The Wednesday before the election, Mitt Romney sent a special message to volunteers about a special project his campaign was working on: “With state of the art technology and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on election day.” What is it they say about something that sounds too good to be true? It probably is. That was the case with the Romney campaign’s “Project ORCA.”
The idea behind Project ORCA was simple, albeit far too complex in execution. Romney’s Boston headquarters wanted a way to track who had been to the polls in swing states, and who had not. It was the most complicated GOTV (get out the vote) effort in GOP history. Volunteers in swing states would be assigned polling places. They would be given lists of every registered voter assigned to that polling location. Those voters would be reported on to Boston via a web application when they arrived to vote, and if that failed, via phone or, as a last resort, voice. Volunteers were to log in to the application, use their assigned pin number and password, and begin reporting on voters who had come through their polling place by ID number. A source familiar with the campaign told me that Boston would initiate calls and visits to those who had not yet gotten to the polls.
The story of how monumental a failure Project ORCA was on Election Day was first reported by a volunteer, John Ekdahl, on the Ace of Spades blog. After tweeting the article, I was contacted by several other volunteers who were eager to explain in greater detail just how many things went wrong with Project Orca on Tuesday.
I spoke with one volunteer in a rural Virginia county who had a similar experience to the blogger on Ace’s site. Shoshanna McCrimmon signed up to volunteer on Romney’s website several months ago. She was contacted by Dan Centinello of the Romney campaign and underwent online and phone training that lasted for several hours in order to volunteer locally on Election Day. Because of secrecy concerns, the application itself was inaccessible until the morning of the election. From the outset there were failures of organization.
Shoshanna wasn’t given the credentials necessary to gain access to the polling place and was told to arrive when the polls opened at 7. A few days before the election, she was emailed a PDF packet, which she was meant to print out, containing the names of all of the registered voters at her polling place and instructions. Her location’s packet was only dozen or so pages; Ekdahl’s packet was over sixty. The packet was supposed to contain credentials, but they did not. Shoshana’s email to the Romney campaign the night before the election about the lack of credentials went unanswered. When Shoshanna arrived on time at 7 a.m., she learned that polls had actually opened an hour prior.
Unable to test her pin number and password until that morning, she discovered, only after after she arrived at the polling location ready to work, that her pin was invalid. She spent until 2:30 that afternoon on calls to Boston every 45 minutes trying to get a new one. She attempted to input the voter information via phone dial-pad–the first backup plan–but her invalid pin number was useless. Plan C, calling in to Boston and verbally transmitting the information, was also a wash. The same phone number for dial pad and voice reporting was given–there was no option to ask to speak to Boston directly after calling in.
After finally getting her pin number in the late afternoon, Shoshanna attempted to log into the site. She had been sent an email from the Romney campaign that morning (after polls opened) telling her that cell phones were often not allowed in polling places, after she was previously warned not to forget to bring her cell phone in other emails. Thankfully, her polling place allowed her to use her cell phone. The website, on a secure server, was inaccessible from her cell phone (Ekdahl explains why in detail). By this point hundreds of voters had passed through Shoshanna’s polling station, unreported. Nevertheless, she went home, retrieved her laptop, and thanks to the pastor at the polling place (a church) she gained access to a locked wireless network. It was only at that point that Shoshanna was able to access ORCA, with only a few hours left before polls closed.
Shoshanna’s experience was far from unique. Starting in the early afternoon, reports were coming in from across swing states that ORCA had crashed. That morning, when Shoshanna was on the phone with Boston, she was told the system was crashing, unable to withstand thousands of simultaneous log-ins. The system had never been stress tested and couldn’t handle the crush of traffic all at once. Thousands of man-hours went into designing and implementing a program that was useful on one day and one day only, and on that day, it crashed. My source familiar with the campaign described it this way, “It was a giant [mess] because a political operative sold a broken product with no support or backup plan. Just another arrogant piece of the arrogant Romney campaign.”
