I was 'data captain' for cumberland county democrats during the Obama campaign and I got an up close and personal look at votebuilder (which is their database/application suite). as a professional systems analyst, lemme tell ya - this thing is well designed. literally anyone can use it - it's UI is slick, it's well thought out, it's lightweight so it'll work on any computer out there (via any browser connection). I could pull up lists of local democrats, sort out the ones we'd contacted and who said they'd help and within 5 min I had a list printing out of people to call and schedule for election day. I ended up teaching people to use it, and no matter the skill level of the end user, they ALL could do basic entry tasks and basic database functions with minimal training and a bit of practice.

the tech backing the Democrats these days had some very big brains behind it's design.

TheOther:
So, does he take it with him or does he try to use it to take the House in 2014?

well, look at it this way - the voter lists we built this election are going to be used as the basis for GOTV efforts in 2014. we know who we reached, who came out to vote for us and its likely that if we reach out to them again, we could get them to vote Democratic party in the mid terms.

plus, Limbaugh and the GOP are spending their time right now yelling at voters and calling them stupid. because THAT'll work out so well for 'em in 2014, right?

The black guy who can't even run a lemonade stand just kicked your ass, and you didn't even see it coming, and you still don't believe it.

Zerochance: homelessdude: there is at least a couple of stories each day as to the ineptitude of the Romney campaign in general.

One of my favorites so far

Link

FThatFA: "For starters, this was billed as an 'app' when it was actually a mobile-optimized website (or 'web app'). For days I saw people on Twitter saying they couldn't find the app on the Android Market or iTunes and couldn't download it. Well, that's because it didn't exist. It was a website."

As someone who works in web development part of every year, I encounter plenty of clients who don't know the proper term for something and refer to it with a different term they've heard before but don't actually understand--and then blame me for not immediately knowing what they meant. (See also: The "My staff sent me an internet last Friday, and I only got it yesterday" part of the infamous "series of tubes" speech.) It's not so much that they don't know the proper terminology--after all, they hired my company to handle that stuff for them--it's that they're convinced that they do know what they're talking about, so I must be the problem. I'm much happier working for people who describe what they want rather than the ones who use a few buzzwords and expect me to know exactly how they're (incorrectly) using them. And yes, when we've created mobile-optimized versions of clients' sites, several clients refer to them as the "app" we built. *sigh*

/Sorry for the rant, but that bit struck a nerve. Such stupidity is not confined to any political party.

SouthParkCon: I don't want to go to off-topic but I've recently been slammed and ridiculed for saying "Progressive"

Don't use the word "progressive" as a pejorative term and you won't be ridiculed.

On the voter protection end of things, the campaign had a smart phone friendly system for incident reporting so that they could see in as close to real time as possible if a systematic problem was developing somewhere in the country. Let's just say that there are lots of reasons why Florida could have been a heck of a lot more of a clusterfark than it actually was if the campaign hadn't been really on top of issues.

And, because the Obama campaign apparently respects competence a lot more than Romney's camp did, the people recruited to do poll watching weren't just random party loyalists. I spent the last two months working to recruit lawyers in Florida to man the poll watching operation. Poll watching is the mostly thankless, (hopefully) boring grunt work of the voter protection efforts on a campaign but we got highly paid attorneys to take the day off, even though that's thousands of dollars worth of billable hours, to sit at a precinct and observe.

halfof33:
Weaver95: I was wondering how you were going to deal with the massive rejection of the GOP agenda...any ideas on where you think you'll be going next?

Looks around... wait, is this the thread where we pretend that the Libs won the House?

Oh, I get it, the libs.... they won the house!

It is opposite day!

Hee hee!

/i noticed you dodged the question, Weavs, the answer is that Illinois is going to be the first state to go broke.

so the GOP lost the white house, lost the fight against gay marriage, lost the fight against the legalization of marijuana...LOST several key US senate and house races, lost a number of key state races...but you're considering election night a GOP victory because the Republicans sill manage to maintain a thin majority in the House of Representatives?

innnnnnnnnnnnnnnteresting.

you don't consider this to be a massive, coordinated and irrefutable rejection of the GOP agenda?

cptjeff: Angry Drunk Bureaucrat: That being said, the biggest complaint we got was that people were hit multiple times by multiple different organizations with whom we had no contact (i.e. the Unions and the PACs). Unfortunately, there was no way we could have avoided that.

As somebody who did some work for a union backed PAC, we got complaints about you too. Just sayin'.

the key point here is that NOBODY was saying they got hit up by the Obama campaign, the unions AND the Republicans.

Article is exactly correct. I'm cool now that the election is over. Good jerb, you guys. If I'm still alive, I'll grouch atcha come 2016. Till then, kudos and congratulations. You deserve it. I hope that things get better for everyone. We'll see.

Muta: Weaver95: i'm still floored that the GOP apparently had zero logistical abilities. none. Team Obama was tightly run and we knew what we were doing, how we were going to get there and come election day, damn if it didn't play out exactly as engineered.

