More about Mitt Romney's failed GOTV effort - Romney fleeced by consultants

[Phokus]

http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/09/campaign-sources-the-romney-campaign-was-a-consultant-con-job/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...whale-romney-volunteers-say-orca-was-debacle/


Wasn't Mitt Romney supposed to be some management genius? Wasn't that supposed to translate into Mitt being a capable executive of our government?

This really is a good example of the difference between Democrats and Republicans. Obama's infrastructure was built by people who are really passionate about public service. Their ground game was ruthlessly efficient (i heard their iphone/android app really got volunteers to critical voters in the quickest/most efficient way possible). Romney built his campaign from the leeches known as consultants who sucked every dollar they could out of Romney's campaign while providing negative value, probably the finest example of the darker parts of capitalism.

This is a former CEO?

Also, this highlights the digital divide between savvy liberals and conservatives who are still stuck in the 80's/90's when it comes to technology.

Edit: Here's Obama's App in comparison:

http://www.vademocrats.org/sites/va...oteBuilder Virginia Quick Start Guide (1).pdf

http://thevoicesofamerica.org/uploads/Votebuilder_Basics.pdf

 

[techs]

Just how many times do I have to tell people Romney is not and has never been the "businessman" the propaganda made him out to be.

He is the made and constructed candidate of the Mormon Church who really saved the Olympics and put Romney's business together and found the best people to work there.

Romney is an empty suit, a nice haircut, a clothes catalog model who while has above average intelligence is not an impressive intellect by any means.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

ars has a good write-up:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/inside-team-romneys-whale-of-an-it-meltdown/

i don't know why i'm still shocked by the incompetency by those that seek power over others.

 

[mshan]

Mitt Romney comes across as an inherently intelligent man, he studied hard and got a good education at Harvard, but he is really out of touch with Main Street and reality.

I think he is great at tearing things apart and destroying things, particularly when he has advantage as bully with tremendous financial resources and going against a financially distressed and very weak opponent.

As for the ability to build up something constructively, I really doubt it.


Look at his campaign:

- he was timid when he should have been bold (as Republican establishment types said, when the Bain attacks were occurring, he should have boldly stepped forward and defined himself with specifics about exactly and precisely what he would do)

- then when his polling numbers went into free fall, twice (first time after London Olympics gaffes and Todd Akin, then the 47% video), instead of cutting his losses and graciously accepting defeat so Republican Party as a whole can at least come through without as much damage, he throws everyone under the bus, wildly and recklessly doubles down with 1) his pick of Ryan as VP, and 2) his breathtaking lying during first debate when he supposedly rotated to middle, and wildly swings for the fences just to save his own skin.


As dangerous as he might have been domestically, Putin, the Chinese, the Iranians, heck maybe even the North Koreans, could easily lure him into some sort of trap with just a bit of misdirection.

He would have been really, really scary as commander in chief.

 

[mshan]

"At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign's headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack."

Thought did occur to me when I was reading about this earlier today that hackers working for Obama campaign might have sabotaged them. Did a quick google search for Was Project Orca Hacked and saw some comments in one article speculating about how Obama used the NSA, etc. to sabotage them.

My guess is that given how incompetent the Romney campaign apparatus has always been, some high school kid with rudimentary hacking skills could have probably taken then down!

As for how it's done in the major leagues, read about what Time Magazine has to say about the Obama campaign's apparatus:

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/0...ants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/ :thumbsup:

 

[techs]

What was the name of the lieutenant in Band of Brothers who would start a conversation and when the guy looked up he would be gone? That is who Romney reminded me of.

 

[Phokus]

This is the app obama used:

http://www.vademocrats.org/sites/va...oteBuilder Virginia Quick Start Guide (1).pdf

http://thevoicesofamerica.org/uploads/Votebuilder_Basics.pdf

 

[Jhhnn]

The best thing about Repubs is watching them steal from each other. This, and Karl Rove's take from his Superpac are great examples of it.

Given how they treat each other, there's little doubt how they'll treat the rest of us...

 

[jagec]

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/0...ants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/ :thumbsup:

Wow. That's almost frightening, in a way, but this line:

assumptions were rarely left in place without numbers to back them up

should always be the case, for everything, everywhere.

 

[RabidMongoose]

The fact that Romney's technology effort was a failure isn't a surprise. This is the party that doesn't believe in science and apparently has its own special kind of math. Technology to them is for fools.

 

[mshan]

Amazing that Mr. CEO business man didn't come up with this idea:

"He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/0...crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2BmFxBmGL

After reading that article, basically Obama campaign apparatus Facebook'd the Romney campaign apparatus.