The operative in question, Dan Centinello, Romney’s Deputy Political Director, was Shoshanna’s only point of contact with the campaign. After a two-and-a-half-hour conference call with volunteers across the country, Shoshanna still had questions about minor details about ORCA and volunteering at her polling place. Her emails were answered within 24 hours, always by Centinello. There appears to have been no delegation on Centinello’s part, and every question sent was answered by the ORCA project manager personally. It’s likely that if this was taking place with the thousands of volunteers in Project ORCA, Centinello was spending hundreds of hours answering basic questions from volunteers that could have been addressed by lower level staffers. This time would have been better spent, I would argue, testing the capabilities of ORCA and its servers and testing the application on small groups of trusted volunteers, especially elderly ones who might have difficulty with its interface (which, on election day, they did).
One of the most basic tenets of conservatism is a loathing and mistrust of big government and bureaucracy. Project ORCA was the embodiment of big government, top-down management. Information was sent by volunteers in swing states across the country to Boston, and those in Boston were then tasked with assigning other volunteers in those same swing states to contact those who had not yet been to the polls. Boston was, at best, a detour and an unnecessary middleman in the GOTV efforts, and when that link in the chain broke, Romney’s GOTV effort crumbled on the most crucial day of his campaign. One of the most successful components of Karl Rove’s GOTV efforts with George W. Bush’s campaigns was his small-government ideological approach. Each volunteer was tasked with personally getting a handful of voters from their area to the polls, voters that they were already familiar with from their church, their children’s schools and their community. Instead of this strategy, Boston was the hub; information was sent there and GOTV assignments were delegated from thousands of miles away by Romney staffers largely unfamiliar with individuals and communities. At Ace of Spades, Ekdahl described the organizational approach of Project ORCA: “The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters).”
Was ORCA’s failure the reason why Romney lost Virginia by almost 116,000 votes, Ohio by 103,000, Iowa by 88,000 or why Florida is still, days later, too close to call? It’s impossible to know what a Romney campaign with working GOTV technology would have been able to accomplish. Ekdahl explained that with the failure of Project ORCA’s organization and its later meltdown on Election Day “30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc.” The possibility that all of the efforts of Romney’s campaign, all of the enthusiasm, went unharnessed and dormant on Election Day when they could’ve at least led to a closer election result, if not a victory, is becoming beyond frustrating for thousands of his staffers, for the millions of Americans who gave their time and money to elect Mitt Romney president as they come to learn just what a disaster ORCA seems to have been.
Romney suppressed his own vote. Splendid, beautiful irony.
Absolutely delicious isn't it?
They tried to be super honest, so no one could accuse them of anything…..and the DEMS have cheating down to a science. The Chicago machine of thugs is getting more and more powerful, just wait for next time. Why bother voting anymore. We are becoming a banana republic, with the old Nazi George Soros in Charge.
This is par for the course with these folk. There is a reason why I call it the mASSgop — Romney himself is a decent guy but as to some of the schmucks he had working for him, well…. n nThe mASSgop is the ultimate "top-down" authoritarian establishment that shut down a college Republican Club (that had a bigger budget than they did) because they couldn't totally control it, that has lost the past two Governor's races with similar foolishness, and in the last election didn't even contest over half the seats in the state legislature. n nThe attitude the mASSgop has — which unfortunately was reflected in the Romney campaign, is that Republicans should simply shut up and vote for whom they tell us to because our other choice is the Democrat who is worse. What they fail to realize — what Romney failed to realize — is that an increasing number simply don't bother vote at all. n nRemember that if the same number of poor white males had voted for Romney that had voted for McCain four years earlier — in absolute numbers — Romney would have won.
And in the meantime, the kids got on social media and cell phones and made it work like a charm.
