Fail Whale! The Unmitigated Disaster Of Project Orca

[angelatc]

Remember the 2007/08 Iowa debacle, where the hard drive either crashed or someone sabotaged the GOTV effort? OK, imagine that on a national scale:

http://minx.cc/?post=334783


Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.


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.

Romney outsourced his campaign. To the GOP. Snicker.

[Lucille]

No doubt it was one of the reasons he lost. I heard the Dems had an incredible GOTV effort.

Community Organizer: 1, Brainy Wall Street Financier: Zero
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/community-organizer-1-brainy-wall-street-financier-zero/



One of the most successful components of Karl Rove’s GOTV efforts with George W. Bush’s campaigns was his small-government ideological approach. Each volunteer was tasked with personally getting a handful of voters from their area to the polls, voters that they were already familiar with from their church, their children’s schools and their community. Instead of this strategy, Boston was the hub; information was sent there and GOTV assignments were delegated from thousands of miles away by Romney staffers largely unfamiliar with individuals and communities. At Ace of Spades, Ekdahl described the organizational approach of Project ORCA: “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).”

I’m sure we’re going to hear lots more about this. But one likely take-away is that Mitt Romney is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.

[Aratus]

it wuz hacked. this is very being hashed over at mrc.com's chat. this is the 1% to 2% to 3% strategic groundlings swell
and the all around smug look by BHO's chicago savvy techno~folks! mr. mitt's internetting is boomer mittster and not as
sophisticated as is our own decentralized rEVOLUTIOn network. thah RNC and Karl Rove have DNC + ACORN egg on face.

[angelatc]

No doubt it was one of the reasons he lost. I heard the Dems had an incredible GOTV effort.

Community Organizer: 1, Brainy Wall Street Financier: Zero
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/community-organizer-1-brainy-wall-street-financier-zero/

Thanks. Interesting. So in other words...central planning fails?

[amy31416]

I'm signed up for tons of liberal and conservative political action sites, and I hardly got any emails from the Romney side, I'd say that I got at least 5 emails/day from the libs.

[Aratus]

way way back last may... as mister sweatervest was kept away from our c-i-c nuclear football
by many wise voters... a large number of g.w + g.h.w bush people & their resumes found work.
had neil bush been able to run this year, or jeb, ORCA would have bellyflopped tanked equally.

[tangent4ronpaul]

I'm signed up for tons of liberal and conservative political action sites, and I hardly got any emails from the Romney side, I'd say that I got at least 5 emails/day from the libs.

Trade ya! :D

Rmoney likes to light up my e-mail folder several times a day and I get enough bird cage liner from him every week to keep me stocked for months!

-t

[idiom]

Thanks. Interesting. So in other words...central planning fails?

Its vulnerable.

Decentralised operations are plenty vulnerable, just to very different tactics.

[Lucille]

Thanks. Interesting. So in other words...central planning fails?

LOL...

Ace has more on Obama's GOTV:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334778.php


There's also this: Obama's team targeted non-voters in a sophisticated system called NARWHAL which seems to have worked. Why is that good news? Because any technological advantage will be quickly ripped off, imitated, pirated.
[...]
When I first read about NARWHAL, I was very skeptical. I thought it was the campaign spinning some Secret Magic Button that would allow them to win in the face of 8% unemployment. I'm not skeptical now.
[...]
It's creepy, and it seems like it should be illegal, but apparently it worked. It turned out a few million non-voters, turned them into Obama voters, and turned the election in Obama's favor.

Obama did lose ten million voters (actually, probably less, when all votes are tallied). But he turned out people who'd never voted before, or voted rarely, by figuring out just what provocative, scare 'em message to send individual non-voters.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/02/project_narwhal_how_a_top_secret_obama_campaign_pr ogram_could_change_the_2012_race_.html

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race/2012/10/president-obama-appears-under-the.html

[Aratus]

this getz better seyz moi --- narwhale spears orca ---- news at 11

[idiom]

Thanks for those links Lucille. The Obama campaign is a machine. Like wow. Read em guys.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ua4cg9VG9nU&noredirect=1#!


Back in 2007, on a particularly bleak summer weekend, my parents came to visit me on Obama's New Hampshire campaign. (I can't remember what was happening, exactly, but Hillary was running the table, as she had been all year.) I'd already put in several months of round-the-clock work. I looked like I had a tapeworm, and as I passed a rare afternoon off bouncing along in the backseat of their SUV, my Blackberry continued to buzz with problems. My mother decided to clear the air. She turned to me from the front seat. "Is it hard, knowing you guys will never win?"

I was outraged. I was hurt and offended. Mostly I was frustrated: even my mom, about the most supportive mother you could ask for, had evidently given up on my guy, months and months before the actual voting. Of course, it looked hopeless. But that wasn't the point! The point was—and I explained this to her with my head back and my eyes closed, to keep from snapping—we were getting our shit together. We'd just opened another ten or so offices in tiny towns around the state. Our field staff was pushing 200. The Iowa staff, I said, was doing even better. They were organizing for the caucuses in ways no one had ever done before. They were even getting high school kids involved. I told my mother I would never forget this moment. I told her I would hold it over her forever. (Promise kept. Sorry, Mom.)

