts tactics behind John F. Kennedy's improbably victorious campaign for president.

If White were alive today and writing about Barack Obama's seemingly out-of-the-blue win in 2008, there's little doubt he'd include the story of a 2006 memorandum that was developed with the help of Seton Hall University law students in Professor Mark Alexander's election law class.

Its prescient heading read, “It Can Be Done.”

The text was not the kind of soaring rhetoric Obama had already become famous for. Rather, it was a data-laden, four-and-one-half page playbook that laid out emerging voter trends, state political leanings and the likelihood of crossover votes in swing states. It catalogued the number of African-American voters in key states, along with voting patterns, registration numbers and demographics, and discussed the importance of institutions like the African-American church. Alexander's memo showed how Obama could win a presidential election.

Alexander recalls that he was “agnostic” at the time about whether he thought Obama should run. But he did offer the then-rising political star this bit of advice over the phone: “You may believe my memo, or you may not believe my memo. But don't run unless you really believe it can happen.”

Alexander doesn't necessarily think the memo convinced Obama to run. “The modest side of me says not,” he says. “But I am confident that I gave him information that would resonate with him -- a presentation that was unique and helpful.”

In February 2007, Alexander took a leave of absence from Seton Hall to become the candidate's policy director. He was put in charge of developing position papers on everything from foreign affairs to the economy. He and his team prepared daily briefing papers and networked with professors, politicians, think-tank experts and others to develop specific policy positions.

“My responsibility was to create the book, basically, of what Barack Obama would do as president,” says Alexander, who later became the New Jersey state director for the Obama campaign. Last fall, he was named to the president-elect's transition team, where he assessed the challenges facing the Federal Election Commission.
But Alexander's work began with the “It Can Be Done” memo, which emerged from a class discussion about the electability of an African-American man in contemporary America.

Former student Eileen Fitzgerald, J.D. '07 recalls what happened vividly.

“It was in the fall of '06, right during the mid-term congressional elections,” she says, “and the discussion inevitably jumped ahead two years to the presidential races.” The class was studying the Supreme Court case that resolved the 2000 presidential election of George W. Bush.

“We were talking about potential tickets, and I said, `Wouldn't it be amazing if it were [Rudy] Giuliani versus Obama?'” Fitzgerald's comment led to the pivotal question: Is America ready for an African-American president?

Alexander and Fitzgerald recall that the discussion that followed  -- which spilled over after class to a stairway in One Newark Center -- was less about race relations and historical turning points than about nitty-gritty details.

“After all,” Fitzgerald says, “we had grown up after the whole civil-rights struggle of the 1960s.” In other words, the topic wasn't about whether, but how. Or, as Fitzgerald recalls saying: “America doesn't have to be ready, all he [Obama] has to do is win the Electoral College majority of 270 votes.”

Alexander agrees. “It was a very practical question.

It wasn't about any black man. It wasn't, for example, about me. And as we talked about it, I sort of sketched out the basic idea. And I thought, jeez, it could happen.”
Fitzgerald, who was Alexander's research assistant at the time, was assigned to dig for facts, and to discover how electable Obama might be as a Democrat, analyzing whether his political positions would have broad appeal.

Kyle Rosenkrans, J.D. '07, another research assistant, crunched the numbers. He recalls they spent days investigating everything from voter lists to tallies from the 2006 election and census reports.

Alexander provided the framework for his research. “He had an idea in his head how the states would go,” Rosenkrans says. “Particularly, we were looking at the untapped potential of unregistered black voters in traditionally Republican states, places like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia,” as well as swing states like Florida. Rosenkrans remembers going through Florida's voter lists county by county. “Step by step, I started to see the numbers racking up … [to] the point where they totaled more than he needed to get the job done,” says Rosenkrans, who is now a legal services attorney in Newark. The realization slowly dawned that Obama could win by a big margin.

How accurate were those big numbers? Rosenkrans said that on November 5, 2008, he looked again at his version of the 2-year-old draft memo “to compare how the states went with how we predicted it.” Forecast: 360 to 404 electoral votes; actual votes: 365. “A lot of things had to come together for that to happen,” Rosenkrans adds, “but it nevertheless happened.”

“The idea was indeed borne out by the data,” Alexander says of the project, which took less than a week of researching, writing and editing to complete.

How Alexander was able to deliver the memo directly to the candidate goes back to a deep friendship between his sister, Elizabeth, and the Obamas. (Elizabeth, who now teaches at Yale, was chosen to compose and read a poem at the inauguration.)

Elizabeth had been a professor of English at the University of Chicago, where Barack Obama taught law. “He reminded her a lot of me,” Alexander says. “She said we had way too much in common, and that it would make sense that we meet.” Alexander first met Obama in person at Elizabeth Alexander's wedding in 1997 and still had Obama's cellphone number handy nine years later.

Alexander, who writes and teaches constitutional law and politics, comes by his interest naturally. His father, Clifford Alexander, was secretary of the Army under President Carter and a civil-rights adviser.

The younger Alexander's resume is replete with in-the-trenches political activity. He served as issues director for Sen. Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential drive. He worked for Sen. Ted Kennedy in his 1988 re-election campaign and for Sen. Howard
Metzenbaum's Washington Senate staff. He was general counsel for Newark Mayor Cory Booker's 2006 campaign and served a two-year term as an elected official in his hometown of Washington, D.C.

Alexander's academic credentials are as deep as his political ones, having been a Fulbright Scholar in Spain and a visiting scholar at Yale Law School. Being a Seton Hall professor has helped sustain his eclectic career, one that also includes writing articles about First Amendment rights and criminal law.

“The really cool thing about being a professor here is that I get paid to think,” he says with a laugh. “I am always thinking about things I care about, things that matter to me.” He constantly asks his students, “What's going on in the world in politics?”
“I want them to make the connections between what we study and the real world,” he says. “It's not abstract.”

The discussion his class had back in 2006 about how Obama might win the presidency was far from abstract. “The overall idea was involving and empowering people at all levels,” he notes. “Not only the experts, but starting from the grass roots up, block by block.

“There's no doubt that we have arrived at a historic moment, an intersection in the African-American journey. More than 69 million people did turn out to vote for Obama.”

Borrowing a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, he adds, “Ultimately, American people are people who want to believe in their better angels. We asked whether our appeal to hope would triumph. In that sense, I think this was a battle for the very soul of America. And hope won.”

Bob Gilbert is a writer based in Connecticut. 

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