Barack Obama…the luckiest politician in history… add a hurricane, a jilted NJ governor, a moderators incorrect debate assertion, and a campaign's incompetence to the list his accomplishments…
And Romney supporters thought this man could run the country, and create jobs! Duh!!! The better man, organization, and ORGANIZER WON!!! (pay attention to details, that's where the Devil is)
Amazing that you attribute it ALL to luck and not the skillful execution of a well run and thought out campaign.
i can't disagree…i supported Romney's policy ideas over Obama's. The fact that they messed this up so badly doesn't give me confidence if my man won that he could have got his policies implemented in a positive way…
true- Obama is one of the luckiest politicians to date. Sandy clearly played a major role and so did the turncoat Christie. Add to that maybe the best political team in the US and you have a win. BUT- the gods of politics are very capricious- let's see what they wil lcook up in the next months…..
This article nearly made me tear up. Not out of sadness. Instead, deep satisfaction. I voted for Obama. This is probably as good as Shadenfreude gets.
Just wait. I voted for Johnson.
Almost makes you think *god* wanted Barack to win. bwahahaha
Leaving campaign planning solely to local volunteers is not the lesson to be learned here. A strong technology organization can supplement local efforts in a meaningful way – for GOTV, for fundraising, for message targeting, and for social media.
The Obama for America campaign had a very strong technology organization, run by programmers, not political science majors. From a distance, it looks like the Romney campaign had a weak technology organization, run by people who didn’t know how to lead a development project.
It’s irritating that the GOP has not developed the tech infrastructure to run a modern campaign, while the Obama campaign recruited tech talent aggressively from Silicon Valley. While talented dot-com staffers are largely liberal, and the Democratic party does have an advantage when it comes to tech recruitment, there are more than enough conservative programmers and product managers to compete – if only campaigns and the Republican infrastructure focused on finding and funding them.
When a component of your ideology is that expertise is by its very nature elitist and not to be trusted, it's hard to get good help.
Hmmm. Sounds like someone hacked Orca. Gee, I wonder what highly technological campaign, employing 100 programmer, data miner, hacker-types could have done such a thing…?
No, it doesn't sound like someone hacked ORCA. It sounds like it didn't work.
Utah has a major infrastructure for Information Technology and plenty of conservative Republican software specialists, like my son, who works fir Overstock.com. Romney could have staffed his tech support THERE, where the geeks would have had a personal stake in making it work. Romney was ill-served by his Boston campaign team.
"Just another arrogant piece of the arrogant Romney campaign.” This couldn't have been put better. n nThe deep story of this campaign lies in the fact that the Obama organization put together a nationwide campaign of 100,000 volunteers, and relied on proven methods for identifying and getting out their vote. n nThe head of Bain Capital tried to go high-tech, and was sold a bill of goods by one of his own. It failed, colossally. This failure came at an astonishing cost. n nKarl Rove spent $400 million, and had no impact whatever. Romney went with robots, and blew it. n nObama, the community organizer, went door to door on Election Day. The outcome was inevitable. It's what happens when a political party tries to substitute money and robots for human beings on the ground.
The 2006 Kerry Healey loss is reflective of what happened. They essentially tried to win with money at the expense of having no volunteers — and the ones they did only did it because they "had to" in order to have a chance at internships and such in DC. n nThe untold story of Romney's 2008 effort was the extremely high dollar to vote ratio — that he really didn't get his money's worth on that run — and I believe his staff this time was more expensive than Obama's. Lots of really expensive "professionals" who don't know how to win an election….
I know it sucks that Romney lost, but believe me it’s for the best. All Romney could have done was stall, slow things down, buy more time. He could never make a fundamental change in the downward spiral your country is in.
Obama won and with him at the helm there will be no slowing down. He’ll step on the gas and when the economy goes into free fall everybody will understand who is responsible. 2008 is going to be child’s play compared to what’s coming. There won’t much wealth to distribute, it’s going to be poverty for all. Let him own it, the hyperinflation. The proliferation of nuclear weapons. The rise of the Islamist Middle East.
