The best explanation I have seen is that BO's six month barrage of negative ads left swing state voters very jaded, and disgusted with both sides. Remember how Republicans were talking up their early vote turnout, and jeering that BO was wasting resources getting high propensity voters to the polls during early voting? Romney on the other hand was going to let the Republican high propensity voters get themselves to the polls on election day, and worked on low propensity voters during early voting.
Turns out that disgust at the months of ads, mailers and knocks on the door had moved many previously high propensity voters into the low propensity voter category. BO's folks understood the situation, heck, they created it. So they cajoled their turned off (formerly) high propensity voters to vote during early voting. Romney left his (formerly) high propensity voters to show up on their own on Tuesday, and far too few of them did.
Agreed - big tactical mistake. I worked on project Orca - poll watched at my precinct in Butler County, Ohio, with the assignment to update who voted from their master list of those who had not early / absentee voted, the concept being to enable them to focus on people who still needed to vote on election day, eliminating making calls to those who had already voted earlier in the day. I don’t know if they had any success with the program - total disaster from my perspective. Another volunteer was able to get logged into the system (smartphone app) but was only able to get about 20 names in before it crashed on him. I was not able to get through all day - even after several calls to the headquarters where they would try to fix things - never worked! They had 30000 volunteers spending election day doing this - probably was sabotaged, just don’t know, but bottom line they could have got a lot more votes if we had spent our time just calling people, or better yet focusing on early voting. Can’t rely on the Repub’s to make it on election day, so need to adopt the Dem’s approach to get as many out early as possible - that’s pretty clear.
Agreed - big tactical mistake. I worked on project Orca - poll watched at my precinct in Butler County, Ohio, with the assignment to update who voted from their master list of those who had not early / absentee voted, the concept being to enable them to focus on people who still needed to vote on election day, eliminating making calls to those who had already voted earlier in the day. I don’t know if they had any success with the program - total disaster from my perspective. Another volunteer was able to get logged into the system (smartphone app) but was only able to get about 20 names in before it crashed on him. I was not able to get through all day - even after several calls to the headquarters where they would try to fix things - never worked! They had 30000 volunteers spending election day doing this - probably was sabotaged, just don’t know, but bottom line they could have got a lot more votes if we had spent our time just calling people, or better yet focusing on early voting. Can’t rely on the Repub’s to make it on election day, so need to adopt the Dem’s approach to get as many out early as possible - that’s pretty clear.