I love your ancedotal story at the beginning of the post. I may steal that sometime.
Here’s one problem that conservatives have. We don’t have a vision for what we want technology to accomplish. To use your example of an architect, we know we want a building and we go to an architect and say “I want a building.” The architect is just going to give you his vision of a building. What we need to do is to come up with a vision, a concept, if you will, then go to an architect and say “build me this.”
We want to use Twitter…well, because everyone else is. The same for the web, facebook, and the likes. Yeah, you can get by with that but you’ll never accomplish anything great that way.
I also like your point about liberal and conservative demographics. Liberals and conservatives are not the same politically (or any other way for that matter) so why would we try to emulate what works for liberals?

What a load of crap. You are offensive. Don’t do it again or you’ll be using a bit less technology…ie, this web site.

Moreno Valley? Who is in Moreno Valley that you would make mention of such an obscure town in Riverside County, CA? Just curious. I live about fifteen minutes away from there and would surely like to know who you are referencing.

There are lots of good points to this article and thanks to Erick for both writing an publishing it.

When I think at the 30,000 foot level all this discussion is good but for a large part the issues we face are not those of technology or hiring hadoop or R specialists, although that would be nice. What we face is making our platform relevant to society and our country. I think first we face a messaging problem.

After we solve our messaging issues within the movement we have to have a candidate who is marketable to the country. I’m not being critical of our current candidates of late, this is just a statement that should be asked of every candidate we run from the courthouse to the White House.

I think there are several companies that see the issues that we face as a movement and are working toward providing solutions to campaigns and candidates, but even as I look at companies like Craft and Engage I still am reminded that the Obama campaign organically recruited a diverse team to work in the campaign proper. Yes, there were vendors like NGP VAN, etc, but by and large most of the work was done in the campaign. Republican candidates are content with merely “outsourcing” a lot of campaign work to state party and national committee, when we see now that it’s something that a campaign must be more intentional about they’re own campaign.

Realistically I fear that the Obama Tech Machine was a perfect storm of “bought in” technologists that brought their expertise to bear on an innovative campaign strategy and doing things differently, but with the obvious goal of getting out their voters. None of the people who were at the top of the tech departments for Obama were political consultants. What we are headed towards I think is making more political consultants who say they are “big data” experts and we find ourselves in the same problems as before.

Rightly though Erick does make the point that this isn’t and shouldn’t be viewed as a savior. If you don’t have a great message and a great candidate you can use all the big data you want to only find out the inevitable.

I’ve got a degree in Political Science (from Mercer, BTW) and over 20 years experience in programming and associated technologies. But, as you noted, if you aren’t inside the Beltway, you don’t have a chance of cracking the political consulting market, just like if you don’t live on the left coast, you don’t have much of a chance of scoring venture capital for a tech business. Age also plays a factor since those of us who’re well over 30 are considered “has beens” even if we’ve worked hard to keep current on technology.

There are two other points that I didn’t see in the article.

First, many recent grads from tech schools have been well indoctrinated in leftist talking points from the one or two non-tech courses they were required to take. This can make recruiting some tech assistance difficult since you’ll want someone who agrees, more or less, with your political positions or who at least doesn’t care as long as the money is good. You may have to educate them on conservatism.

Secondly, there is sort of a scam that goes on with a lot of technology consulting. Many consulting companies are really just a slick sales team who off-shore the actual technical work to India, Malaysia, the Philippines or elsewhere in Asia. Often the quality of the work is lacking and, due to communication problems, the development speed lags and there’s a lot of back and forth over misunderstood specs and requirements. This happens in the corporate world a lot but many managers have caught onto this. In the political world, they may be less familiar with this trick. If you do go to an outside source, make sure that they have the tech resources in house, or, at the very least, will be hiring US based contractors. Hiring tech help outside the US is as bad as selling “Made in China” campaign swag, perhaps even worse.

I’m a software contractor that lives in California. I’ve contracted for some major technology organizations. Most of my work has been in internet marketing, such as optimization platforms for Google AdWords. So I feel like I can speak to this to some degree.