You can’t be responsible and slow it down, the left wont let you. You need to let the process run its course until it strikes disaster. There is no other cure.
In other words, "worse is better" as that other "community organizer" Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov said?
The Romney GOTV operation simply was outclassed by the Obama effort. Unfortunately the Republicans seriously underestimated their opponent. They believed their own propaganda.
Not the embodiment of Big Government, this was the embodiment of Big Business. And was precisely the sort of thing one should expect from a Bain alum.
Mitt Romney's campaign apparently blew it big time—but it still should not have made such a dramatic difference. Anti-Mormon bigotry still seems to remain the number one reason.
Oh, nonsense, David. n nThe epicentre of anti-Mormon bigotry is not on the left. It's on the right — the far right, particularly among Christian evangelicals. Only VERY recently did Billy Graham de-list Mormonism as a cult, if only because most of his own supporters vote Republican regardless. n nIt must be said that a good many rational people wonder about entrusting the nuclear codes to someone who believes that a tribe of nautical Hebrews settled the New World with Mormons 3000 years ago, and that Jesus strolled around Missouri, of all places. n nBut many people in public life have bizarre religious views. Mr Romney believes in the existence of Planet Kolob. Tom Cruise believes in the existence of Planet Xenu. And so it goes. n nNB: it may be noted that Mr Romney lost BOTH Massachusetts and Michigan, the states that know him best. AND: it is now reported that more Mormons voted for W than voted for Romney.
AND lost New Hampshire, which essentially is a Boston Suburb — and more Republican.,
It appears that no more than 2% Mormons voted for Bush 43 than Mitt Romney. In others words, perhaps a statistical tie! Indeed, many people were probably wary of the peculiar theology of the Mormon Church. Your answer actually supports my theory that Romney would have won were he a Baptist, Methodist, or a member of another Protestant mainstream denomination.
he might have run if he ran a political campaign as Obama did and not, in the stretch, a complacent marketing campaign based on the complacent strategy of a victory in the bag.. imo this whole Morman thing is an excuse.
Yep. Lots of folks spent Mitt's money. He didn't get much for it, either… n nAnd if Mormonism was an issue, in highly Catholic Massachusetts it would have been an issue in his earlier Governor's race back in '02 and it wasn't even raised to my knowledge.
Romney did not loose the elections; the Rep lost the election. nParochialism will undermine the Rep. This election is a warning.
well he shed a proportion of his own base, underperforming McCain–that could be partially explained by the larger demographic and cultural shifts, but not necessarily
He p***ed off a good chunk of his base — his slash & burn approach to the primaries had to hurt him with the GOP base — and his "well, I still am better than Obama" mentality didn't wash when folks simply didn't bother to vote at all… n nI still say that if he had picked Allen West as his VeeP candidate — and just let West loose to campaign on behalf of both of them — he would have cleaned Obama's clock. West is a very smart man, very disciplined, and very down-to-earth (he uses an Army rucksack rather than briefcase to carry things across/'around Capitol hill). And a Black man who grew up in "Inner Atlanta" during segregation. Obama wouldn't have stood a chance….
Well they did their best to drive the libertarians out of the party. I voted for Johnson.
The Republican Party has, in most areas, very few actual tentacles into the community except the traditional "silk stocking" areas and the business community. "Bubbaland" belongs to the Democrats. Unless that is fixed there is no next time.__
I don't know about the rest of the country, but the mASSgop does its best to boot "Bubbas" out of the party outright.
I know people that would be professional enough to give their best to both (like I know 1st Amendment lawyers that will take on left-wing and right-wing clients indiscriminately) but it does raise questions. n nIn fact, your description of a bunch of marketers and execs plus two (2) coders is at least as much of a red flag: I would never hire such a company for IT work.
Hmm, sounds more like "crony capitalism" than like "free market" to me.