Campaign Sources: The Romney Campaign was a Consultant Con Job

RedState ^ | 11-9-2012

[Sir Napsalot]

(More Project Orca fallout, and Romeny being blindsided)

If you spend your time watching politics and haven’t been hiding in a deep depression since Tuesday, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about “ORCA.” According to the Washington Post, ORCA “was designed as a first-of-its-kind tool to employ smartphones to mobilize voters, allowing them to microtarget which of their supporters had gone to the polls.”

There is now widespread condemnation of the program as being sloppy and poorly deployed.

.......

Specifically Targeted Victory, FLS Connect, and The Stevens and Schriefer Group. While the Romney campaign did work with other consultants, they were apparently not part of the problem.

They say that the truth is the consultants essentially used the Romney campaign as a money making scheme, forcing employees to spin false data as truth in order to paint a rosy picture of a successful campaign as a form of job security.

......

According to all the sources I spoke to, the breakdown of the campaign can be traced to the primaries. One source saying “they looked at the guy who could raise the most money in history as a ride” adding that “money no longer matters. That’s the problem,” also referring to the campaign overall as “the biggest political flim flam of all time.”

[freekitty]

BS, Romney doesn’t appear to be a stupid man. Stuff like this is written to pound the final nails in his coffin and/or the conservative movement.

[WildWeasel]

Sadly, this is probably why Axelrod was so confident the Obama campaign would prevail. ORCA was not a secret and the Obama campaign knew it would fail.

Really, I thought Romney had smart people running his campaign, but this is a political blunder that will go down in history as one of the worst of all time.

[Will88]

I don’t know any details of the Romney campaign’s expenditures, but the few times I’ve looked at expenditures for previous campaigns, there were some pretty amazing amounts being paid to ‘consultants’.

It might be interesting to see a summary of the Romney campaign expenditures when available.

[J.Deere Man]

Volunteering in my precinct to get out the vote. We were told to use this great new software program(after we were given password access) to help identify voters. Never could get into the program. Thought it was just me and my lack of computer literacy. Turns out now it was a fiasco.

[napscoordinator]

I agree.. I personally know 7 people who voted Obama in ‘08
that voted Romney..

Well Obama had millions of college students who didn’t vote for him in 08, but were old enough to vote for him in 12. Romney was told to go to college campus’ but he said “it wouldn’t be worth it”. How crazy can Romney be. Even if he would have gotten 5 percent of those NEW voters on college campus’, it might have made a difference.

[tanknetter]

Agree. Romney actually came close enough to winning that the botched implementation of ORCA can explain why he failed in critical states without realizing it. There were 30,000 volunteers staged for GOTV. They were overwhelmingly located in the critical states like OH VA and FL.

Also consider that Obama was acting like he knew he was about to lose. He now seems pretty shocked that he won (I think his emotional breakdown at his thank-you event with campaign staff was genuine)

I’ve done big ERP rollouts. SAP and Peoplesoft. It usd to be that the average SAP implementation took 24 months and had a 65% chance of failure necessitating an effort restart (companies, after having learned lots of expensive lessons in failing tended to get it right the second time around).

ORCA seems to me to have been too complex and ambitious ... Classic “big bang” implementation, which are incredibly risky and not best practices ( it’s better to evolve existing systems or implement incrementally — that’s why Agile and similar methodologies are on the rise, waterfall on the decline)

The failure here isn’t really with ORCA, but rather with the apparant lack of a fallback operation. That’s just plain nuts, but not indicative of griffer consultants using the campaign as a cash cow. Romney did too well for that to have been it.

[Sir Napsalot]

>>> BS, Romney doesn’t appear to be a stupid man. ...

Nobody’s saying Romney a ‘stupid man’. And you may be right about now post-election insiders tearing one another apart.

BUT, from other people reporting and participating in ORCA, there is truth that the system was riddled with problems, and ‘consultants and firms’ fed Romney hogwash materials. If not an outright Chicago inside job.

These con men must be identified, tarred/feathered.

[PLMerite]

When the Zombie Apocalypse comes Rove should be careful as he could feed a family of five or six.

