[Vision2020] How badly did Mitt Romney lose the technology fight?

[Art Deco]

 How badly did Mitt Romney lose the technology fight?

Posted by Rachel
Weiner<http://www.washingtonpost.com/2011/03/08/ABDMyKP_page.html>on
November 9, 2012 at 9:39
am

Time Magazine has a deep
dive<http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/>into
the work of President Obama’s data team, something Slate’s Sasha
Issenberg has been
following<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab.html>for
months. The upshot: Democrats used data to refine their fundraising,
persuasion and turnout operations in ways Republicans have failed to do.

On technological innovations, Romney’s campaign was sometimes just a little
behind, as with a Square
app<http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/obama-and-romney-campaigns-adopt-square-for-funding/>
for
collecting donations by mobile phone. At other points they were months
behind, as with launching an automatic “quick donate” system. The initial
Romney Web site for that feature initially used copy lifted
wholesale<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/09/10/romney-website-appears-to-copy-obamas-text/>
from
Obama’s page.

Obama’s campaign engaged
supporters<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/the-life-of-julia-shows-obama-camps-web-savvy/2012/05/03/gIQAIy1YzT_blog.html>
with
eye-catching, interesting infographics. While Republicans pushed back on
those campaigns on social media, they were still reacting to someone else’s
initiative.

“You can’t really look at anything the Romney campaign did that was new
and different, that was innovative,” Nick Judd, managing editor at
TechPresident told the Post.

And as Slate has reported, Obama’s team engaged in massive
experimentation<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/10/obama_s_secret_weapon_democrats_have_a_massive_advantage_in_targeting_and.html>with
data and voter contacts, leading to a huge success in targeting and
turning out voters.

Aides told<http://washingtonexaminer.com/stunned-romney-supporters-struggle-to-explain-defeat/article/2512861#.UJ0KzeOe_Fw>the
Washington Examiner that Project ORCA, touted
by the Romney campaign<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/01/project-orca-mitt-romney_n_2052861.html?utm_hp_ref=elections-2012>
as
an untouchable, state-of-the-art smartphone-based poll monitoring program,
gave misleading results on Election Day and then crashed.

So what happened? Here’s what we found.

Romney didn’t begin<http://techpresident.com/news/23106/romneys-digital-campaign-second-place-finish>
staffing
up his digital campaign until after the primaries. Digital director Zac
Moffatt acknowledged<http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/07/how-romneys-digital-director-zac-moffatt-got-silicon-valley-brightest-minds-to-work-for-the-campaign/>in
September that the Obama team had years to build and improve on its
own
tools; Romney’s web team didn’t really get going until after the primaries.

“Comparing us to the Obama campaign straight up, it’s really apples to
hamburgers,” Moffatt told the Post. “They had four years, we had five
months.” He points to huge online fundraising, Web site hits, and voter
contacts as evidence that the divide is overblown. “For us to be almost
at parity” with Obama, he said, is “a testament to how we successful we
are.”

Since losing in 2004, in part thanks to Republicans’
success<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/04/AR2007070401423.html>at
microtargeting, Democrats have been building their data. The GOP
hasn’t.

“The Democrats are sitting on a warehouse of information that is
exponentially larger and are able to derive more insights because of the
time frame at which they’ve been collecting, analyzing and massaging that
information,” said Cyrus Krohn, former digital director at the Republican
National Committee.

The GOP, he says, keeps starting over: “When a new chairman is brought in
to run the party, in most cases they throw out of all of the technology and
the people that were building technology.”

Democrats also benefited from a web culture that goes back to Howard
Dean’s 2004
campaign <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81834.html>.

“Digital is viewed and treated within the progressive community as a tool
by which we achieve empowerment against entrenched forces with deeper
pockets,” said Matt Ortega, a former DNC staffer and Democratic digital
consultant. “Howard Dean inspired this notion with his pioneering Internet
operation that focused on ‘people-power’ as a concept. After his failed
presidential bid, it was a philosophy that permeated the DNC while he was
chair.”

Much of Dean’s web staff came out of technology, not politics. Republicans,
without those ties, tend to rely more on political staffers who got into
technology rather than technological experts who decided to get into
politics. The right has tried and
failed<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/liberal-conservative-activists-meet-and-admire--a-bit--in-minneapolis/2011/06/18/AGrjfgaH_story.html?hpid=z4>
to
replicate the success of the left-wing online fundraising behemoth ActBlue.

 ”One problem facing the party is consultants who are okay or decent, but
not the honest-to-God best in the business being given big, important
contracts a little too routinely,” said one Republican strategist. ”I think
the Republican effort did a pretty decent job of matching Obama’s campaign
in 2008, but the problem is that’s not what they were competing against.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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