The White Whale

The shit hit the fan this morning with the news that Orca, which represented most of Romney’s Election Day ground game, failed massively. It amounted to an app that poll watchers could use on their smartphones for polling information. Volunteers would open the program, let it record voters as they stated their name for election workers, and compile them. I assume the idea was to forward that information to phone banks to skip people who had already voted. If you don’t know what the point of that is, you’re not alone. Worse yet, the system didn’t work and didn’t even accept IDs from campaign poll watchers.

I was going to bitch about this like most other conservatives when I heard a rant from Pat Caddell about the failures of the Republicans. He started with the lack of testing and the fact that the Obama campaign had dress rehearsals of their system. They apparently data mined better and got out on the streets. He then moved on to Karl Rove and accused him of profiting from dupes who donated to him. Then he capped off by blaming Romney, demanding he spend his own money on the campaign, calling for Marco Rubio to be the VP nominee and declaring the death of the Republican party in lieu of a Tea Party.

First, Mr. Caddell, go screw yourself into the ground. You ran an even bigger upset loss than this election. You’re complaining about negative campaigning now? There is entirely too much blaming of Mitt Romney for this result. First of all, I think the Romney guys were too cocky about this election. One thing Mitt Romney is not would be cocky. Romney’s worst problem may be that he relied too much on outsourcing. Then again, Obama entirely relied on his people. There’s a reason they call it “thick as thieves.” I know many are trying to harpoon that white whale that ended everything, but we have to ask a different question. If a winner lost, how did a loser win?

Votermom looks at the real ground game of the Obama campaign. The reason Chicago politics work is not only because of the illegality, it also relies on the tireless efforts of cronies to harass and threaten voters. Pat Caddell’s much envied Obama “data mining” operation seemed to consist of lists of registered voters who had not requested an absentee ballot or early voted. The campaign then paid people to call them daily until they either got a ballot or voted. I guess we know where that 7.8% unemployment figure came from.

Of course, the harassment was also personal and constant to certain persuadable groups like union workers and the inner cities. The county political identification maps are nice for a Republican to look at because they are vastly red. The downfall is that people in Democrat counties are packed like rats. A GOTV operation can hit thousands of people with just a busload of volunteers. Their dress rehearsal was the Walker recall. They learned from the loss that sending out mailers with neighbors party registration backfired. Instead, they personally appealed to loyalists to sell out their family members’ phone numbers. Don’t outsource when you can “get in their face,” as Obama once put it.

One thing strikes me about the “predictions” of liberal pollsters with almost 0% error using data with a 2-4% margin. That is in some cases, a tolerance 100 times better than the specifications. If cars were built like that, no one would ever need a transmission fixed. Was there cheating? I find it harder to believe there wasn’t. I thought Republicans should have fought for electoral reform right after 2008. Instead, they waited until this year. No state with firm photo ID laws went to Obama.

I’m not going to implode over an election. This is tactical, not factual. Obama knows how to rain death from above. They spent their resources on big elections, like President and Senators. They ceded the House early. If the Republicans do it right, they can stop all of Obama’s stupid plans. By the same token, if they had broken the White House by holding the purse strings past the arbitrary point of no return, voters would have been excited by the Republican brand.

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