I knew Romney’s technology operations were in the shitter very early in his campaign, when I saw his ads showing up on Google on sites like the Daily Show and even DailyKos. That’s awful. His operations were literally pissing away money. I’ve built some systems for some companies to avoid this exact thing from happening, because any impressions/clicks you do get are likely to be accidental and low-converting. For all the gnashing that was done when the media reported Romney campaign spent 4x on Obama on TV ads because he didn’t book them ahead of time, I bet his online marketing operations were ten times worse.

This is going to be an uphill climb. Among my colleagues — typical leftist Californians — the Republican brand is just pure poison. I personally know some of the guys that worked for the Obama campaign’s technology operations and took massive pay cuts to do so. As a decent software engineer with 3 years of experience, it’s completely reasonable to get a job paying $125,000. These guys were willing to quit their jobs and work for a campaign paying half as much because of how much they believed in Obama. I’m 30. These guys were all around the same age. We are not idealistic college kids. They have spouses and some of them have kids.

So I suppose my concern is: I don’t think money will be enough to solve the problem. You need your campaign organization to drink the Kool Aid, and that applies to the technology team too. What is the conservative message to attract these guys? Yeah, yeah, we know about personal freedom and responsibility and and accountable government. But without a conservative version of Obama, can you find the conservative version of Harper Reed? Until then, I don’t think any sort of top-down solution will suffice.

This comment ought to be a Diary. On the Frontpage.
Thank you.
CW

“I see little utility for technology for the republican party as a large part of the republican voting base is old people”

OK, we will just pencil you down as an ignoramus who doesn’t know campaigns *OR* technology, or have a single solitary clue what Erickson is talking about, ‘mkay?

“The tea party movement was primary physical activism not digital activism to be the best of my knowledge”
Yeah, and your knowledge is golden, because not a single Tea Partier used Meetup, had a yahoo or google group to organize, pod-casted, put out an email blast, had a blog (like ramparts360 here in Austin), or created videos of events and posted to youtube … nope that never happened … it was all quill pens and smoke signals (shakes head, walks away…)

Item III hits nearest the mark as a critique of the copy-cat crowd. The left lives for top-down design and strategies; the right views such at various levels of distaste all the way up to wholesale abhorrence. If Obama’s technology took advantage of that organizational structure, then such technology surely cannot work for us.

Another point that does not get emphasized enough is the size of Obama’s database. I have read posts and comments by people who refused to click on ‘whitehouse.gov for fear of being added to Obama’s database. I don’t know if those fears were well-founded, but it would not surprise me. During the 2008 campaign there were a lot of Hillary folks who were appalled at the stunts that the Obama minions pulled during the primaries – particularly in the States who held caucuses instead of elections. The Obama folks went into these districts with an eye to discover – not what was permitted, but to discover that which was not forbidden. Indeed, the Obama cabinet operates very much in that mode. Is it forbidden for whitehouse.gov to add you to the President’s mailing list. Probably not.

We scoffed; we railed; we warned against this and other Obama shenanigans; largely on the basis that ‘you just don’t do that.’ Well, they did. And they won.

“We must begin developing an army of technologists we can trust. We must
curtail duplicative efforts on the right to keep building the same
widget. Yes, let a thousand flowers bloom, but stop ever right of
center group re-engineering the same flower over and over in house.”

Well put. The way this should be done is via sharing of open source base technologies and an ecosystem for tools and data that parties and campaigns share. Making each campaign pay through the nose for high-priced consultants who mark these up and re-invent the wheel is a big mistake.

The last lines said it all. The Republican Party Establishment has lost, but maintained proper decorum now for a few too many cycles. This is especially evident in the non-election, legislative battles, as well as in the entire p.r. war in the press. Unimaginatively, they’ve “…not gone down to the opposition’s level…” too often. This has sounded good at the time, but it really is a subjective call, especially in battle and war. And what level is preferable in losing? Eventually the laughingstocks, losers, they have maintained their dignity… …really? The establishment is whistling past the graveyard now, hoping to – again – emerge in default. It’s happened before…

You flag a lot of very important issues here but I think there are two more that you need to consider:

1. The Romney campaign acquired this received wisdom that they could “buy the best tech money could buy” by shopping around, paying top dollar, going to a variety of consultants and providers — and not keeping it all in one house under one rubric as the Obama For America campaign tech did.

