Posted on 01/21/2023 9:49:40 AM PST by lasereye
While working on combat veteran and Gold Star husband Joe Kent’s campaign for Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District, I knew by early October we were in trouble.
We had overcome a $10 million deficit in the primary—owing almost entirely to Republicans backing the incumbent—but that came at a cost. We had exhausted our $3 million war chest and went into the general election broke. Our Democratic opponent emerged from the primary unscathed with about $3 million cash on hand. We had about six weeks before voting began and we were ultimately outspent 6-to-1.
While Nancy Pelosi’s super PAC spent a half-million dollars to boost the Democrat, we scrambled to find outside support.
We learned that the Republican National Committee was investing in field programs in Washington state and reached out, only to get a startling reply: Because our campaign had elected to use a third-party voter data vendor and door-to-door app, the RNC would not provide ground support as a matter of policy.
I was dumbfounded. Perhaps they were concerned that valuable identification data would be lost if we used another program. But I was still rebuffed when I offered to return all of that data to them so they could match it back into their system.
And unfortunately, we went on to lose by less than one percentage point a race that very easily could have cost Republicans control of the U.S. House. Most heartbreaking was that a few extra field organizers would have helped us get the 2,629 additional votes we needed among the mostly rural 80,000 Republican voters who failed to cast a ballot.
Apart from the lack of wisdom behind the RNC’s policy, the situation raises another question: Why did we elect to spend several thousand dollars on a third-party data and app solution instead of using the RNC’s free voter data-and-door app?
The answer illuminates a problem that goes well beyond a single U.S. House race and reveals a systematic failure affecting every Republican candidate and party organization in the country.
The RNC is responsible for two technology platforms that it makes available to state parties and campaigns: voter data, which is managed by their designated vendor, Data Trust, and online fundraising, which is managed by another designated vendor, WinRed.
It became clear to me that the primary goal of Data Trust and WinRed isn’t to help Republicans at all but to enrich RNC-connected consultants.
These platforms are a dangerous and malignant infection on our party that is costing us elections and ripping off our candidates. The time to fix this problem is now.
Until then, voter databases were developed by a hodgepodge of small vendors, state parties, and campaigns.
But then-RNC Chairman Haley Barbour imagined a way of internalizing and nationalizing within the RNC a voter database for all 50 states. I had the good fortune of cutting my teeth working with the team that executed Barbour’s vision.
While our product was not as sophisticated as the data mined, psychographic mapped voter data products of today, it was substantially better than what the Democrats had at the time and, in clutch elections that were decided by just a few points, this more efficient and intelligent system carried elections for Republicans all over the country.
In 2008, the technology-driven campaign of Barack Obama and innovations in the DNC closed the technology gap at a time when GOP voter data operations began to stagnate.
Voter file development shifted to an outside organization, Data Trust, and since then, quality control and innovation have gone sharply downhill.
In the 2022 cycle, I worked on 16 different campaigns all over the country. And what I hear from campaigns and county parties on the front lines of the battle for our nation’s future is universal disgust with the quality of the “free” voter data provided by the RNC.
One gubernatorial campaign I was helping out switched from RNC data to a third-party vendor for their volunteer phone program and saw their response rates go from 60 percent to 80 percent.
County parties are notoriously short of cash, but one in Virginia still spent money on third-party voter data for a special election because local party officials were tired of their direct mail bouncing. Another county in Wisconsin is doing the same thing because their volunteers chronically complain about being directed to knock on the doors of homes where the target voter has long since moved away or died.
And while the RNC mandates states to “buy-in” to their voter data to receive funding, California’s party sought and obtained a special exemption from this rule so it could spend tens of thousands of dollars on voter data from a third-party instead of relying on the free data RNC provides.
While the interfaces from third-party vendors are fast, engaging, and intuitive, the two interface options for RNC data, GOP Data Center and Delphi, look like they were designed in the ’90s and have the speed of a dial-up internet connection to match.
A relatively simple task like exporting a household mailing list for all Republican voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election but not in the last midterm takes a couple of seconds on third-party alternatives. The process on the RNC’s platforms is cumbersome and slow.
The RNC’s designated door-to-door app, Campaign Sidekick, is also a failure. I recently spoke with the voter data specialist in a large and important Wisconsin county who shared that he had spent dozens of hours developing “walk books” for volunteers in Campaign Sidekick that targeted specific school districts. His relief was indescribable when I showed him a third-party walk app that could do all of that work in minutes.
Another consultant I work with spent days trying to get the Campaign Sidekick team to load the correct data into the app so volunteers could get started on a critical statewide race. Because all this work had to be done by the app developer’s data team and they were jammed up at the peak of the 2022 election season, volunteers had to cool their heels for nearly a week.
When I showed this same consultant an alternative app that allowed the campaign to manage all of this data directly and immediately get volunteers into the field, he vowed never to touch Sidekick again on any campaign that could scrape together the money to pay for this alternative.
