From a highly informative post, Obama, Romney, and GOP Technology: A Chilling Analysis at Red Mass Group:
This post is about technology, but is written for a non-technical audience.
You may think you know what happened with the technology of the Obama and Romney campaigns because of what you read about Orca. You don’t know. This article is incredibly long. It will be worth it, and you will never look at technology and politics in the same way. If someone knows where to post or put this so that the RNC sees it, please do so. I am designating this content under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. Distribute freely with attribution.
Here are two images from the post:
Go to the post for the explanation.
Then go to Michael Patrick Leahy’s series:
- Steele’s Competitive Bidding Resolution Was Ignored at RNC in 2011-2012 Election Cycle
- ‘Inside the Cave’ Documents Obama Campaign Tech Superiority over GOP
- Will the RNC’s ‘Fleischer Report’ Address the GOP’s Digital Deficit?
- First in a Series: RNC ‘Autopsy’ Looks Like an Inside Job
- One-Third of RNC’s Final Five Weeks of Spending Went to One Telemarketing Firm
- FEC: Romney Campaign, RNC Paid over $150M to Two Well-Connected Consulting Firms
- Romney Campaign Paid $33 Million to Two Consulting Firms With Ties to Key Staffers
Then stay away from sharp objects and ledges.
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Comments
your link to the Red Mass Group article is bad. The Stalwart Leftie Tech Gurus have struck again.
In light of its contributions to the Obama campaign, why is there an Amazon link on this site?
If I boycotted every tech company whose execs supported Obama I’d have to stop using a computer at all.
I’ll bet you have days when that sounds like heaven.
It’s not about boycotting every tech company or not making personal use of their products or services. It’s about facilitating Amazon’s business with third parties. I didn’t mention Microsoft, eBay, Google or the others because they don’t have links on your page.
Amazon also provides one of the few streams of revenue for this and many other conservative blogs through its Associates program, and helps keep us financially alive. No other retailer has a program which works as well, and with more and more readers using ad blockers which deprives us of advertising revenue, Amazon is critical to paying the blog bills. So it works both ways.
I understand why you, Glenn Reynolds and others have Amazon links on pages decrying Amazon’s politics.
Amazon is a high tech company populated by tech people, they do not like Republicans. If you read all the way to the end of the linked post the answer to why is at the end.
I’m an old nuc myself. I write for ECN Magazine. Look me up.
A very brief but excellent symposium on how to message…
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&aref=ur0&mpid=105&load=7959
Again, this is not rocket surgery.
Change the incentives for consultants: we win, you get paid.
We lose, thank you for your voluntary services. Hope you learned a lot.
Why did “netf..(i’ll be civil) even bother? $250?
Nothing that dragging geeky boy behind a team of wild horses, on gravel, wouldn’t cure.
OK Link works now.
This is a huge problem because the tech companies really are the gatekeepers into the industry and so conservatives don’t move up. The industry is very much made up of Obamaphiles. Hire a bunch of tech people even in house and they’ll likely as not sabotage your whole system and have it go pear shaped on election day…just like Orca did. Oh wait…
I had a pretty good sense of the extent of the OFA tech advantage but it is still pretty staggering to see it all laid out like that. Having volunteered for ORCA and been first-hand witness to its failure I was naturally interested in following stories on the Romney/RNC tech autopsy. It’s gruesome stuff but lessons that need to be learned NOW not in 2014 or 16.
I mentioned in a few posts I have been taking free online Data Analysis and programming courses through Coursera. You can absolutely get a full education online for free or close to it if you are at all motivated to do so. Patrick Ruffini was encouraging people on Twitter to take the computing for stat analysis class on Coursera. I just finished that course yesterday.
There is absolutely no excuse for the RNC, GOP and any other branch of the Republican party’s failure to get the people they need trained. A commitment needs to be made to pay committed activists instead of the consulting companies who could obviously care less or are completely clueless about how to win elections. It needs to start now because I am seriously worried about winning anything in the midterms if we continue to operate at this disadvantage.
The guy in the photo – wasn’t he the gatekeeper to Oz?
Season 3, “Breaking Bad”. Played road kill…
To be clear, I meant the gatekeeper to the city of Oz.
The author of Red Mass Group notes that “the high-tech world is a diverse and tolerant culture” and yet when looking at where their political money flows it shows that the high-tech world is nowhere near diverse and tolerant.
Highly doubt the high-tech world has the intellectual ability to honestly see they dwell in another Collectivist group-think bubble.
Yes the GOP is behind in the technology game however the high-tech world is far ahead in the game of tyranny.
Stupid useful idiots claiming they’re diverse and tolerant is the only way Progressives know how to be.
The Libertarian Wing of the Party does high tech. The Libertarian Wing of the Party is not very welcome in the Party.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe the Republicans lost because of inferior technology. They lost because they have inferior philosophy; It’s cluttered and inconsistent, and their “leaders” never seem to be able to articulate exactly what it is that they stand for. They hate big government but increase its size and power every chance they get. They simply refuse to stand up for individual freedom and capitalism. When was the last time a Republican congressman ever said, “That’s not the proper function of the federal government; Better to leave it to the States or the People”? Yeah, I can’t remember either…
erm….ever hear of Tea Party Republicans? That’s their message, right there.
