Organizing For Action is the key to the Progressive machine and Obama’s 2012 re-election. Their tactics of data-mining and behavioral analysis made the difference in the election. The Republican Party has not yet grasped the nature of what they are up against. Some young Conservative techies seek to create an answer to OFA.
Silicon Valley and the GOP — together at last?
That may seem like a peculiar proposition given all the public soul-searching and dirge-singing since Election Day over the digital failure of Republicans in modern campaigning.
But a blast of cheerful California sunshine may be starting to light the way in the form of an underground gang of young, conservative hackers in the Valley assembling via a communal Google Document to brainstorm about what they can do to save the party from the clutches of tech-phobic leaders.
“There’s this myth that there aren’t any Republicans out here who are willing to drop everything to help the way Democratic hackers have,” said Aaron Ginn, who with Garrett Johnson have dubbed their nascent brain trust the Republican Stealth Mob. “We’re out here, and we want to help.”
[….]What makes this gang different from the myriad of existing GOP digital strategy firms with hanging shingles in Washington is that the Silicon Valley bunch isn’t in it for the money and they’re not as interested in political gamesmanship as they are in creating useful and usable campaign tools. They look upon the much-vaunted Obama tech team not with contempt but with admiration over its impressive sites, sleek apps and intuitive systems.
[….]
Troubles began almost immediately. He learned that the campaign’s online home, MittRomney.com, was built on an archaic architecture that required the entire site to be updated every time most changes were made. That made the site more prone to crashing and made rapid response more cumbersome, as evidenced by the lag of days before the front of the site touted Romney’s triumph in the first presidential debate.
He said his offer to re-code the site was turned down. He had been hired to manage and grow something called MyMitt, a little-used program intended to help rank-and-file volunteers raise money. MyMitt was clunky and unpleasant, Ginn said, so he laid out an $80,000 proposal to bring in four Republican computer engineers to build something new. The campaign at first was encouraging but then decided after a week to nix it.
These Conservative techies ran up against the Consultant Class. Too many GOP Consultants, like the despicable Karl Rove, refuse to realize the nature of what they are up against. I can not emphasize too much that OFA is the most formidable electoral machine ever assembled.
It’s not the Economy or Demographics , it’s Technology stupid!
Tags: OFA
