GOP GOTV Volunteer Says: Team Romney "Unprecendented" Failure

[kpete]

The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA

What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:

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

Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The "massive undertaking" is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we'll get to that in a second). This wasn't really the GOP's effort, it was Team Romney's. And perhaps "unprecedented" would fit if we're discussing failure.

..........................


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.

............

On one of the last conference calls (I believe it was on Saturday night), they told us that our packets would be arriving shortly. Now, there seemed to be a fair amount of confusion about what they meant by "packet". Some people on Twitter were wondering if that meant a packet in the mail or a pdf or what. Finally, my packet arrived at 4PM on Monday afternoon as an emailed 60 page pdf. Nothing came in the mail. Because I was out most of the day, I only got around to seeing it at around 10PM Monday night. So, I sat down and cursed as I would have to print out 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. Naturally, for reasons I can't begin to comprehend, my printer would not print in black and white with an empty magenta cartridge (No HP, I will never buy another one of your products ever again). So, at this point I became panicked. I was expected to be at the polls at 6:45AM and nothing was open. I was thankfully able to find a Kinko's open until 11PM that was able to print it out and bind it for me, but this is not something I should have had to do. They expected 75-80 year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day? From what I hear, other people had similar experiences. In fact, many volunteers never received their packets at all.

..............

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.


more, fascinating:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php

[orwell]

1. Orca?

...as in White Whale.

I guess RMoney is Capt. Ahab.

I always assumed he was a Mony Dick...

[KurtNYC]

8. Free Willard!

ORCA aided their loss and prompted their killer wail.

[malaise]

18. DUzy

[central scrutinizer]

24. killer fail! nfm

[Berlum]

28. Orca Republicans: the highest order of FAIL

[ET Awful]

33. Orca is a killer whale (as in Shamu) n/t

[louis-t]

2. I hear they mailed them an abacas and a polaroid camera.

[Ms. Toad]

20. It was actually more sophisticated than that -

until it was shut down in NE Ohio by alert OFA observers before the polls had been open an hour. R observers carried phone apps into the polling place and were asking every voter for their name and party affiliation.

Some persisted by dogging the check-in table, but by and large they were left perusing strike sheets posted twice a day. Since that meant they had to capture the strike sheet info and enter the info in batches rather than real time, it severely crippled the ability they anticipated to have the real time exit polling - at a rate approaching 100%.

[enough]

3. It seems pretty clear now that many of the people running

Romney's campaign had some other motive than actually getting him elected. They were in it for the money.

[Berlum]

29. "In it for the money..." Yup. Why else would anyone back Romney-Ryan

Their ideology and their platform were an insult and a grave disservice to the ideals of the United States of America.

[randome]

30. They were in it for the lazy, cushy job. Like most Republicans are.

[OkieGranny]

4. "We had the latest technology in abacuses."

[lastlib]

14. The paid staffers had slide rules....eom

[calimary]

54. Welcome to DU, OkieGranny!

Glad you're here! PRIORITY ONE: PROTECT AND BUILD UPON the gains we made last Tuesday! Let's not forget how drastically our fortunes changed between 2008 and 2010 - when the fucking teabaggers took over. We can't let that happen again!!!!

[Bicoastal]

5. You can't run a campaign like a business, Mr. Romney.

Enthusiasm and inspiration has to come from the bottom up, not the top down.

[Bucky]

6. Idiots. If they'd won Florida, Virginia, AND Ohio, they'd've STILL lost the election.

http://www.270towin.com/ <== Do the math. The Repubicans sure as hell can't.

[L0oniX]

7. Rmoney Epic Fail!

Crossroads gps too.

[ProudProgressiveNow]

9. And Romney and company were suprised they lost?

Afterthought... how much money did they skim off the campaign...

[dchill]

39. You KNOW they did...

In their minds, they're entitled to a consultant's fee...

[KurtNYC]

10. Thanks for posting this

I am in discussion with some people who would have loved ORCA and would have bet the house on it, just like Romney.

Low tech gets it done. Over tech'ing stuff is risky.

[tblue37]

49. Yeah--like insisting on hackable electronic voting

machines instead of low-tech but reliable paper ballots.

[Bigleaf]

11. As a fellow DU'er said the other night, GOP's Orca = Killer Fail

[PA Democrat]

12. Didn't I see a story about their Orca app crashing on election day?

Of course I did! It was right here on DU!

'Romney's GOTV app just crashed. Now they're flying blind.'

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021732757

[wildeyed]

13. This is what happens when Republicans try to do GOTV.

They should stick to things they are good at. Like writing checks.

[tanyev]

15. That whale got beached.

[joeybee12]

16. Amazing...and a good point about 75-80 year-olds...lots of volunteers are the retired...

And not all are computer savvy, and being retired probably means you don't have money to waste like this...

[calimary]

53. One of them did reference how "we leave that to the blue-hairs," didn't they?

It's a rare one who understands the new technology. I'm not a blue-hair (yet), and I barely have a clue!

[Jennicut]

17. They had no idea how to set up an operation like what Obama and co had.

Clueless, totally clueless. ORCA? Couldn't even come up with a better name?

[tblue37]

50. Maybe they should have recruited a--wait for it--

community organizer!!

[leeroysphitz]

52. :)

[MrScorpio]

19. When they finally write the definitive book about the Romney campaign…

I have no doubt that it will be described as the most incompetent one in the history of American politics.