The nightmare of working with the RNC’s voter data and app is a universal story around the country. Talk to almost any county party chairman or campaign manager. The upshot is the same: this platform and the RNC strong-arming Republicans to use it is costing us elections.
The RNC’s designated payment processor, WinRed, is a for-profit company that built its platform on top of another for-profit payment processor, Stripe. All of that profit means high fees on campaign donations of nearly 4 percent.
This is a much higher fee than a campaign would pay by setting up a merchant account for credit card processing that would charge less than half that and often as little as 0.05 percent per transaction, depending on the card type.
Not only are the fees high but the donor data isn’t secure. A close friend who was running for office told me of a family member who made his first ever campaign contribution through WinRed only to get spammed by phone calls, texts, and email messages soliciting more money for other campaigns and causes.
It gets worse. Stripe is a woke tech firm based in San Francisco. In the 2022 election cycle, of the $392,000 that Stripe employees donated to federal candidates and PACs, 98 percent went to Democrats while just 2 percent went to Republicans.
The danger of building the party’s fundraising platform on a payment processor openly hostile to us was made abundantly clear when Stripe shut down President Trump’s WinRed account, cutting off his ability to raise money to fight his legal battles in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Stripe shut down Trump’s WinRed account because, according to the firm, he was “inciting violence” with his rhetoric. But according to leftists like the employees who run Stripe, all Republican policies incite violence against homosexuals, minorities, immigrants, women, etc., thus no Republican is safe from having his or her finances cut off with no notice from these left-wing Big Tech extremists.
And what did the RNC do in response to their own payment processor shutting down President Trump’s account?
Absolutely nothing. Stripe remains in place under WinRed, growing ever richer with each Republican donation and using that money to help fund Democrats.
If you think that taking more than twice the standard card processing fee was excessive, hold on to your hat.
An average of 90 percent of most contributions prompted by emails and texts that are processed by WinRed goes not to the campaign the donor believes they are supporting but instead to fundraising consultants. This “RevShare” mechanism is built into WinRed and delivers the consultant’s cut instantly without the donor ever knowing—on top of the 4 percent that WinRed collects.
It’s even built into the “panels” a donor sees after making an initial donation (allegedly to one candidate) and encouraging that donor to give to additional candidates.
Is the RNC willing to look their donors in the eyes and tell them, “Yes, of that $100 you donated, using the platform we built, your candidate only got $6 while our favored consultants took $94”? How would donors react if they knew that was happening to their contributions? How would they react if they knew the RNC was facilitating that theft?
Alternatively, how many elections would we have won if our candidates weren’t being looted by this WinRed-enabled theft?
The poisonous root underlying all of these problems is that the RNC prioritized generating profits for consultants over helping our candidates win. There is no limit to what the RNC can do if the leadership is determined primarily to help their friends make money.
To improve our party’s voter data, the RNC should audit the quality of several third-party vendors and then contract with the best option to create a customized, branded portal that siloes our candidates’ data. Supplement that by building out an internal team at RNC that can provide support and training in deploying the data. Similarly, audit the available apps and contract with the best app maker to create and expand a special version for the RNC to deploy.
Break WinRed away from Stripe and instead partner with a merchant account provider so that each campaign is issued its own merchant account that’s virtually impossible to cancel and delivers the lowest rate possible. Fund the operation by asking donors to chip in a few extra dollars at checkout.
End the RevShare scam by building an online cooperative where our candidates can exchange lists and then split revenue not with consultants but with each other in a transparent way.
There are countless other ways an RNC not focused on profits (or pissing off greedy consultants) can boost our candidates. One of the biggest consultant scams is pocketing the 15 percent rebate media outlets pay them for ad placement. The RNC could build out an ad placement platform that ensures when a candidate buys $100,000 in TV or radio ads, they’re really getting $100,000 in ads.
Response of the Candidates for RNC Chairman The power to solve these issues lies almost entirely in the hands of the chairman of the Republican National Committee. I’ve shared my criticisms and solutions with each of the two candidates running and gotten different responses.
When I spoke with Harmeet Dhillon, she understood the problems, was as outraged as I was, and was also eager to come up with solutions.
When I raised these issues to the current chairman, Ronna McDaniel, at the RNC winter meeting two years ago, she responded by ignoring me and telling a closed-door meeting of the RNC members that everything was fine.
While some of the solutions I’ve suggested are novel, the problems they address are well-known to candidates, party leaders, and campaign operatives in every state. And for the first time in a dozen years, the Republican National Committee members will have the opportunity to choose a chair who can do something about it.
I urge them all to consider their choice carefully and to put the future of our party and the country first.
