The GOP's digital deficit “The nature of conservatism

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The GOP's digital deficit

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“The nature of conservatism is about individual free-market thinking and competition and not about looking to create a strong collective for the betterment of society,” said Harris, who also managed the digital efforts for Newt Gingrich, Allen West and Linda McMahon in 2012.

“It’s almost a socialist premise. But Republicans need to adopt that collective mind-set because we are going up against a data giant and a data giant that is built by really, really smart tech geeks that Republicans simply don’t have.”

Yeah, that a real dilemma huh righties? Those 'really smart tech geeks' come from, thrive within, a high tech free market that is as competitive as any industry in the world.

And yet they choose to work for and support, in overwhelming numbers, for the Party with the 'collective mind set'. Why?

https://www.aei.org/publication/what-does-sil...erenstein/

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Pethokoukis: You’ve done interviews with some 130 Silicon Valley founders. What you’ve found is that they donate overwhelmingly to Democrats, but they have some beliefs that don’t necessarily align perfectly with Democrats or Republicans. You call them “hippies who dig capitalism and science,” pro-business liberals.

They’re big on globalization, free trade, open borders, and they’re anti-labor union, but they’re also pro-Obamacare, and believe that governments should act like a business. They have a meritocratic world view, prioritize individual creativity as a source of problem solving, yet also believe in collaboration and competition.

Why do all these free enterprise loving Silicon Valley folks vote for Democrats?

Ferenstein: The high level elevator pitch is that Silicon Valley and, broadly, urbanized professionals, represent an entirely new political category — not libertarian, not Democrat, and not Republican. I argue that they are pro-capitalism and pro-government and their belief is that the government should be an investor in citizens to make them more educated, entrepreneurial and civic, rather than act as a regulator of the two parties.

By Steve Friess
| 01/27/13 07:03 AM EST

Republicans are running a 1.0 digital ground game operation in a 3.0 world — and they know it.

At their recent leadership retreat, Chairman Reince Priebus and others sounded the bell for closing the vast technological divide that made all the difference for Democrats in getting out the vote last fall in numbers that stunned the pundit class.
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“Let’s host Skype-based training sessions and Google hangouts on campaign strategy, fundraising, door-to-door advocacy, and digital tools,” Priebus urged at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in Charlotte, N.C. “We need to give the next generation of organizers access to the brightest experts.”

He went on: “And in the digital space, we don’t want just to keep up. We want to seize the lead.”

That’s easier said than done, and insiders aren’t heartened that the most specific he got was references to well-worn online video conferencing tools.

Simply put, the Democratic National Committee has nearly a decade’s jump — and counting — thanks to innovative software for gathering detailed voter information that includes input from Democratic campaigns at every level of the ballot.

While Priebus and others repeatedly cite the technological superiority of the president’s campaign in particular, it’s unclear whether they realize the DNC itself has been building that information backbone prior to Obama’s first run.

The stakes are high. That information allowed Democrats in 2012 to identify likely voters and customize campaign messages for targeted groups — such as sending mailings about protecting reproductive rights to women under 40. In addition, they used the data to find new voters and ensure they get to the polls.

The DNC’s system, known as the Voter Activation Network is a mammoth, ongoing database that has been tracking the interests, voting histories, family circumstances and much more on more than 150 million voters since 2006.

That’s when then-DNC Chairman Howard Dean mandated that every state-level Democratic unit contribute to and have access to the same system, developing a powerful weapon that the GOP simply won’t match in the near term.

“Republicans have historically been a lot more selfish about their sharing of data and sharing of information,” said Vincent Harris, the 24-year-old GOP digital strategist who leveraged social media to put little-known Ted Cruz on his path to the Senate. “There’s no central hub. That integration is priceless, and that’s what [Priebus] needs to lead us on.”

Meanwhile, Harris warned, “Every day that goes by, we are getting further and further behind.”

Indeed, while the president’s Chicago-based geek squad earned widespread admiration and GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s online team endured some humiliations last fall, those elements alone don’t explain the poll-defying voter turnout that led to Democratic victories down the ballot.

For that, the VAN is the unsung hero.

Every contact with voters, from a door-knock that found someone has moved to a phone call that reveals a specific political issue of top concern for a particular household, is fed into the same database. Volunteers and staff for virtually all Democratic candidates from president to dog catcher add whatever they learn as they learn it, building out comprehensive and constantly refined files on millions of voters.

The VAN, in fact, was the starting point for the Obama campaign, which then applied highly sophisticated and innovative analyses and models that would help engineer its victory.