Why yes, I’ve heard of Tea Party Republicans. They’re the ones that the Republican “leadership” (Yeah, Boner, I’m looking at YOU!) just removed from committee assignments in the House. They have no chance as long as Boner and McConnell are running things in congress.
The technology failure was important because data mining helps identify the marginal voter and the policies that will attract him/her.
Of course if the Republicans don’t want to adopt policies to attract that voter they can continue losing elections.
Let’s hope and pray that there are plenty of conservatives in the biotech field. The Left could use some genetic tweaking and we could use the biotech’s profits.
Most genetic engineering research on anything larger than bacteria is done on mammals. Unfortunately for your excellent plan, lefties are reptilian.
And here I thought they were bacteria.
[…] Via Legal Insurrection. […]
and yet….and yet……with all their net-fu, Obama got 8 million fewer votes in this past election than in 2008. Would anyone care to explain why that happened?
“and yet……with all their net-fu, Obama got 8 million fewer votes in this past election than in 2008. Would anyone care to explain why that happened?”
Although it’s true that Zero’s vote tally was down vis-a-vis 2008, that’s not the essential question. The real question is, how many votes would Obama have gotten this time without the technology? Admittedly, the answer will be speculative; we’re dealing with “woulda couda” stuff. Did the high tech stuff net Obama an extra 1.5 to 2 million votes that he would NOT have gotten otherwise? The author of the article certainly thinks Obama’s tech machine swelled the final tally this year. That’s the real issue, not whether he got fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008.
Eat the hipsters!
Contemporary business leaders are trained Keynesians. They donate to Santa Claus just like everyone else.
Better to be a thief than a victim.
It is a good thing capitalism and free enterprise did not have anything to do with the origin and success of these companies.
Oh ok, I see what you did there!
what I didn’t see, and may have missed it, was how much the campaign spent on this that was borrowed and still not yet paid for.
remember they ended the campaign with a huge debt too.
just seems like lately society as a whole does not like you unless you spend more then you have 🙁
and that in no way excuses the horrible job romney staffers/rnc did with their tech funds.
orca….seems Mitt Ahab was chasing a black whale this time…
Perhaps the work has begun?
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01/31/conservatives-launch-new-social-network-to-escape-facebook-censorship/
“The Tea Party Community” is kind of a mouthful. Why couldn’t they go with something catchy, like Friendface?
Interesting article. I work in (mostly web) technology research, so I naturally paid some attention to what both sides did with technology. A couple points:
1) That the big companies are run by lefties says nothing about the relationship between tech and politicians. Most corporate execs are college grads who have long exposure to the liberal kool aid. If anything, their work in tech has insulated them from learning about the real world.
2) What the Obama campaign did right (hiring people who knew how to build infrastructure — and did a good job) is less important than what Romney did wrong: Everything. EVERYTHING from messaging to buying ads to “47%” to coasting in the last 2 debates to the Orca disaster. Everything.
3) (bonus point) That said, the tendency of the Romney campaign mirrors the Republican approach in general, to outsource whatever needs done to “experts” who just happen to be friends with somebody on the inside. No thought. No strategy. Just, “Here’s some money. Go fix our problems.”
Let me emphasize that. It’s not that the Democrats are ahead in technology that matters but that they picked something useful and excelled at it. They made a strategy and pursued it aggressively.
The Republicans, by contrast, just went through the motions and assumed things would work out. They milked the network they were used to milking, without ever looking around to see if there might be other, maybe even better, options.
I fear, therefore, that the Republicans will never catch up in technology not because its hard or because computer geeks prefer Democrats (I don’t, after all), but because they are too deeply invested in their brand image as the stupid party.
irv: I believe you have correctly described the problem. The Republican establishment is suffering from terminal HIA syndrome and will succumb.
There are many contributing factors to the loss, however,
their are two that stand out:
1. massive voter fraud
2. the rino repubs ignoring the conservative base,
in particular, not giving Sarah Palin a prominent
speaking role at the convention, shennanigans involving
rule changes, bashing of Tea Party members, etc.
Bottom line: Many conservatives stayed home and many more democrats than were registered voted.
So, liberals own tech. They own the media. They own Hollywood. They own education. We do own guns and farming though, so I’d imagine that if we can’t outsmart them, we can start a war or starve them to death.
There’s a pretty big problem for republicans in building up a tech base. I’m not the only one that believes that if we work for or donate to romney/rnc, that will be held against us when looking for a another job.
I wouldn’t consider the donations to be a metric of anything. If my donations were public, I sure as hell wouldn’t make any to a republican.
I read about 1/4 of the way through and the first thing I thought was – the Libertarian wing of the party could do this. And what was the first comment? The Libertarian wing of the Party can do this.
And what does the “base” want? Fewer Libertarians in the Party. Too funny.
Having worked for two of these companies, this is not news to me.
I do get some shaw-den-froid now that these bitches have had their cadillac health plans smashed.
Oh yeah- those are some unhappy entitlement minded little pricks who now have to pay more for what was cheaper before Obama care.