Then, as now, I knew little about how the running tally of calls made from the phone bank, or doors knocked by volunteers, actually translated into votes. What I knew was that David Plouffe said we were going to win, and I trusted him. We all did. As national campaign manager, he would hold regular conference calls with the entire staff in which, in his icy, quiet voice, he would simply assert that everything was working, and that we had better ignore everything the press was saying because they were a bunch of lazy assholes who didn't understand what the race was really about, what we were building. After Obama won the nomination, Plouffe took his act big, recording wonderfully low-fi videos for the campaign website. He'd explain the state of play, and what the campaign was doing, and how it was all going to come together in a win—studded throughout with numbers and details that girded you against the cable news narrative of the day.

It wasn't a TPTB deciding the vote, Romney got hosed because he didn't have us. With us he still would have had a hell of a fight.

We have to pick up our game. We need to learn how to play at Obama's level in a decentralised way.

We need to do it now. For 2014. We need phone from home on steroids.


Now, take a look at that first debate again. And please, pay no attention to the president on the stage, the one who seemed so listless and above-it-all and unwilling to land a punch. That guy was barely involved in the real campaign.

For those waging the real campaign, the night could be quantified easily, precisely. It was—believe it—a good night. Obama for America hosted 4,000 watch parties, many of them held on campuses to keep the kids engaged and excited and to force voter-registration forms into their hands. The next day alone, the video team in Chicago used the debate footage to cut seven sharable web spots; maybe you saw one. Buffy Wicks was in Nevada for the week, checking on the youth vote operation there (and the Latino vote operation, and the African-American vote, and...). Kal Penn and John Cho, stars of the Harold & Kumar movies, were staging a voter-registration competition between University of Colorado and Colorado State University. Jim Messina watched the debate from the staff waiting room on site, and then headed back to Chicago, where he was no doubt counting Facebook friends, and checking the numbers from Wicks, and mining the evening's focus-group report for message points to exploit. Somewhere, right now, dry-erase markers are squeaking, beginning another graph, or visual, or diagram.

We have a huge advantage. We have something they don't. We have ideas.

[MozoVote]

Only in move scripts (or Star Trek) can you put together an untested idea, and implement it in the nick of time, to save the day.

Lots of Paulites work in Infrmation Technology. So I'm sure there are many heads shaking, as they read about ORCA and the lack of testing and dry-runs with it.

[angelatc]

We have a huge advantage. We have something they don't. We have ideas.

Apparently they had some ideas too. As well as leadership strong enough to get them to work.

[idiom]

Apparently they had some ideas too. As well as leadership strong enough to get them to work.

I was referring to policy ideas.

Campaigning ideas, they have tonnes of those, and we should steal every one that isn't nailed down.

[Occam's Banana]

Rmoney likes to light up my e-mail folder several times a day and I get enough bird cage liner from him every week to keep me stocked for months!

I wonder ... how much of that stuff you got was from "certified" Rmoney spam and how much was from "unofficial" sources?

Maybe I'm off, but from Amy's post, I got the impression that a significant part of the Obama stuff she got wasn't from the official campaign.

[MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2]

So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers


The truth is that Romney doesn't have 30,000 volunteers. I wouldn't believe that for a minute. We watched it all election... He could hardly get a few hundred people to watch him speak.

[MozoVote]

It's really starting to dawn on me how badly run Romney's campaign was. This article is a better, even handed summary than most I've read.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/11/why_romney_was_surprised_to_lose_his_campaign_had_ the_wrong_numbers_bad.html

Romney didn't lose because of "us". He lost because his campaign did not have the volunteers, or the nuts-and-bolts of a winning campaign architecture. Add on top of that the utter lack of enthusiasm of the party base for him, and I'm surprised he didn't lose by Dukakkis margins.

The hail-mary spending in Pennsylvania at the end, was exactly what it appeared to be.

[Lucille]

Knapp wrote about it too:

More Post-Election Analysis: GOTV
http://knappster.blogspot.com/2012/11/more-post-election-analysis-gotv.html


I don't know that it was in any way decisive, but apparently the Republican Party's Get Out The Vote effort fell completely to pieces on Tuesday [h/t The Other McCain] due to over-centralization and reliance on tech that was just not ready for prime time.

Now hear this: You can lose a hotly contested election even with a great ground game and very effective GOTV (for example, by telling the fastest-growing voter demographic that their relatives should "self-deport"). But you can't win a hotly contested election without them.

I live in St. Louis county (Missouri). While the city and north county are overwhelmingly Democratic, south/west county are largely Republican, and county-wide races can be competitive.

In an election year, it goes something like this:

- Months before the election, I start getting direct mail from candidates of both parties.

- Weeks before the election, Democratic candidates start leaving stuff on my door and sometimes knocking on it.