And that proved to be fatal, as there were too many fragile links, too many sub-contractors, not enough adult supervision, too many egos not managed properly and just plain negligence if not outright sabotage. Yes, I realize that all indications *from the Romney tech people themselves who are the least ones to tell the truth about it now* say it wasn’t hacking or sabotage in the classic sense — and likely it was not. But is any kind of independent examination really being done, by press or by the RNC itself, about what really happened with Orca? Because sabotage doesn’t always have to take the form of a “plot”; it can take the form of spite and contempt rising to the surface for various reasons and no one pushing back.

This “buy the best money can buy out of the marketplace” may seem like sound free enterprise economics, but it was disastrous when the Romney campaign did things like hire Obama’s (!) 2008 campaign director of analytics to do their analytics, and when the main consulting company they hired and spent the most money on had Al Gore’s 2000 campaign technologist.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/was-al-gores-dev-in-charge-of-romneys-aps.html

I notice among your list of recommendations isn’t this one: “don’t hire even Obama’s people if they are good technologists under the mistaken belief that if paid enough they will do good work for us”. Such technologists in fact may be professional, but it is actually a stretch to demand that everyone in the technology food chain through a wide variety of service providers are going to put their entire heart and soul into a Republican campaign *when they are Obama voters, and especially if they worked directly as technologists for Obama or Gore or others*. Obama didn’t hire ex-Republicans to do work for him; it’s got to work both ways.

This ought to be obvious; this shouldn’t have to require so much argumentation. Yet I find geek forums endlessly in denial about this, and refusing to admit that by and large the coder contingent in Silicon Valley tend to lean leftist or libertarian — and tend therefore not to vote for mainstream GOP candidates. In fact, they voted for Obama or Gary Johnson.

I think this harsh political reality has led to a number of grave errors as you’ve outlined — Republican candidates just nervously grabbing at whomever hangs out a shingle with the words “Twitter” or “SEO” or “A/B” testing on it and pretends to be a serious technologist.

It means that specifically Republican digital shops with Republican donors at the head or on the board, and Republican clients, aren’t getting enough scrutiny when they mess up not one but two of Romney’s apps, to enormous ridicule in the mainstream media.

The GOP has to get deadly serious about the tech piece of it. That means that it does indeed have to be inhouse, and not outsourced to a lot of separate shops where the quality control and the political loyalty are not managed properly. That’s the one thing the GOP simply must do as Obama did.

There are things that Obama did wrong that we never hear about — like GOTV programs with lists of people in Ohio who were NOT Democrats and were NOT going to vote for Obama — and really resented “progressives” from New York City phoning them up and telling them to go out and vote for Obama. The GOP can do better than that and doesn’t have to play that game.

Republican volunteers got very, very frustrated with the Romney campaign’s centralization and failure to do parallel processing instead of serial processing literally and figuratively. The GOP has to sort out the problem of young libertarians who are very good at tech but now leaving the GOP and condemning it for its fixation on lifestyle prescriptions like “focus on the family” and antagonism to gay rights or birth control. That’s both a technological and organic problem, but the GOP has to attract more libertarians especially among women and minorities who share some of the GOP’s basic political values such as free enterprise and entrepreneurialism, and give them the visible leadership positions instead of the tired menu of lifestyle conservatives who only represent some of the potential GOP candidate voters.

2. The digital manager in such an operation is extremely important. Yes, real technologists are needed, but even technologists — or especially technologists given the very obvious political demographics and connections — need management and supervision. Even if he were an ardent classic Republican (and I’m not sure he wasn’t; he could have been more of a libertarian) Zac Moffet was wrong for this job because he spent all his time on highly visible bashing of the Obama campaign’s methods and how he was going to do it all differently. When he failed miserably and even admitted that he hadn’t watched how Orca was farmed out and failed and hadn’t insisted on and supervises the national field tests, he kept clinging to his self-righteousness and telling us “the numbers were good, even though we lost” and continuing to insist on his methods and distracting from his glaring failures.

More than anything, the GOP has to hire a geek who has both the brashness and guts and beliefs in the party to succeed for it, but also the humility to focus on the job at hand and not see it as a a resume-builder for himself, and as a chance to shine with a negative PR campaign of the sort the Democrats run on Youtube.