[XemaSab]

27. Not only that, but their candidate sucked

The teabaggers didn't like him, the fundies thought he was a cultist, the smart moderates were like "This guy's all over the map," and so forth. The only thing that made it close was their shared hatred for Barack.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

47. You just covered all my points, I couldn't agree more.

[Jim Lane]

21. I'm reading every one of the comments -- this is schadenfreude week for me.

My favorite so far, coming after several different people have lambasted ORCA in every way imaginable:

71 Did I mention that at 5:40am OFA had their person there, with a chair, with a huge sign to answer questions about provisional ballots. When the poll didn't open at 6am on the dot, the OFA person was calling at 6:01am, and actually talking to a live person.

I have to set myself a cutoff. By the end of the day tomorrow, I'm going to stop wasting time reading stuff like this and lurking on FR.

But it's just so damn much fun.

[magical thyme]

22. if that's how they ran their campaign, can you imagine them running the country?!?

Phew! bullet dodged!!!!

[JaneyVee]

23. Uh, Orca killed people. I saw the movie.

[Scuba]

25. CEO mentality. Dump a load of shit on the underlings and expect them to do everything.

[Tumbulu]

40. ding ding ding

that's it exactly!

[WinkyDink]

26. ANOTHER ungracious and mendacious "We defeated ourselves" load of CRAP. TEAM OBAMA HAD BETTER IDEAS

NOT JUST BETTER VOLUNTEERS.

[jsr]

31. Shitty candidate for shitty party of shitty people

Their problem was huge.

[Skidmore]

32. All that money and the volunteers still had to print out their top secret documents on their own

dime?

[DallasNE]

34. No, This Was Not A Difference Maker

Romney's team was effective at disenfranchisement of voters by requiring a huge number of minorities to vote a provisional ballot which will likely never be looked at let alone counted. Arizona has been singled out so far as Maricopa County alone had something like 162,000 provisional ballot cast and mostly by Hispanics.

Apparently denial is a hard thing to shake. When Romney pivoted to the center in the debates and became Obama light it really dampened enthusiasm and demoralized the ground game. There simply weren't enough angry white men to elect Romney then look at what happened in Senate races where Democrats won 25 seats to only 8 for Republicans -- a debacle matched only by the Goldwater disaster of 1964.

[loudsue]

35. Because they were planning to STEAL it! Duh!

Besides....who in their right mind would be willing to actually WORK to put people in office who DON'T LIKE TO WORK? They're billionaires. They delegate. They mostly inherited their wealth. Work isn't what they understand.

[heaven05]

36. I'm glad

it was a flustercuck. In fact I'm elated.

[RBInMaine]

37. That's what the dumb fucks get for spending all their money on a bunch of stupid ads.

[ffr]

38. Lawrence O'Donnell: PBO GOTV - 109,000 volunteers & > 200,000 on phones

Romney had 30,000?

Son, you were outgunned!

How the Race Was Won - The Last Word

[RomneyLies]

41. It was a consultant con job

I know Redstate is a right wing site, but this diary over there pretty much shows how wacked out the Romney campaign was.

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

The one point missing from the diary is the fact that the Romney are heavily invested in the consultant firms they used, which means the family profited to the tun of roughly 8 figures personally at the end of the campaign.

[underpants]

44. That's what it sounded like to me too

Campaigns often serve as a means to funnel money to political operatives with side businesses (like Rove's supposedly effective direct mail). Many small campaigns that have no chance are really just a way to get money out of contributors pockets and into pros pockets.

We had heard stories about the massive over payments that the Romney campaign was making to consultants and that was the first thing I thought of when I read that....other than what I posted below about canvassing.

[jsmirman]

51. There's an idiot on that board who likens not voting for Romney

to poor treatment of veterans after Vietnam.

Right, not voting for the draft dodger is just like that:

"Jack Savage" - what a dumb, dumb, dumb motherfucker.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

42. Romney never ran a real business with real employees, so of course his operation failed. nt

[underpants]

43. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen

Having canvassed in 2008 and this year for Tim Kaine I know a little about this type of operation.

You can't just turn people loose to canvass. They have to be trained and it is a PROCESS not just a 3 day thing.
The data has to be analyzed after each run (weekend) to see what results you are getting and where the next area should be.
You simply can't cover enough ground on the last weekend to make much of a difference.

We canvassed from August on and in it I learned more and more about the best approach. I learned to gather information as I neared a door and to leave little notes on the handouts. Did ORCA even have literature to leave on doors? If they had a Va. Tech yard sign their literature had a GO HOKIES!! written on it. If there was anything religous in sight I mentioned Kaine's mission work in Honduras. etc. I knew to keep it short and that the introduction (first sight) was as important as anything I could say.

Our organizer spent hours picking areas, researching them on Google streetmap, and put packets together including driving directions and a suggested course map. He followed up with data entry so they had knew what had been covered and where to return to for GOTV. Literature changed as the campaign went on. He knew where to send what canvassers - I got apartments because I could handle the stairs easier than older volunteers and he knew to give me larger packets because I could cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time.

[tabbycat31]

45. Speaking as a Dem field director, I have two words to say

EPIC FAIL

[Jack Rabbit]

46. The Twit said he would run the government like a corporation

And this sounds like the corporate training I attended in my former life as a corporate peon (except it wasn't done by phone) . . .

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.

[Cha]

48. What?! Sorry, mittLies was too busy..

getting his Transition Team of bush neocons Ready to take over our White House.



http://theobamadiary.com/