“Obama for America gets the headline, but the VAN did the work behind the scenes on a lot of local races that made the difference,” said Peter Pasi, digital consultant for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign. “It’s a culture and an infrastructure that we need.”

The VAN grew out of Democratic desperation. In 2001, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) assigned staffer Mark Sullivan to figure out a way for all Hawkeye Democrats to share voter information. Harkin and Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack were both running for reelection in 2002. Sullivan created the VAN for Iowa and it helped candidates survive what was otherwise a brutal Republican wave year.

By 2006, Sullivan had created VANs for 25 state parties, and when Dean took over the party he decided the system needed to be unified as the cornerstone of his famed “50 state strategy.”

The GOP, by contrast, has no such system, an oversight that leads to the loss of information that could be valuable to others both in real time as well as from one election cycle to the next. If, for instance, a statehouse candidate has learned that a voter’s particular worry is health care, that would also be useful for a congressional candidate to know in deciding what campaign literature to send to that home.

Or if a volunteer from one GOP campaign has already ferried a voter to the polls on Election Day, it’s best for other candidates in the vicinity to know, so as to not bother calling or visiting that person.

“We absolutely need a centralized database to record voter history, online and offline interactions and add in demographic data that we can learn from and social data we can learn from to get a full picture of our customers,” Pasi said.

Part of the VAN’s success comes from party discipline. Last summer, for instance, when the Clark County Democratic Party in Nevada briefly decided it wanted to try a different software vendor, it was quickly lashed back in line by DNC higher-ups who shuddered at the prospect that down-ballot candidates in Las Vegas, with 70 percent of the population in that crucial swing state, wouldn’t be contributing to the system.

That’s a level of commitment to a top-down approach that will be difficult for Priebus to attain for a party fundamentally opposed to forced collaboration.

“The nature of conservatism is about individual free-market thinking and competition and not about looking to create a strong collective for the betterment of society,” said Harris, who also managed the digital efforts for Newt Gingrich, Allen West and Linda McMahon in 2012. “It’s almost a socialist premise. But Republicans need to adopt that collective mind-set because we are going up against a data giant and a data giant that is built by really, really smart tech geeks that Republicans simply don’t have.”

The GOP once was the standard-bearer for this sort of data collection, but it largely ceded the ground to the Democrats following the reelection of President George W. Bush in 2004. In the era when races were won and lost on sending direct mail, when “targeting” meant reaching out to broad swaths such as “soccer moms” and when TV advertising reigned supreme, Republicans held the keys to the kingdom, said Eric Frenchman, a top digital adviser to 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

“Once the Internet democratized data, the Democrats were able to build tools from scratch to capitalize on that,” Frenchman said. “I realized [they] were playing a different game when I saw job postings for analytics experts, data miners, statistical modelers. When I see the RNC making a job post to hire people like that, I will be reasonably optimistic that something is changing. That would be a tell-tale sign.”

There were some efforts in 2012 to replicate elements of the Democrats’ apparatus, but they were short-lived, glitchy or parochial. Romney, for instance, tried to create an Election Day database program called ORCA to keep track of who had made it to the polls and who needed prodding. It was a spectacular flop; volunteers weren’t properly trained and the bug-riddled system crashed at crucial moments.

Yet even if ORCA had functioned perfectly, its information would have been available solely to Romney’s campaign. Thousands of Romney-supporting volunteers and staffers for candidates elsewhere on the ballot could have helped and might have avoided redundant voter-outreach efforts were they included.

“As far as we know, they have no shared system that’s used up and down the ballot,” said Jim St. George, managing partner for VAN, which merged with the Democratic campaign software company NGP in 2010. “I don’t doubt that Romney’s operation put technology together that allowed them to be relatively more efficient. But it’s not the same stuff that the state senate candidate was using and it’s not the same stuff that members of Congress were using.”

That efficiency can also make up for other campaign challenges.

“At some point in the 2012 cycle, somebody told me enthusiasm was down and doesn’t that worry me in terms of our ability to turn out the voters,” St. George said. “But, no, even if it’s true, our volunteers were so much more efficient and productive that we can counteract any perceived or actual drop in enthusiasm.”

The problem for the Republicans is that even if they could get it together to create their own VAN-style system and use it properly, the Democrats now have years of historic data that continue to expand. It would take years to catch up if only because fine-tuning and collecting such information is a laborious task that is difficult to hasten, Harris said.

“We better all put our egos behind us and do what’s best for the party,” Harris said. “We’re now nine months out from the 2013 election, 21 months to the mid-terms. People are saying the right things, but not much is being done.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/gop-dig...z4HETnRlG4