- Weeks before the election, Democratic party workers start knocking on my door to find out whether or not I am registered to vote and GET me registered if not (presumably they do not do this in the Republican parts of the county -- they're hitting areas where they expect the people they register to almost certainly vote Democrat).

- A week or two before the election, I start getting robo-calls to tell me how close it is and how important it is that I vote. Those calls run about 3:1 Democratic.

And on election day, my phone rings off the hook with prominent Democrats urging me to vote, offering me a ride to the polls, screeching that the election depends on my participation, etc. Back when I voted, those calls stopped once I and my wife had voted, which leads me to believe that there's a watcher at each polling place, communicating to the phone banks when they can scratch names off lists.

At the polling places, both parties have signage out, and both parties have campaign workers greeting voters with sample ballots, brochures, etc. There are usually 15-20 Democrats and one or two Republicans. The local Democratic Party workers -- and in many cases the candidates themselves -- come around in the morning with coffee and breakfast food for those workers. They come around at noon with box lunches. They come around in the afternoon with bottled water.

This is in an area where there is no doubt whatsoever that the Democratic candidates will win the races in the immediate area. The reason for the herculean GOTV effort is to boost the Democratic vote count for county-wide and state-wide races and in the presidential election.

In 2008, I ran for Congress in the gerrymandered Republican second district down in south/west county*. And what did I find there? Same thing -- the Democrats had everything wired up to perfection. The Republicans were barely visible. The Democrats knew they weren't going to win that congressional seat, but they still wanted as many Democratic votes as they could get to influence the outcome in the countywide and statewide races. The Republicans either figured they didn't need to work a safe district and could take the day off, or else they bused their workers to other places where the local outcomes were more in doubt.

I suppose it is possible that there are areas of the country where the GOP is as well-organized as the Democrats are here. But I've never heard of them. When I hear about a well-oiled ground game and GOTV project, it's always the Democrats.

The Romney campaign's "Project ORCA" appears to have been an attempt to put together an election day GOTV effort as good as Obama's. It fell apart in implementation, but they tried. And even if it had succeeded, it was too little, too late. Their ground game needed to have extended back into the weeks and months before (and by "ground game" I don't mean big rallies and sign-waving, I mean identifying and registering likely Republican voters and motivating them to get their asses to the polling places -- or to vote NOW in early voting states). Their GOTV effort needed to have emphasized early voting by the base as well.

My personal friend and political opposite, Eric Dondero, went Greyhound from Texas to Ohio to help out the Romney campaign. His description of his work there sounds like his dedication and willingness to work were not efficiently utilized. They had him doing things like waving a sign and button-holing random passersby in areas where there might be some votes to be had. If he had been put to work with a list of likely Republican voters, knocking on their doors and driving them to early voting centers, he'd probably have drummed up more Romney votes. Not his fault, of course. He showed up and asked to be put to work. They just didn't make the most of that.

Was ground game / GOTV the decisive factor in the election? I don't know. I'm still pretty sure that demographics, especially the Latino vote, played a big part. But it was certainly a major factor in the outcome.

[angelatc]

Their ground game needed to have extended back into the weeks and months before (and by "ground game" I don't mean big rallies and sign-waving, I mean identifying and registering likely Republican voters and motivating them to get their asses to the polling places -- or to vote NOW in early voting states).

I know that I can't attribute quotes on MRC to the official campaign. But early on, I saw the posters there feeling absolutely confidant that they didn't even need to target the GOP base, because they felt those people would show up and pull the lever regardless. I knew that assumption was mistaken, and I can only hope that the campaign did too.

[MozoVote]

See this post

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?395292-Romney-Repudiation-Examples

for examples of how "Romney un-thusiasm" played out in my county. The presidential race should have been dominating in the results. But Romney was getting fewer votes than down ticket races.

[Lucille]

http://theothermccain.com/2012/11/09/orca-romneys-killer-fail/

[MozoVote]

The Ace of Spades link is also worth reading for the tekkies here. I just read that and go ... uh-huh, yep. Yep.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php

It lays to waste Romney's reputation as a good business manager as a rationale for his presidency. It really sounds like his campaign was played by smooth talking consultants.

I may actually end up in the camp that is relieved Obama won.

[MozoVote]

The Red State article is also good. Notice the comments from Romney supporters, angry about how their donations were siphoned off by flim flam artists.

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

[HOLLYWOOD]

Remember the 2007/08 Iowa debacle, where the hard drive either crashed or someone sabotaged the GOTV effort? OK, imagine that on a national scale:

http://minx.cc/?post=334783





Romney outsourced his campaign. To the GOP. Snicker.All Romney had to do was bring Ron Paul into his staff and mittens would of had a huge grassroots organization, energized youth, seasoned campaigners, and a ton of votes.

Proves Romney was just a puppet to the power elite and what they said.

