The Orca and the Narwhal, or how Romney lost the ground game

"The story starts in 2008. The Romney campaign sought to counter Team Obama’s highly touted, high-tech voter-targeting system, nicknamed Narwhal after the Arctic Sea mammal. Narwhal provided the Obama campaign with reams of specific data on voters—finding single women in conservative counties, for instance, or families with children that have disabilities."

"In 2012, the Romney campaign unveiled its own killer app and called it Project Orca—the fierce great whale that is the natural predator of the Narwhal. The only problem: Boston’s Orca turned out to be toothless."

"“It was a snake-oil kind of program. I say this as a web developer. This was throwing money at a product that just didn’t work.”

"The mood grew increasingly grim on Tuesday as Romney officials realized that their supposed state-of-the-art answer to the Chicago’s turnout juggernaut was a bust. Walking down the central aisle of the Romney war room you didn’t hear the humming of a well-oiled turnout machine, one campaign official recalled. You heard the panicky tones of operatives flooded with calls from the field about technical snafus and mass confusion."

" “It was amateur hour,” lamented one Romney official."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/09/the-romney-campaign-s-ground-game-fiasco.html

 

For extra fun:

"Adviser: Romney ‘Shellshocked’

Between the accidental victory site post and single speech preparation, it’s pretty clear Mitt Romney did not expect to lose the presidential race. But as it became obvious that President Barack Obama was going to keep his position Tuesday night, one Romney adviser described the realization that they weren’t going to win as a “sucker punch.” Another adviser told CBS Romney “was shellshocked” by the loss, and was thrust onstage for his concession speech before he had a chance to fully process what had happened. According to an aide, both Ann Romney and Janna Ryan cried after realizing the imminent loss. “We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory,” said a senior adviser. “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.”

 

From a end user of the vaunted Mitt Romney ORCA vote logging project....

"By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM. I'm not sure if that's true, but it wouldn't surprise me. I decided to wait for my wife to get home from work to vote, which meant going very late (around 6:15PM). Here's the kicker, I never got a call to go out and vote. So, who the hell knows if that end of it was working either.

So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc.

We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake.

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that."

 

Hey Lil' Pecker. How about a medium thick crust meat lovers, delivered?

You could use a couple of extra bucks tip money, couldn't you?

 

Jeezus we get it. You hate Mitt Romney. Do you think you are convincing anyone or is it therapeutic to get it all out?

 

Women. Also, Hispanics. Asians, even.
There's more women, period, than there are men.
Hispanics went 2 to 1 for Obama, but get this: so did Asians.

That's pretty pathetic.
He could run all the GOTV efforts he wanted, from Boston or any place else. Wouldn't matter.
The thing is this: it's what the Republicans are all about. Ryan said convincing folks on economic issues was just a way of making the social stuff palatable. In other words, the real point of the Republican party is the social, not the economic, issues. And that means the real point is restricting people's social freedoms, because across the board that's what they're for.
For some reason, they think they can cover that up. They can't.

 

Actually, I don't. He was the most acceptable of the Brady bunch.

Now after putting up for a year with your stupidity and lies, don't mind me if I gloat for a while. And by the way, I just explained how the most efficient businessman wasn't even able to run a software without glitches....