Matt Braynard is a political operative who has worked on five presidential campaigns and served as Donald Trump’s director of data and strategy on his 2016 campaign. He also served for three cycles on the staff of the Republican National Committee in 1996, 1998, and 2000.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Polling data tells the RNC if you are winning. This is data on which voters they should contact.”
You have no idea what you are talking about. In a modern campaign the 10,000 of thousands of people you talk to at the doors provides much more insight than the 1000 you poll.
They don’t collect data on who they talked to and send it back to the RNC for analysis. That’s ridiculous. The RNC is not analyzing data from door to door conversations.
Again I suspect you work for or with one of the vendors.
“They don’t collect data on who they talked to and send it back to the RNC”
They 100% are, and the data gathered affects all elements of the campaign.
Priming rural voters, "if only we'd had eleventy billion dollars and a cool app" is excuse-making: those old farm f-----s, probably more RINO-ish than you'd care to admit, slaves to ag welfare, didn't vote in the primary! And you thought you were going to make them vote MAGA in a mail-in ballot for the general? What, at gunpoint? LOFL!
What part of this don't you simps understand?
This whole post would have been much better dedicated to the fact that MAIL-IN BALLOTING IS NEVER GOING TO ADVANCE THE CAUSE OF AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL CONSERVATISM. NEVER.
Mail-in ballots are a deeply-researched Marxist subversion of the US Constitution, and proven to give the Democrats every. single. advantage. every. step. of. the. way.:
Mail-in ballots are WRONG. They are morally wrong, they are rationally wrong, and they are unconstitutional.They are void on their face and must NEVER be given credulity by the GOP. NEVER!
Fetterman is THE raison d'etre to eliminate mail-in ballots altogether forever.
His handler's strategy to cover-up his waterhead imbecility, and hand off ONE pre-debate interview to a stoogette who was in on the cover-up, was specifically to build the mail-in ballot lead -- abetted by fraud -- before Fetterman was found out, in the debate, to be a drooling Baby Huey, a freaking real-life orc, but in no way shape or form qualified to be a United States Senator. (Here is an opportunity that a real GOP would have seized upon: NO ONE challenged Fetterman's 'lack of capacity' to serve as Senator, by the clear evidence from the debate, Fetterman is non compos mentis to take the Oath of Office! And he's only going to get worse!)
Given that 1.2M mail-in ballots were received before Election Day, the ballot edge was absolutely established by the ballots mailed-in before the debate, as there is no restriction on how early you can request a mail-in ballot in PA. Presumably that option to request validates ad hoc shortly after the primary counting is completed. PA's primary was May 17, 2022, so PA probably completed primary counting, oh, say, sometime before
Memorial DayJULY. Funny not funny. Sorry not sorry.Offering ballots 4-5 months before an election is ABSURD and on its face UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
It is simply NOT possible for any voter to make a REASONED decision on ANY candidate HALF A YEAR before a general election.
That is literally the win margin, plus an extra 40K for cover. Mail-in ballot fraud in a purple state with bad, unconstitutional election laws, that NEVER favor Republicans. He never had a chance. That is not a Republic, that is not representative democracy, and that is not constitutional.
The Real reason Joe Kent didn’t win is because Kevin McCarthy didn’t want him to win because Kent would have joined with the conservative caucus of the Republican party and vote against McCarthy.
McCarthy only cares about McCarthy. Fortunately McCarthy has to kiss the button of the group who wanted someone else. They are pulling McCarthy’s strings. If he does follow his promises, the Speaker’s Chair will be vacated, and McCarthy knows it.
You’re a bald faced liar. My wife has gone door to door. She doesn’t collect data. I can’t imagine what “data” could even be collected that would be more accurate than polling data - your original ridiculous lying claim.
You seem trollish. I believe you’re connected to one of these vendors. Or maybe you’re connected to the RNC. One or the other.
“You’re a bald faced liar. My wife has gone door to door. She doesn’t collect data”
You were working on an incompetent campaign then.
Every canvasser should have walk sheets (or and app) and the results of that conversation recorded. Those sheets are then data entered once you get back to HQ.
This story you’re telling is idiotic. It implies they have some database set up at the RNC to enter thousands of conversations and draw some kind of conclusions on each race from that. It would require thousands of man hours or maybe a very sophisticated AI program to look at all of them and draw some useful conclusions, and they still could not be more useful than a simple poll.
Give it up lying cretin.
Washington is mandatory vote by mail.
No republican can win...ever...regardless of what the rnc does or doesn’t do.
“This story you’re telling is idiotic. It implies they have some database set up at the RNC to enter thousands of conversations”
Yes, that is exactly what exists. It’s called VoterVault. Thousands of campaigns across the country data enter millions of canvass results, then a team of data scientists take that data to get campaign insights.
As one example, when it is GOTV and you are told to remind all likely Republican voters to vote, how do you think it is determined who should be on that list?
My background, I’ve managed several campaigns. Even the small ones that I’ve been involved in have the tools to do all of this.
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