Pretty disgusting that Romney turned off everyones credit cards right after he lost. Leaving staffers stranded or paying their own bills. I betcha that will reciprocate into lot's of missing data for the FEC for this quarter. No worries, the FEC will just sweep it under the carpet.

[MozoVote]

Another interesting first hand account of how this failed:

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Project-Orca-Catharsis

[Occam's Banana]

Pretty disgusting that Romney turned off everyones credit cards right after he lost.

Yeah. Funny how that seems to have been the only efficiency involved in the whole fiasco.

[MozoVote]

Another good post from "Disaster" at http://battlegroundwatch.com/2012/11/09/more-reports-of-project-orca-fail/



I volunteered for Project ORCA for a while now in the Boston HQ. Please do not attack or take shots at me. I only did it so that I could help get Mitt elected our next president. The idea was conceived long ago before I joined. When I signed up, the concept seemed like a great idea to me and it was described as the wave of the future and a high tech solution to the outdated GOTV efforts of the past.

I am not a campaign veteran nor am I a high tech guy, that said, I started noticing problems right away. There was poor organization and communication. The task force that I was on, had a responsibility for vetting and training volunteers on the ground in the battleground states.

The internal system that we were using for tracking folks in the field was very poor. It was inefficient and poorly designed. It crashed on us many times. I felt like it was designed by amateurs. In fact, we saw lots of young interns involved in this project. They are smart and passionate but they have no real life expereince and they should have been managed better.

Things were going well for a while and we met and even exceeded our numbers in terms of the field volunteers. Original goal was 17K volunteers, but we doubled that. There were about a 100 of us giving as much time as we possibly could and eating Domino’s pizza every single day. We were constantly told that things were going great and this is going to make the difference on the election day. However, as we were getting closer to the election day it was becoming more and more clear that the communication was handled poorly, volunteers on the ground did not know what to do, they had no idea when they would get an app, and the list goes on and on…

We were told that there would be a test run before the election day, looks like it never happened. I was also at the TD garden on the election day, 1 of about 900 volunteers. It was a complete disaster from the moment I got there. Complete lack of organization, internet connection was very slow, phones were malfunctioning, and most importantly we heard nothing but frustration from the volunteers in the states. The system crashed all the time and the 900 people at TD Garden really had very little to do.

We stopped getting calls, however we were told that ORCA is working and we are getting good information. They promised to us to put up the numbers on the TV screens so that we can track what is going on with the voting but that never happened. Our guess was that they either do not have the numbers or they don’t like what they are seeing. The entire state of NC was closed off to our volunteers because the campaign failed to work together with NC GOP (How can that possibly happen???). We were divided into state specific section and NC folks had absolutely nothing to do all day long.

By early evening most of us felt like we are in a bubble. While we were at the command center, we had less information that anyone at home who had access to TV, and so we turned to internet to get the information. As more and more bad information started coming in, the whole place got quiet and some folks started leaving early. The whole day was surreal and very depressing at the end.

I feel that I did my part in helping get Mitt elected. I made financial contributions and worked with about 100 volunteers many late nights to do everything we possibly can. I was hoping that the system will work and there are competent folks on the organizational side of this project who would get us across the finish line. It did not happen. Whoever runs in 2016 should pay careful attention to this disaster…

[angelatc]

I was referring to policy ideas.

Campaigning ideas, they have tonnes of those, and we should steal every one that isn't nailed down.

Data mining. It's a pretty good idea.

[angelatc]

All Romney had to do was bring Ron Paul into his staff and mittens would of had a huge grassroots organization, energized youth, seasoned campaigners, and a ton of votes.

Proves Romney was just a puppet to the power elite and what they said.

Pretty disgusting that Romney turned off everyones credit cards right after he lost. Leaving staffers stranded or paying their own bills. I betcha that will reciprocate into lot's of missing data for the FEC for this quarter. No worries, the FEC will just sweep it under the carpet.

It's not disgusting. The cards weren't "everyone's." They belonged to the campaign. Rest assured if I was running the campaign I would have done exactly the same thing. The campaign was over - the last thing the campaign needed was a bunch of drunken disappointed malcontents running around with campaign credit cards. Besides, it was probably entirely automated - the decision was probably made when they were setting up the accounts to ensure all the cards did indeed get shut down at the end.

It was pretty bad that they didn't warn people it was going to happen - I'll give you that. But there's no reason that they can't get reimbursed for their out-of-pocket expenses.

[angelatc]

It's really starting to dawn on me how badly run Romney's campaign was. This article is a better, even handed summary than most I've read.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/11/why_romney_was_surprised_to_lose_his_campaign_had_ the_wrong_numbers_bad.html

Romney didn't lose because of "us". He lost because his campaign did not have the volunteers, or the nuts-and-bolts of a winning campaign architecture. Add on top of that the utter lack of enthusiasm of the party base for him, and I'm surprised he didn't lose by Dukakkis margins.

The hail-mary spending in Pennsylvania at the end, was exactly what it appeared to be.

