Friday, November 9, 2012

...Or Maybe Romney Lost Because His Campaign Was Incompetent

This post on the goat rodeo that was Project ORCA might explain a lot.

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.
Read the whole thing--this bite only gives you the vaguest flavor of what happened.

Modern presidential campaigns require many of the skills needed by an actual White House staff.  They require vision and strategy.  But the also require superb tactical execution and, newest and perhaps most important, a firm grasp on complex, automated systems design, testing, rollout, and execution.  Based on this description, the Romney campaign utterly failed the test.

I'd be much, much happier with a Romney presidency.  But this is the sort of thing that telegraphs that might have been really screwed up.

A key tenet of the Democratic catechism is that Democrats are smarter than Republicans, and therefore should have more power in governing.  The Project ORCA post-mortem doesn't sound like it's going to do anything to dissuade anybody from thinking that the Democrats are right.

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