[socialism_stinX]

I don't buy all this stuff about consultants just profiteering off the Romney campaign. The last Gallup poll before the hurricane had Romney with a 5 point lead among likely voters. This poll was not part of a "con game". Rasmussen's last poll had the election close to tied in the popular vote. Something unusual and unexpected happened on election day that the pollsters absolutely did not expect to see, and I don't buy the argument that the election was stolen through vote fraud. Obama won by large margins in several of the swing states that were supposed to be very close, and he won by too many votes to explain that by fraud.

It seems like the entire science and art of polling needs to be re-examined and revised by firms like Gallup and Rasmussen. They missed something big in this election and so did Romney's consultants.

[socialism_stinX]

In fairness to the Romney campaign (and speaking as a software developer), I’m sure they ran a very large number of tests on the Orca system. But it’s difficult to simulate the number of simultaneous users that you have on election day and there’s no possible way to simulate all the possible technical and user-related problems that can occur on election day. My take on this is that the GOP needs to use a simpler and less-sophisticated system next time that doesn’t rely so much on real-time data from field operatives with smart phones, but just gets the basic job done and enables volunteers to contact all the likely GOP voters.

[rbg81]

Point is, Romney was sold a bill of goods and all he knew was there was an app that would change the election in his favor. He probably asked one question, “will this work?” And probably got back, “of course it will work.”

---

I think you are probably correct re: Romney's level of involvement with this. I am kind of split. On one hand, running for President is extremely grueling and he was probably one of the busiest men on the planet for the last few months. So....I can understand where he might have a hands off approach to something like software. On the other hand, he marketed himself as a can-do executive. It reflects poorly on him that such a critical cog in his political machine could go so haywire. If he only asked one question, then that was way too little.

Of course, there were many factors why he lost. Blaming it on any one is disingenuous at this point.

[spodefly]

I never was a Romney fan, but like most people with their eyes open I knew he was a better alternative to Obama.

But one of the reasons I had any hope at all for a Romney Presidency was because of his “skill” at picking and working with talented people that know what they are doing.

Apparently, that delusion is off the table now based on the above story.

[Sir Napsalot]

I can’t figure out how, if this is a scam or even just incompetence, they managed to pull wool over the pollsters either.

[x]

This is the reverse of the Nate Silver phenomenon. Silver wanted an Obama win and made predictions that supported what he wanted. Those predictions (it appears) were accurate, but what if he'd wanted a different outcome? What if his model revealed that his candidate was losing? Wouldn't he tinker with his model? Wouldn't he try to keep his favorites candidacy alive?

So it was with the Romney people. They weren't going to say at the outset, "Hey we're going to lose." They'd try to encourage, rather than discourage their supporters. They'd choose polls and models (subconsciously perhaps) that portrayed their candidate in a favorable position. You could argue that they needed a devil's advocate, somebody to scare them into working harder and doing more and taking steps that they may have figured they didn't need to take. But I don't see them as terribly different from other losing presidential campaigns in history. Maybe they were better than most (Mondale, Dukakis, Dole). They weren't good enough to win though.

Last election's viral sensation -- "Romney People Badmouthing Palin" -- came from somebody who worked for a firm that had worked for McCain. It was never clear that those "badmouthers" were really "Romney people" or just longtime McCain loyalists who wanted to blame Palin and let Romney take the blame for their attacks. FWIW I note that Ben Howe has his own media company. No word on who his clients are.

[freekitty]

It was probably was hacked. Obama didn’t run a better campaign. He stole the campaign by cheating, fraud, lying, smearing and stealing. It’s that simple. Doesn’t matter a hoot what people say unless they tell the truth. I don’t know if Romney threw the campaign or not. He and McCain were not our chosen candidates. McCain most likely threw the election so another conservative, Palin, could take the fall as McCain is no conservative. This was probably done so he could save his a$$ and career.

[freekitty]

I agree and agree with you about Obama’s acting role. The simple answer is fraud big time.

[goldstategop]

I wouldn’t blame the staff - blame the candidate - Mittens made poor decisions, allowed Obama to define him early, never hit back and he had no game plan for getting out the vote in a very tight election.

He seemed intent on coasting to the presidency and the arrogance of Republicans and the Romney campaign in their belief in a landslide win was the ultimate form of hubris. People will be asking how they blew this thing. Barack Obama was beatable but he easily beat the weakest candidate in GOP history - a liberal who never much excited the conservative base.

This was the guy GOP elites picked to contest Obama. As a result we are saddled with Obama for another four years. Thank Karl Rove and Ann Coulter for the final result!