I don't put too much faith into the Slate article. The Romney campaign might have had an inking that the numbers weren't what they wanted to see, but that certainly doesn't mean they were going to sabotage any enthusiasm they may have had. Did the writer really think the campaign was going to put put press releases that said anything but they were winning?

Losing campaigns are always "like a death in the family."

But I do believe this:
In retrospect, the Romney team is in awe and full of praise of the Obama operation. “They spent four years working block by block, person by person to build their coalition,” says a top aide. They now recognize that those offices were created to build personal contacts, the most durable and useful way to gain voters.

I wish we could do that with Rand, starting now.

[MozoVote]

I think what we witnessed here, was the same top-down control that was exhibited at the RNC in Tampa. They kept thinking they were in control of everything, and eventually they succumbed to this hubris.

In some ways though I think the emphasis on GOTV is overblown. If you have a candidate that people trust and agree with, they will show up and vote with enthusiasm. It's not as if anyone in America did not know an election was coming, or who the main candidates were!

[MozoVote]

Thought this comment was worth passing on, from the Ace of Spades blog. Insight by an anonymous Obama insider



I work on the deep blue side (independent expenditure) but have friends on the red side of the fence. So I was getting bits and pieces of this via text message on Election Day. We were using our scant break time from the doors howling laughing at y'all and your ORCA. What an unmitigated disaster. The worst part is, some snake oil salesman/"job creator" is going to be able to employ a new valet after making a 30% commission selling that piece of crap technology ultimately to some unwitting shareholders.

And as a labor IE, yeah we use a lot of bodies, but we're not low tech at all. We have been using (and improving) a heavily field tested system for a few cycles now. Our apps worked perfectly. Our targeting runs and deployments were spot on. Our ward captains were exactly where they were supposed to be on Tuesday AM. There were a couple wards in a couple cities where we came statistically close to 100%! All the pollsters said there was no way we could match 2008 historic turnout. In the most important counties in Florida, Ohio and other battlegrounds - we actually beat it by 3%-5% percentage points.

By 4 PM, we actually started feeling sorry for your guys. Mass deployment of something that hasn't even been through troubleshooting in the primary? Are y'all out of your minds?

Our org had field offices in 7 battlegrounds and notched a 'W' in every single one...at about 5% of the cost of just what Crossroads spent (but again, I know those consultants get a nice commission on selling that national media ad time.) Even if Romney lost, at least some those guys made out like bandits.

I know there are some people freaking about totals and stolen votes and this and that. But the fact remains I have worked many campaigns and I've never seen a GOTV operation work this smoothly.

[Lucille]

INSIDE ORCA: HOW THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN SUPPRESSED ITS OWN VOTE
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/08/Orca-How-the-Romney-Campaign-Suppressed-Its-Own-Vote


A source within the Romney campaign agreed to share his reflections on Project Orca with Breitbart News:


It's easy to point fingers after a loss and I wouldn't normally do it, but consider what happened.

Project Orca was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smartphones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.
I worked on the Colorado team, and we were called by hundreds (or more) volunteers who couldn't use the app or the backup phone system. The usernames and passwords were wrong, but the reset password tool didn't work, and we couldn't change phone PINs. We were told the problems were limited and asked to project confidence, have people use pencil and paper, and try to submit again later.

Then at 6PM they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINs (which also didn't work). Meanwhile, counties where we had hundreds of volunteers, such as Denver Colorado, showed zero volunteers in the system all day, but we weren't allowed to add them. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left.

I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN's. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red.

Regardless of the specific difficulties, this idea would only help if executed extremely well. Otherwise, those 37,000 swing state volunteers should have been working on GOTV...

Somebody messaged me privately after my email and told me that North Carolina had the same problems -- every pin was wrong and not fixed until 6PM -- and was also told it was localized to North Carolina.

The problems with Orca appear to have been nationwide, and predated Election Day itself. At Ace of Spades, John Ekdahl reported his frustrations as a volunteer in the field:


From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of "rah-rahs" and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like "Has this been stress tested?", "Is there redundancy in place?" and "What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?", among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

Ekdahl describes how volunteers were expected to print their own materials, and were mistakenly not told to bring their poll watching credentials to polling places. Attempts to communicate with the Romney campaign to ask for assistance were unsuccessful:


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.

Likewise, Twitchy recorded widespread real-time complaints and criticisms on Twitter by Project Orca volunteers. At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked.

Romney volunteers in Virginia confirmed that the campaign had relied entirely on Project Orca to turn out the vote in key areas such as Roanoke, where Romney and Ryan had made appearances. Volunteers who had driven to Virginia from safely-Republican Tennessee were shocked at the disorganization they encountered.

While the Romney campaign waited for Orca to function as planned, the Obama campaign had placed signs outside every one of the city's thirty-three polling places, and was fully staffed with two volunteers outside each polling place, and a strike list volunteer inside, all day long from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. The best that the short-handed Tennessee volunteers could manage was 40% coverage of polling places; the local GOP, they said, had relied entirely on the campaign's centralized Orca system in Boston to turn out the local vote.