 

[Moonbeam]

I'm going to start blaming Romney for all the faults of his campaign just as soon as I get through blaming Obama for the economy. But if you lie down with dogs, you will get fleas.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

So, in the end, the guy who was mocking for being a "community organizer" outmanaged the "successful business executive".

You'd think they'd have learned something after 2008.

 

[mshan]

Yeah, I think Romney needs to go back and try and run Obama's lemonade stand before he runs for president again!

(don't know if he can do this, at least without insulting every customer who comes up to stand and wants to buy some lemonade)

 

[RabidMongoose]

Yeah, I think Romney needs to go back and try and run Obama's lemonade stand before he runs for president again!

(don't know if he can do this, at least without insulting every customer who comes up to stand and wants to buy some lemonade)

Lemon. Wet. Good.

 

[Jhhnn]

The only thing that the failure of Orca did to the Romney campaign is that it kept them in the dark a little longer on election night.

Which is no surprise, considering that the whole conservative echo chamber had been in denial all along, anyway. Our resident Righties are great examples of that, tossing up every outlier poll & semi-plausible delusion as truth.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign ran a great ground game & adjusted to reality when appropriate. They didn't specialize in telling the Boss what he wanted to hear, at all

 

[child of wonder]

Romney built his campaign from the leeches known as consultants

What is that supposed to mean? All consultants are leeches?

 

[DominionSeraph]

Amazing that Mr. CEO business man didn't come up with this idea:

A fact-based methodology coincides nicely with the Liberal fact-based worldview. It does not so nicely fit with conservatard ignorance and superstition. While "lying for Jesus" is morally acceptable by the Right in mostly nebulous form, a conservatard would likely have difficulty holding to both the epistemology behind highly refined analysis and their sloppy beliefs. The contrast between the two is extreme.

 

[Veramocor]

A lot of articles mention that the ORCA program sent out a 60 page pdf manual. Has it leaked to the general public yet?

 

[mshan]

"One Republican source with close ties to the operation said the system essentially appeared to have crashed on the first wave of information coming in, and never managed to get started again. It was down throughout the day, and while it may have been gathering numbers, it never provided the output in terms of target guidance it was supposed to, said a source."

"One Republican who helped operate the system from Boston on Election Day called it a near-complete “failure” and an “amateur operation.”

Throughout the morning, volunteers in the states called frantically back to headquarters to alert campaign officials to ORCA’s deficiencies: Users’ login information and data entry failed and a backup phone system locked out many campaign workers and failed to confirm that information from others had been received. Cries for help from the campaign help desk went more or less unanswered.

“Pretty much every single person who called in would have one of six discrete errors [with ORCA], but each of them was enough to prevent them” from using the system, the Republican said.

After “hours and hours pass and there’s no resolution,” the Republican said the campaign help desk instructed them: “The numbers are coming in, things are fine, just project confidence.”

“At the end of the day, they told us that every single swing state was looking either pink or red and the worst one was Virginia, where they were a little concerned. Of course, we know the opposite of that happened,” the Republican said. “So what was the quality of that data throughout the day?”

"Another Republican working on the system in Boston told POLITICO, “They kept telling us the problems on North Carolina were just our state, but that’s apparently not true … We discovered as the day went on that no one was using [the website] because someone had sent out incorrect logins and passwords to every single person in the state.”

"On a midafternoon conference call with political insiders, Romney campaign brass ticked off a list of data points about turnout — in mega-swing states such as Colorado, Ohio and Florida — that they called signs that victory was at hand. They warned that people shouldn’t take the media consortium exit polling too seriously, since it would most likely be wrong.

It’s not clear where that data came from, given that much of the campaign’s GOTV-tracking machinery was dysfunctional. In retrospect, said several Republicans who participated in the call, at least some of the information was flat-out wrong. Other sources said the campaign was getting its raw vote tallies from places like CNN.com’s feed or from calling state officials to get specific county totals."

"The collapse of the ORCA platform is all the more astonishing because of how aggressively the Romney campaign hyped it in advance of Nov. 6.
Centinello was quoted in The Huffington Post on Nov. 1 touting ORCA to volunteers in these grandiose terms: “There’s nothing that the Obama data team, there’s nothing that the Obama campaign, there’s nothing that President Obama himself can do to even come close to what we are putting together here.”

But for operatives within the Romney orbit, there was reason for skepticism even before the system went down on Election Day. Strategists in the states never got a chance to test-drive ORCA, which would have left them unfamiliar with the software on Tuesday even if it had worked."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83653.html

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83653.html

Reminds me a bit of what happened when the iPhone first launched. I worked at the support center for activations, but many others and me couldn't do anything since they never got a bunch of people their production logins. Not to mention many other clusterfucks.

 

[Moonbeam]

where they can do a little communal soul searching and critiquing themselves free from liberal bashing, PLEASE.