In searching for the right tech person, the GOP can actually capitalize on some of the negatives of the Obama tech side. The Obama campaign attracted geeks from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Adobe, whatever, the best in the business, working for a fraction of their Big IT salaries because of their ardent belief that Obama meant Internet freedom and support for Silicon Valley. But the Obama for America geeks then parted from their ostensibly opensource cultish belief by now holding the tech and the names so close that they won’t give them even to the DNC. That’s a weakness that the GOP can play on by announcing from the beginning that their tech and lists, while managed in one closed shop, will be available for the RNC and all candidates. Obama has alienated some candidates already who have realized they are not going to get their hands on the GOTV lists and tech even though they supported Obama.

As I’ve explained,

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/harper-reed-and-the-soulessness-of-the-new-machine.html

Harper Reed is an autocrat who believes in the autocratic “benign dictator” open source cult and even the Singularity, and openly ascribes to methods that if used in government would be disastrous for democracy. And I believe the GOP and libertarians when they get serious can find a technologist who doesn’t have these undemocratic cultic beliefs and will be better for the candidate and ultimately better for our country. Think of the technologist as a compressed and coiled version of the government you would like to see and you will take it just that seriously, and not seeing the geek as merely hired help.

I think the Romney campaign could have started by harm reduction — not hiring Obama’s actual technologist from his past campaign, or various digital shops filled with those leftist California geeks (and Obama voters) that you describe — as I’ve explained in my own lengthy post here. That’s just a minimum of quality control that wasn’t done, in the mistaken belief that geeks who are very good at their jobs can work like a caterer would and just supply the meal without their actual beliefs getting in the way. Oh wait, even catering didn’t work out so well for Romney because one of the water-bearers filmed him speaking about the 47%, enabling Mother Jones to turn it into a wildly viral and vicious meme.

I think the GOP can find loyal geeks, but they have to get out of Washington and and California and look in Texas. That’s where their voters are in the high tech industry there were all the servers are. That’s where Gov. Perry, a failed candidate but voted for by geeks in his state. The GOP should plan now to appear at SWSX this coming year with an improved new (and more diverse) young tech look and explain that they are the party that helps entrepreneurs have the freedom and kind of limited government they need to succeed.

Yes, I had that same problem. I must have sent 20 emails trying to sign up and it never appeared in my inbox or in my spam file. My pleas for help with web staff went unanswered — not even with the standard reply message standard for all help desks now that say “we got your request for help and we’re working on it”. They should farm out to Get Satisfaction if they can’t handle it here. I finally managed to get an account on this name although there is no reason why my real name couldn’t have been processed, I had never been on this site before the elections. If the GOP wants to hang on to first-time Republican voters like me. they have to become more responsive.

Obama had Google on his side and Eric Schmidt personally showed up to slap all the coders on the back, whether they worked for Google or not, they were in his friendship links. The GOP has to befriend a Big IT company like Google, and maybe Facebook is the one to work at. Recruiting one of these big platforms to the cause has to be viewed on the same level as recruiting gun owners or auto workers or Catholics or married women. It’s a demographic that the GOP has to get on its side.

The big data experts are extremely important, but they are worthless without the story crafters who develop “narratives” like “the war on women” or “voter suppression” that can be pushed to the carefully identified demographics found in Big Data.

While the GOP has serious problems of its own demographics and failure to reach out to young people, women, minorities, this problem cannot be seen in isolation from its lack of tech-savvy leadership — the two will have to be inextricably linked. The big data guy and the story gal that they get for the next presidential campaign have to be really good at what they do AND really believe that the Republican Party offers a viable alternative to the increasingly extreme leftism of the Democratic Party. If the GOP will be facing off against Hillary and Chris Christie, they will have to perform a miracle in this regard.

All that um open-source goodness in VAN — and yet Obama for America will not turn over their programs or lists to other Democratic candidates let alone to the DNC. They are holding it close to reward only “their people” around the Obama cult of personality.

You bang on evil consultants who don’t let the lists go and keep it as proprietary information. But Obama for America did just that very thing, so it’s not really about Republican consultants but about how the overall campaign’s “big data” is managed not only as a technical proposition for a political one.

Open source software isn’t a miracle and is only as open as the open-mindedness of its managers.

