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Putting merit aside, there's quite a bit to the Republican National Committee's game plan for the next few years, some of it rhetorical, some of it structural. But listening to Reince Priebus and reading the report he released yesterday, it's clear the party is prepared to heavily invest to close the "digital gap" with its Democratic rivals.
That certainly seems like a sensible idea. What's controversial, however, is who the RNC is teaming up with as part of its efforts. The Wall Street Journal reported the other day:
The Republican Party is working with Silicon Valley investors on a venture, backed by political strategist Karl Rove, to create a digital platform for targeting voters and donors, an effort that is adding to tensions between the party's establishment and its insurgent wings. [...]
The Silicon Valley venture, led by former Bain & Co. executive and private-equity investor Richard Boyce, with Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy serving as an adviser, is part of a core team working with the RNC to develop a central digital campaign tool that all Republican candidates and organizations can use in future elections.
The venture has won a prominent backer in Mr. Rove, the former White House adviser, who presented the group's plans last month to a who's who of Republican campaign groups.... The Rove-supported venture hasn't been distilled into a legal entity, and participants say its mission is still being refined. But one executive involved said the intent is to create an interactive platform with multiple applications to digest the GOP's trove of data on voters, so that campaigns can better identify, persuade and motivate supporters.
It's not altogether clear whether Rove has endorsed a tech venture established by others and is now encouraging his party to embrace it, or whether Rove was directly involved with the venture's development.
And while those details certainly matter, there's an overarching question that arguably matters more: why in the world would the Republican National Committee still be listening to Karl Rove?
I seem to recall Rove humiliating himself on Election Day 2012, not just with a bizarre on-screen tantrum, but with a truck full of cash Rove spent with precious little to show for it.
"The billionaire donors I hear are livid," one Republican operative told The Huffington Post. "There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do ... I don't know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing."
Conservative activist Richard Viguerie said at the time that "in any logical universe," Rove "would never be hired to run or consult on a national campaign again."
That was less than five months ago. Now, the Republican National Committee is eager to get back on track, so it's investing in a Rove-backed venture.
Because his other ventures have such a good track record?
In 2000, it was Rove's idea to keep George W. Bush in California in the campaign's waning days, instead of stumping in key battleground states. Bush lost California by a wide margin, and Rove's strategy practically cost his candidate the election.
In 2006, after nearly getting indicted, Rove's sole responsibility was overseeing the Republican Party's 2006 election strategy. He told NPR in late October that he'd found a secret math that gives him insights that mere mortals can't comprehend, and soon after, Democrats won back both chambers of Congress in a historic victory.
And in 2012, Rove's Republican attack operation spent nearly $400 million and lost just about every race it contested.
But in 2013, the RNC is ready to start spending again, investing in the kind of modern tech infrastructure it'll need to compete. That Republicans are turning once more to Karl Rove is a development that probably makes Democrats very happy.
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"The more things change, the more they stay the same"!
Actually Rove is trying to build up a tech base to prevent being hacked again when he tries to steal an election. "It should have worked...it would have worked except for that damn Anonymous"- right Rove. Never forget it was Rove who was responsible for Mike Connell's (his tech guru) murder (not accident) because he was about to roll over on Rove...was threatened by Rove...left a note saying if I'm killed it won't be an accident...and then died in a plane crash. ?Rove believes anything is fair and all that counts is winning...but he was stopped in 2012 by being hacked by Anonymous. Hahahahahaha. Never trust a Rove.
They don't need a ground game like we do, their base always shows up...
The important thing the establishment conservatives have is their broad database of voters and social media contacts. If you are running data driven political techniques, whoever owns the data mining resources and the database has the power. The GOP will have some advantages over the DEMs, and one is that they will have far less hesitation to gather and leverage information that deeply intrudes on privacy. If a facebook change allowed the GOP to mine information on your friends list, do you think they would immediately seize the opportunity to gather as much info as possible before the hole was closed? You bet they would.
As for the GOP vote calculation, 2012 proved the old Bush formula doesn't work. Now they know they need more than their base of voters, and that traditional advertising blitzes won't buy them the middle. Alternate messaging could have positioned Romney in a way that could have taken much more of the center. Using OFA techniques employing numeric and social media methods to identify and focus efforts on persuadable voters, Romney could have won.
Of course, there were counters to such ploys, but the main problem was that Romney sincerely had, and sill has a low opinion of the intelligence of voters- honestly believing along with his Yes-Men that he could etch-a-sketch his image in the swing states.
Rove is simply reaching for a more effective etch-a-sketch mechanism. Dems have to recognize that OFA opened a pandora's box and demonstrated some electoral nuclear weapons technology that is replicable. It is only a matter of time before they reverse engineer what the Obama campaign was doing, and use it against DEM candidates.
One silver lining is that unlike a wasteful arms race, the by product of this sort of electoral arms race is an mass of voters more closely engaged with political issues. I don't like centralized impersonal aspects of it, but it doesn't matter whether we like it or not. It provided a decisive edge, and so this is what we will see more and more in future campaigns.
The problem I see with your analysis is that you're assuming Romney could have gotten the nomination without the nutter rhetoric and vicious position on immigration. Remember, the big thing that started to sink Perry with the GOP base (before his "oops" moment made him a laughingstock) was his defense of his state's in-state tuition for children of undocumented immigrants.