Ekdahl concludes his account by hoping that the failures of Orca did not cost Romney the election:


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.

In fact, Orca diverted scarce resources that would have been better used physically moving voters to polling places. By a rough calculation, Romney lost the election by falling 500,000 to 700,000 votes short in key swing states. If each of the 37,000 volunteers that had been devoted to Orca had instead brought 20 voters to the polls in those states over the course of the day, Romney would have won the election.
[...]
The truth is much worse. There was, in fact, massive suppression of the Republican vote--by the Romney campaign, through the diversion of nearly 40,000 volunteers to a failing computer program.

There was no Plan B; there was only confusion, and silence.

[parocks]

Remember the 2007/08 Iowa debacle, where the hard drive either crashed or someone sabotaged the GOTV effort? OK, imagine that on a national scale:

http://minx.cc/?post=334783





Romney outsourced his campaign. To the GOP. Snicker.

Very useful and interesting. Extremely long. Not going to finish it, but very interesting. They completely botched GOTV.

[angelatc]

Thought this comment was worth passing on, from the Ace of Spades blog. Insight by an anonymous Obama insider

I think they're data-mining. I don't know all the ins and outs...lexis nexis and facebook, supermarket loyalty cards....but they're data mining.

[parocks]

There are always poll watchers, they shouldn't be diverted, because they should be there. However, and maybe I'm confused on this, aren't those poll watchers really just sending in the data about who doesn't need any more phone calls? Because it seems like that's the whole thing of it. phoning people over and over again. And I kinda doubt that in this day and age, based on our phone from home experiences, that the database, or lists, are updated on election day to reflect whether someone has voted or not. And does it matter? Back in the old days people made calls, now it appears only that robos do, and you can apparently make a lot of phone calls with those robocalls very quickly. In the olden days, you knew that the goal was to get people to the polls, and the people making the calls in the afternoons could quickly arrange to get those voters to the polls. Years ago, I was calling, and by the end of the day, everybody who you could talk to you who didn't vote you were really really asking if they needed a ride to the polls, and the last thing I did was give someone a ride to the polls right before they closed. From what I see, it appears that they aren't putting the pieces together into a whole that makes sense. If they aren't planning on driving people to the polls, there's no need for data, because robocalls can just hit everyone with the same vote, vote, vote message.


"If each of the 37,000 volunteers that had been devoted to Orca had instead brought 20 voters to the polls in those states over the course of the day, Romney would have won the election."

Right. But how do you know which 20 voters? I would think you'd need both the people there seeing who is voting, and the people taking the phone calls and the drivers.

[parocks]

LOL...

Ace has more on Obama's GOTV:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334778.php



http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/02/project_narwhal_how_a_top_secret_obama_campaign_pr ogram_could_change_the_2012_race_.html

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race/2012/10/president-obama-appears-under-the.html

All very interesting. Very surprising in this day and age that all of these things aren't just interwoven anyway.

I don't really understand why something like this should be difficult to accomplish.

I don't see why one big database wouldn't just solve the problem. But apparently, seeing that Obama made improvements and Romney failed,
it's not clear at all that Rand Paul 2016 is going to have a system that rivals whatever the Dem has in 2016.

But it should be easy, shouldn't it? Everyone's facebook page has tremendous amounts of data attached to it. Something remotely similar could contain all the data,
and the data could be presented to the different departments in the way they want to see it.

[parocks]

I don't put too much faith into the Slate article. The Romney campaign might have had an inking that the numbers weren't what they wanted to see, but that certainly doesn't mean they were going to sabotage any enthusiasm they may have had. Did the writer really think the campaign was going to put put press releases that said anything but they were winning?

Losing campaigns are always "like a death in the family."

But I do believe this:

I wish we could do that with Rand, starting now.

Rand should develop / copy Obama's system get it up and running, so that if people are out there, that data could be properly implemented.

[Lucille]

The All-Seeing Campaign
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-all-seeing-campaign/


Some astonishing details are trickling out about the Obama campaign’s sophisticated infrastructure. They were polling, watching, targeting, microtargeting, “microlistening,” and in general doing everything possible to stay on message, turn out voters, and economize.
[...]
And while they were doing all this, the Romney campaign was playing name games:


The name for Project ORCA, the Romney campaign’s much-vaunted, digital voter turnout and poll monitoring system, started out as something of a joke.

ORCA was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder to an advanced data-gathering effort put together by the Obama campaign called Project Narwhal. The Romney team’s conceit: An orca is a natural predator of the narwhal, a tusked-whale that lives in the Arctic.

It started out as a joke, and it ended as one too.

See Lloyd Green’s review of Sasha Issenberg’s book, The Victory Lab, about the science of winning campaigns, here.

[angelatc]

I don't see why one big database wouldn't just solve the problem. But apparently, seeing that Obama made improvements and Romney failed,
it's not clear at all that Rand Paul 2016 is going to have a system that rivals whatever the Dem has in 2016.