And with the constant advertising of VAN by its makers and supporters, we have to ask what consulting fees they would expect to enjoy with this lovely free software. The meter is always running — and with balloon payments — when you get free software but need geeks to run it for you.

Belaboring the point but the message doesn’t need to be homed, if it can’t reach through to the people in the blue states you want to convince. We need a ground game, our own activist organizations to protect and serve the communities you want to reach. We need to invest in people, out of work college students in the target demographics. Hispanic, Asian.

Yes, but we can’t just start from scratch, and this is why tools like Gravity and rVotes are so important.

But when it comes to making tools that “reflect” freedom and diversity and democracy and grassroots participation, I’m not exactly sure the RNC is the place to do that. After all, once we kick into campaign mode, it’s only natural that the whole thing becomes sort of top-down, though Chicago managed to micromanage perfectly well, which strangely, made it seem bottom-up.

I should think it’s the entire campaigning structure and organization and operation, from Iowa to Election Night.

What???

Physical activism needs communication and coordination, and the web is one of the best mediums for those two essential things.

Story crafters like Planned Parenthood and the Justice Department?
Maybe we just need a good pollster. And maybe a Frank Luntz. Plus a Lynton Crosby.

The RNC didn’t want to use technology which could be snatched out from under their noses in 2016? Dear me, I wonder why.

“In fact when I object that Twitter is tilted to the left, as its devs
are leftist and they packed the recommendation list with their leftist
friends, geeks argue with me that in fact there are numerically more
conservatives using Twitter now.”
Both are true. Alas, much to the New-Tech media, from yahoo news to buzzfeed to TPM leans left. Recommended sources on Flipboard and Pulse (used on mobile) include Guardian UK and Huffington … but it’s not a monopoly, RedState is there. Some of these sources have become the new lamestream media in their bias.

“If you believe these media memes to be false about the inherent liberal
tilt in technology, then please supply the names of people you think are
the conservative technologists who illustrate your point.”

Me. I am. I am not the only one.

You don’t have to hire a liberal to get someone who can do data analytics hadoop jobs on Amazon clusters (like Obama campaign apparently did). There is nothing inherently liberal about social media, nor inherently conservative about talk radio. Yes, we can use the same tools as they do.

“Open source=closed society.” You dont get open source. It’s the most cost-effective way to develop widely reused software. Its pro-capitalism.
We need an open source ecosystem to share campaign infrastructure.

In 2014, there will be 10,000 state and Federal campaigns and elections. 10,000. How many wheels will they re-invent?

Well, that’s a good example — “me” — as far as it goes, and I actually know a few others, but it’s not good enough — there is no “thought leader” or “influencer”.

Of course there is everything inherently liberal about social media and I’ve outlined it above in numerous ways, but in brief: no “no” vote (that’s the first thing that normal people try to correct in every single liberal platform); beta test favouritism; banning/muting functions. I’ve studied leftwing and rightwing blog sites a lot; some of them allow no comments; these tend to be on the left.

If you don’t want to hear it from me, hear what the inventors of Drupal say themselves about their own handiwork — they say it is “inherently progressive”

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/03/dropping-the-drupal-dope-on-the-us-government.html

The liberals hired to do analytics hadoop jobs did not burn with passion to help Romney the way Harper Reed burned with passion to help Obama. So it’s not good enough to hire just nerds and it’s not just tech.

I sure do get open source, having been soaking in it on the Internet for more than a decade and participating in open source projects and beta testing. It isn’t cost-effective at all — this is one of the big shills of the OS gang. I’ve been on many a Drupal website that turned into horror stories of huge budgets — and ask Fast Company about what they paid for their Drupal disaster.

Here’s a good news story cutting through the BS on OS:

http://absorblms.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/how-one-organization-abandoned-a-free-open-source-learning-management-system-and-saved-a-pile-of-cash/

I use OS myself. And yes, please don’t tell me that “this blog” or “the Internets” are all based on OS. So what? The *closed-minded dictatorial culture* of OS; the cultishness around it and the hegemonic insistence on its use — THAT is the problem, and particularly for something like a political campaign.

First that “sharing ecosystem” has to be built into the human system of governance offline in the organics. Then the software that best meets its needs can fall into place.

If there is a mixture of open source and proprietary solutions that work better in this or that setting, great. There shouldn’t be religiousity about this.

