Yesterday, I wrote (here) about Obama’s winning ground game. So, it makes sense to look up Mitt Romney’s game for comparison-sake. His campaign’s on-line voter turn-out approach was code-named ORCA, and by all inside accounts it beached itself on election day resulting in a whole lot of white votes for Romney/Ryan that went un-netted (to exhaust the whaling metaphor).
The Boston Globe describes the detail (here), but the plan was to station 30,000 field workers at key battleground polls on election day to track which of the Romney faithful were actually voting, versus sitting at home. In response, eight-hundred Romney staff were at the call-center in the TD Garden (new Boston Garden) prepared to telephone the slugs, as reported from the field, and talk their sedentary white-behinds into moving to vote.
It seems, however, that there were some problems with the execution, if not the plan itself. Many of the field workers were not properly credentialed to carry out their task of figuring out who was or was not voting, and were turned away by poll authorities. On top of this, the actual system for reporting crashed for at least ninety minutes in the middle of voting, throwing the whole she-bang in Boston and across the country into chaos. So there was limited Romney ‘call-and-push’ to match the Obama ‘knock-and-drag’ I spoke of in my Obama ground game post.
Unsurprisingly, Romney failed to mention this facet of failure, on the part of his campaign, in his election post-mortem analysis. Romney said he lost because Obama gave stuff to minorities and women (here).
After hearing his sorry excuses for losing, more than a few Romney supporters (check out the comments here) seemed glad their guy lost. Wow!
James C. Collier
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