But it should be easy, shouldn't it? Everyone's facebook page has tremendous amounts of data attached to it. Something remotely similar could contain all the data,
and the data could be presented to the different departments in the way they want to see it.

Do you know that Change.org is a site developed by a liberal group....Working Families For America, I think? They're not trying to change the world though internet petitions - they're harvesting email addresses, tying the addresses to specific political interests, then probably matching the data up to Lexis Nexis for demographics, and creating a voter message that is tailored just for that person.

It's a powerful tool. But can you imagine our grassroots running phone banks sticking to the message that the campaign told them to deliver to the voters on that list? Because I can't.

Maybe I could, if they were let in on the plan. But that would never happen.

[jllundqu]

Google announced its support for Obama long ago and gave his campaign separate access, real time data, 3700 Street SNiffers, algorithms, etc. They knew in real time who was posting/tweeting/emailing and about what. They knew in real time what punches were landing and what punches were missing, right down to the state, county, and freaking street.

The GOP was massively outgunned, technologically.

[angelatc]

Google announced its support for Obama long ago and gave his campaign separate access, real time data, 3700 Street SNiffers, algorithms, etc. They knew in real time who was posting/tweeting/emailing and about what. They knew in real time what punches were landing and what punches were missing, right down to the state, county, and freaking street.

The GOP was massively outgunned, technologically.

The GOP didn't even try. They were trying for an updated version of existing techniques.

It's ridiculous to blame Google. Only liberals refuse to accept responsibility for their own mistakes.

[Lucille]

Political Campaigns Emulate Your Stalker Ex in Search of Votes
http://reason.com/blog/2012/10/16/political-campaigns-emulate-your-stalker


Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a creepy-licious story about how the Obama and Romney campaigns are gobbling up personal data about voters as part of an effort to make targeted appeals for support — and even to shame people into going to the polls. The information they're acquiring isn't just mile-high data of the sort that's been used in the past to maximize the use of resources on targets of opportunity; it includes details about purchases, friends and family and Web-surfing habits. Yes, the campaigns want to know everything about you so they can make as personal — and really well-informed — an appeal as possible.
[...]
For social network data, the campaigns seem to be accessing the connections of volunteers who log into their own accounts and offer up their friends and loved ones for the glory of the cause. Data-mining software makes it an easy task.

The campaigns are getting even more technical and intrusive than that, however. They're also looking into Internet habits in a way that may convince you to set your browser security to "cloaking device."
[...]
The mention of shaming voters into casting ballots is confined here to voting habits. That is, the campaigns may start calling out people they see as potential supporters who have been less-than-diligent in exercising that all-important franchise. But the danger of other sorts of political arm-twisting, implicit or explicit, seems fairly ... impressive with all of that data in hand.

The tactic would also seem to have huge potential for blowback. A political party or campaign may be able compile all sorts of embarrassing data on voters, and even wield it to drive people to take an active role, at least so far as voting goes. But those people, protected by the still-secret (for now) ballot, could well be expected to punish their tormenters.

That stalker ex can make your life hell, for a while. But doesn't it always come at the price of really pissing you off?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZSRI2vQ8wU

[Occam's Banana]

The All-Seeing Campaign

Some astonishing details are trickling out about the Obama campaign’s sophisticated infrastructure. They were polling, watching, targeting, microtargeting, “microlistening,” and in general doing everything possible to stay on message, turn out voters, and economize.

It needs to be considered whether Narwhal did so great on its own merits, or only in comparison to Romney's ORCA fiasco.

As effective as Narwhal may have been, they still managed to get *millions of votes fewer* than they got last time. Technology is grand, but it will only get you so far.

[tsai3904]

More about Narwhal:


They created the most sophisticated email fundraising program ever. The digital team, under Rospars leadership, took their data-driven strategy to a new level. Any time you received an email from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing emails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers.

Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear on Reddit, the massive popular social networking site. And yes, he really did type in his own answers with Goff at his side. One fascinating outcome of the AMA is that 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President dropped in a link to the Obama voter registration page. Oh, and the campaign also officially has the most tweeted tweet and the most popular Facebook post. Not bad. I would also note that Laura Olin, a former strategist at Blue State Digital who moved to the Obama campaign, ran the best campaign Tumblr the world will probably ever see.

With Davidsen's help, the Analytics team built a tool they called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to buy eyeballs on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen's old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign's own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. Having that data allowed the campaign to buy ads that they knew would get in front of the most of their people at the least cost. They didn't have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours.

According to CMAG/Kantar, the Obama's campaign's cost per ad was lower ($594) than the Romney campaign ($666) or any other major buyer in the campaign cycle. That difference may not sound impressive, but the Obama campaign itself aired more than 550 thousand ads. And it wasn't just about cost, either. They could see that some households were only watching a couple hours of TV a day and might be willing to spend more to get in front of those harder-to-reach people.

Goff described the Facebook tool as "the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that's come around in years, since the phone call."

