DomKen
Posts: 19457
Joined: 7/4/2004
From: Chicago, IL
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DarkSteven
His number crunchers.
Note that Romney had his number crunchers too. They had a model that was flawed enough to continue to predict a Romney victory even when the returns were coming in. Evidently, the Romney campaign had a hiring binge for them that wasn't started till summer (in fairness, they couldn't do serious fundraising till after the RNC, but surely Romney could have funded a developmental group prior to that). Amazingly, the project intended to monitor exit polls and take some kind of action based upon those polls' results (as if you CAN do anything on election day that's not already being done). When one of your major achievements makes no sense, there's a problem.
Incredibly, Orca crashed on Election Day, even though the campaign should have been aware that the Obama campaign had the exact same problem with an overloaded system crashing four years earlier and had decided to abandon the real-time polling feedback feature.
It wasn't just the numbers guys, although they were incredibly important. It was keeping OFA, alternatively Obama For America and Organizing For America, together between 2008 and 2012. The campaign had 4 years to improve the Get Out The Vote operation. They had the dedicated volunteers in place for when the paid staff entered the field.
The numbers guys let them target exactly the voters they needed but the GOTV operation was so large and comprehensive that they could reach all of those voters. For instance, to the best of my knowledge, OFA made no GOTV robocalls. People like me hooked into the OFA database from home and made the calls, I made several hundred calls in the last week, and if a voter didn't know where to go to early vote or if they needed a ride to the polling place on election day the callers could make those arrangements. Sometime Friday it must have been determined the race would come down to Ohio and Florida because all of my calls over the weekend and into Monday went into northern Ohio and southern Florida.
Romney's field operation didn't even get started until September. He certainly had the cash on hand to set up a 21st century GOTV operation but he simply refused to see and understand what OFA was capable of.
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An unsung hero of the Obama victory. - 
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