And while I don't underestimate the ability of Republicans to catch up technologically, that's not enough to replicate what the Obama campaign did. What people (especially journalists who like shiny websites) tend to forget is that the key element of more effective persuasion is face-to-face contact. The technology serves the goal of targeting that contact and making much more efficient use of volunteers. Without the army of volunteers, all they'll get is more targeted mailers and robocalls, which will still leave them way behind.
Perhaps it's different in some places, but in all the places I've been campaigning, Republicans just don't have that culture of volunteering. The rule always is that Republicans have more money, and we have (way) more volunteers. The only army of volunteers they've ever had is evangelicals, and they tend to be, shall we say, harder to get to focus on the message a campaign wants.
I tend to be an optimist, but I'd be happy if the GOP thinks Obama technology alone is the magic bullet. Combined with their army of grifters keen to skim whatever they can from party coffers, it's likely to be a huge waste of money.
To be fair, the GOP bench is not that deep.
Or different.
And the kind of techno-geeks who are Republicans are certainly as fifth-rate as the "celebrities" (Ted Nugent? Stank Williams Jr.?) who are Republicans, so getting cutting edge work in digital technology is like getting cutting edge cultural expression. Ain't gonna happen.
Crap, no matter how you dress it up or digitize it, is still crap.
What shall we call this new venture? Digital lying? If a Bain Capital guy is involved you can bet on it. When will they realize it's not the messenger it's the message. It's your policies stupid.
If Bain is involved maybe they will outsource Rove to China.
Watching people too stupid to know how stupid they are (or even that they're "below averqage") is amusing.
"If Bain is involved maybe they will outsource Rove to China"
Marty
We should be so lucky.
While wealthy Republicans rework their schemes to milk America, Rove, being a Republican, reworks his schemes to milk them.
It's quite fitting, really.
I concur with you and joca41 - the plutocrat third of the taliban/teaparty are happy bilking anyone, even their own. Plutocrats and theocrats never believe the monster they create will turn on them.
Act I - Rove; Look, if you want to recoup the money I, I mean WE lost in the last election, just give me some seed money to start a new business we can sell shares of to our gullible base. We'll clean up.
Act II - Bankrupt the business with huge loans (the money split between Romney, I mean Bain and Rove, never meant to be repaid) leaving stockholders with the empty snipe bag.
The answer to all of your questions, Steve, is the Madoff Effect.
I think you're missing the point here. Karl Rove may have spent a couple of hundred million dollars in the last election without actually electing any Republicans, but you can bet that a nice percentage of those millions ended up in Rove's pocket. I'm sure this new tech venture will also be very lucrative for Rove, even if no working code is ever produced
....why in the world would the Republican National Committee still be listening to Karl Rove?
Just look at the people at CPAC that they had speaking and cheered. They love losers.
Is the RNC doing everything in their power to provoke the Tea Party? Keeping Karl Rove in the game? That's just illogical...
So............Bain & Co. plus Karl Rove are teaming up to tell the RNC how to establish and run their new digital platform.
Sure - Go For It - Absolutely!
After all, they were so successful the last time these guys tried to win an election.
[Insert sarcastic tone for all the above.]
Best thing that could happen to the Democratic Party.
Is it possible that Rove is a Deep Cover Liberal? :)
Good luck with that! :)
So, let's see.
Big Important Project to build Big Computer Database and Software Thingee from scratch? Check.
"Advisory board" to identify vaguely defined goals and functionality?
Project management by people who are subject matter specialists, not actual computer specialists, who will interface with marketing pros rather than engineers? Check.
Vast sums of money waiting to flow into coffers of vendors creating massive incentive for marketing people to concoct elaborate lies? Check.
Yeah, it's all there. I'd say the odds of this turning into giant black hole for money that produces nothing more than terminated contracts and an orgy of bitter mutual recrimination are 2:1. And, if it does produce an actual product or products, I'd say the odds that a) they'll be obsolete on the day of introduction and b) perform substantially less well than existing off the shelf products, are 4:1.
The "digital divide" between the parties isn't about computers, i-phones, and the rest of the hardware side of technology. It's about people, and the way they employ that hardware.
As long as the Republicans put more stock in having a small number of huge donors, viewing that as a substitute for local organizing efforts involving millions of individual contacts in key districts, any technology gap will remain.
Grifters gotta grift
First prototypes for the Robot project, a wind up modeled with simplified intelligence, able with enough digits on one hand to hold a pen and sign legislation, and carry an assault weapon in the other just in case you don't like the reaction of children while you read about a pet goat hiding being a Bush. I can also hold a donation collection plate with digital check and transfer capability.
no matter how crazy they are, no matter how terrible their candidates are, the gop has an endless supply of money, money money. i have seen statistical data that says that the candidate with the most money wins 94% of the time. 94%! so the gop doesn't have to field honestand, smart candidates. they just need to raise a hell of a lot more money than the democrat does. they can lie, change their mind 4 times in 24 hours, they just need that money. do i think that some of the 20 or 30 somethings are starting to learn about the lies the gop spews. maybe. but i think the dems need to hammer these people over and over until everyone gets the message. they need to be truthful and consistant. over and over. thats how you beat someone who has a lot more money to spend than you do.