One of the things that I think we should do is to form a corp, solicite investors and buy or create a tv network that is unabashedly conservative/libertarian. I would gladly invest in such a venture. Then we become the counterculture to the left and start fighting fire with fire. We start ridiculing the left for the idiots that they are and give the next generation something to aspire to.
We have been lamenting the fact that the left owns the media, we are free marketeers, lets buy some.
I think that we investors would make money at it.
I will throw 100 dollars in the pot right now.
Erick, you can make this happen. I would like to be on the board of directors, (in my dreams).

When you’re in January in an election year, you do start to get a little paranoid.

Planning should have started way before this year, and preferably, if the RNC were that concerned (with the long-term view in mind), they should at least have done it in-house or something, replicating, at the very least, the 2008 Chicago operation. They, understandably, didn’t want to use outside technology, but they also couldn’t be bothered to create and develop their own, and that is a far greater problem. Not just paranoia, but procrastination.

Erick, your column begs for me in my second ‘off topic’ response to it; to remind everyone that considers this subject of a couple of things.

First, would, and have I heard, a Mark, Glenn, Rush, give slightly more than cursory acknowledgment to the need to bring our “technology” up to standard (and that’s about it). I have not heard any conservative talker advocate for technology so absolutely amazing that it would ‘sell’ a “conservative” candidate that doesn’t really know what conservatism is, to a lot of conservative voters that don’t really know that they are conservative…though, on the ‘technology front’ that is what we were lacking during the Nov. election. What we were deficient-in was something that we would not objectively even allow ourselves to ask for.

Secondly, Ronald Reagan, with ‘only’ his message, bonded to his electorate like syrup-on-a-waffle without the need for commensurate intermediary technologists. Notwithstanding that those were different times, he overcame ‘what was there’ in opposition. I submit that: ‘what was there’ in opposition then, was different, but was necessarily as formidable as ‘what is here’ in opposition today, and that nothing can stand in the way of an effective communicator. Those that remember the great communicator will see his ‘answer’ as not needing any hint of a ‘solution’ to get there. I saw an undeniable bonding with a growing audience in Mr. Santorum’s campaign just before the wizards of smart ‘assured’ him out of the race.

So Erick: to what degree do we enter the ‘kidding-ourselves’ category with your addressment.

Yes, and if we can sell our opponent as a-little bit worse if that’s possible, our non-story will gain even greater legitimacy. I foresee someday winning on all fronts, except the one that counts. This subject begs for a gadfly…

Wedge issues will not work for Hispanic voters for the time being.

I know that “self deportation” sounds great on paper, but I will tell you first hand that when a *legal* immigrant hears that, it means ‘make the life of Person X, who I know and is illegal, as close to living hell until they have no choice but go back to [wherever he came from]“.

The problem is that where they came from, is often, a living hell. As a nationwide policy, it’s not going to work. It may shift illegals from Arizona and Alabama to other states that are more friendly, but eventually, it’s never going to cause them to shift back to Mexico or wherever in large numbers. And the side effects, especially on children and family members who are probably legal anchor babies and such, is socially harmful.

There isn’t going to be a wedge issue that will turn this around.

It’s not nearly as narrow as it looked to be on election night. It’s bigger than both of Pres. GW Bushes wins. He won just over 51% of the popular vote, it looks like.

It was a fairly close race, but since we can now believe the statistics and polls, it seems fairly certain that excepting debate #1, Pres. Obama never broke a sweat and in fact handily won re-election despite the worst economy in 50+ years.

If we couldn’t win this one, with a cash, conditions, and suffering advantage we have problems.

Our best long term hope is that that Obama coalition demographics don’t translate well to another Democratic candidate.

What non-story?

Rubio may be sympathetic to the cause of amnesty, but his version of the DREAM Act is not that bad, yet, though it could certainly do with a few tweaks.

Really, it’s a bit silly to suggest that embracing progressive technology means embracing their ideology and “story”.

That “story” lost us the election on Nov, not the lack of technology.

What I’m saying about Reagan’s unstoppable success applies to ‘ability to articulate a conservative message’ today. Though the bully-media could inhibit it in the long-run, that message was only tried shortly by Paul Ryan at and around the convention a’la Palin.

It was definitely exacerbated by it.