The digital, tech, and analytics teams worked to build Twitter and Facebook Blasters. They ran on a service that generated microtargeting data that was built by Will St. Clair. It was code named Täärgus Taargüs for some reason. With Twitter, one of the company's former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically send individual users direct messages. "We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff." Meanwhile, the teams also built an opt-in Facebook outreach program that sent people messages saying, essentially, "Your friend, Dave in Ohio, hasn't voted yet. Go tell him to vote." Goff described the Facebook tool as "the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that's come around in years, since the phone call."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/2/?single_page=true

[Lucille]

RNC to launch major digital overhaul following election inquiry
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/11/17275284-rnc-to-launch-major-digital-overhaul-following-election-inquiry?lite


Republicans will embark upon a major restructuring of their digital strategy as part of the Republican National Committee's new autopsy of the 2012 elections, NBC News has learned.

When the RNC on Monday releases the findings of its "Growth and Opportunity Project" — the report ordered by Chairman Reince Priebus on the party's losses in the 2012 campaign — it will emphasize closing the GOP's widely-reported technological gap versus Democrats.

RNC chief of staff Mike Shields, whom Priebus recently hired to help shepherd the RNC's modernization, said he is working on "fundamentally restructuring the way the RNC works so it is centered around the technology department."

Shields said that the release of the RNC's report on Monday "kicks off the 2016 election cycle," pledging an unprecedented commitment to data and technology.

Republicans have repeatedly and openly talked since the election about their data disadvantage versus the Obama campaign. The president's re-election team's sophisticated, cutting-edge digital operation has been robustly chronicled since the election, and credited with helping propel Obama to a second term.

Shields was reluctant to divulge any specifics of the RNC's new commitment to digital efforts, but said it would be far broader than any simple social media campaign. The RNC also intends to take its new tech operation on the road, to showcase the party's new capabilities for state parties, campaigns and activists.

"By first combining digital, data and tech, you are creating synergy in all of those areas based upon what data you are creating and what it tells you about voters," he said. "But further, by putting that entire department at the center of the organization, you are making your fundraising pitches better and your voter contact much better to ultimately help you win elections."

Republicans' new emphasis was spurred, in part, by Priebus's own meetings with various factions of the party across the country since the election to hear out concerns. To that end, he recently went to Silicon Valley and met with Facebook in order to deal with a recurrent theme he was hearing — that the Republican party was not technically on par with their Democratic counterparts.

RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski belied that holding a digital team in such high esteem was a rarity in the party, even during Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

"The digital campaign was not intergrated into daily decisions," said Kukowski. "But the digital department is not just in some basement anymore."

[Lucille]

Reince Priebus is supposed to tell the world on Monday specifically how he will repair a GOP digital operation that last year Democrats made look like a relic of the dial-up era.

Yet in late-February meetings with tech industry gurus on the West Coast, the Republican National Committee chairman still appeared genuinely torn, sources present told POLITICO. Priebus, they said, complained about not knowing whom to trust amid a barrage of conflicting advice about how to fix one of the party’s most vexing deficiencies.

And those issues are likely to trouble the GOP for some time, if the forthcoming plan of action in an RNC preview distributed Tuesday is any indication. The outline looks to some like a version of similar vague rhetoric that several GOP strategists — all of whom were involved in high-profile 2012 campaigns — told POLITICO they’ve heard before.

The most specific promise, for instance, is to hire a digital director — dubbed a “chief technology officer” — who will be well-funded and empowered to be bold and innovative. That is regarded by many with cautious optimism, a hope that the party really means it this time, tempered by a sense of déjà vu. The RNC is regarding such a hire as an important new idea, but Republican strategists have been clamoring for it since Election Day and believe someone should already be in place.

“It’s almost like their quote is the same quote as before they hired Todd Herman and Cyrus Krohn,” said Vince Harris, newly hired digital director for the reelection campaign of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), referring to prior RNC tech figureheads. “My worry with the whole thing is that the RNC is looking at photo ops and flashy hires and sound bites, throwing out data and that at the end of the day that it’s hard to really change the culture of a sitting institution. And that’s what needs to be done.”

The sentiment was echoed by another prominent Republican digital expert, who asked not to be named because of working ties to the RNC. “Meet the old boss, same as the new boss,” the strategist said. “Every two years they have this new great person who’s going to change it. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

RNC chief of staff Mike Shields, hired just three weeks ago, vowed it’ll be different this time. The committee’s summary of Priebus’s plan offers the promise “to fundamentally change the role of digital, technology and data at the party committee level.” There are promises of training programs and new get-out-the-vote tools, all of which heartened campaign consultants.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/the-gops-stubborn-digital-deficit-88792.html#ixzz2NSy9pSTs

Lots more at the link

[CPUd]

The Ace of Spades article is correct- the RNC didn't really have anything to do with ORCA, and probably didn't even know what it was until they made Mitt their presumptive nominee.

In a future presidential campaign, how are they supposed to implement and test something during primary season when the individual campaigns are going to want to use their own systems?