Do you think the Dems can maintain that advantage through the 2020 election? I don't see the Republicans losing their derp they lose that election big and get redistricted.

well, gerrymandering is going to be more of a problem with state/local elections so getting out the vote is going to be possibly less effective than it was for the Presidential election. that said, I think the state strategy needs to focus more on letting the GOP hang themselves AND balancing efforts to get voters motivated to vote for you. that could be difficult though. budget constraints are more of an issue down here on the ground.

SouthParkCon:

While the butthurt is going to have to run its course, I wouldn't assume that is what the RNC will be depending on in 2014. I know Fark see's the Tea Party and GOP as a bunch of racist backward hillbillies but the reality is that a lot of people getting involved on the Right just don't have the experience that the Left has in community organizing. That is beginning to change, will it make a difference? I would hope so. I know a vast majority of Farkers would support a Democratic super-majority however like the old saying goes "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" and for the record I wouldn't support a Republican super-majority either.

i'm going to disagree here a bit - the Right does know how to organize. they're not entirely stupid, and the tea party has organized/motivated teams of voters to get out the vote and pull down powerful members of the GOP that the baggers felt needed to go. so its not that they lack the knowledge or experience. what's ripping the GOP up is that 1. they are sloooooooow to adapt new technologies and 2. the GOP has serious control issues. past a certain point you have to trust that your regional leaders know what they're doing and you have to give 'em free reign to get the job done in their own way. the GOP has big problems trusting regional directors with that level of responsibility. they want to maintain control at the top and have a very strong central control that calls all the shots.

I was always expecting something like this would come to light when the dust settled. Not that I had any specific info about what it would be specifically, just that one hallmark of Team Obama over the years has been an understated grasp on technology and an even lower profile on the various schemes they have devised to deal with certain situations. This particular DB and its obvious backend capabilities, fall right into line with this very mature, reserved and methodical manner in which TO has operated on the campaign trail and in the WH.

While this may be a stretch, I have also had questions as to the first debate where Obama was trounced. It was so out of character, I can only think it was a calculated move to bait R2 into a trap of sorts that was later sprung, not at the other debates so much, but in the manner the campaign was conducted in a general way up to the election night. Maybe it was a diversion to put R2 on a different track away from focusing on TO's actual strategy of GOtV and other efforts. R2 ended up chasing its tail around the country while TO carried on with their plan. It also allowed Obama to shift focus from campaigning to important issues of governance when needed as his actions during Sandy demonstrated.

Anyway, it is obvious that R2 was played like a deck of cards by Team Obama and since election night, there is at least a couple of stories each day as to the ineptitude of the Romney campaign in general.

Angry Drunk Bureaucrat: Weaver95: central party HQ in philly.

We had the biggest fights with Philly HQ. Honestly, I know that we were behind on statewide numbers on Sunday night, but no one in Pittsburgh was going to answer the door or pick up the phone during a Steelers game (and one so close at that). It wasn't worth our time or effort; Philly didn't seem to understand that.

our issue with philly was that they didn't seem to understand that knocking on doors out here can literally take hours - especially in the more rural areas like perry county. they were always like 'your late with your canvass data' and i'm like 'dude...they're out in the f*cking woods. give 'em time, they'll come back'.

Mitt's problems were psychological as much as they were mathematical in this respect. They could have had more accurate numbers. They didn't want those.

You adjust your strategy based on the numbers. Not the other way around. I guarantee you a large part of the problem was Mitt himself not wanting to be told the unpleasant truths.

Angry Drunk Bureaucrat:

That being said, the biggest complaint we got was that people were hit multiple times by multiple different organizations with whom we had no contact (i.e. the Unions and the PACs). Unfortunately, there was no way we could have avoided that.

that was less of an issue in my area, since it's nominally Republican...but we did hit the same people multiple times - phone calls and canvassing neighborhoods. we made sure to make AT LEAST two passes through neighborhoods on election day in order to get out the vote. again, we knew this was the plan and we had a clear chain of command up to central party HQ in philly.

I was essentially the site logistics coordinator* for our ward. I've worked on a couple campaigns in the past and I was most impressed by the organizational structure of OFA. It was fairly structured from the State Campaign Director on down to the Field Organizer level, but at the Field level it was fairly collaborative. The model reminded me a lot of Amway: convincing your neighbors to convince your neighbors to convince your neighbors buy your product. Other campaigns I've worked on relied on canvassers and phonebankers from outside the neighborhood/city/county to do the leg work, but in this case it was probably someone you knew or recognized from the area. That's really powerful for GOTV efforts and it allowed us to take advantage of local knowledge to be more effective (e.g., we told our FO there was no point in canvassing with 7 minutes left in the Steelers/Giants game and that if we did send people out, we'd most likely lose votes).

That being said, the biggest complaint we got was that people were hit multiple times by multiple different organizations with whom we had no contact (i.e. the Unions and the PACs). Unfortunately, there was no way we could have avoided that.

/*This wasn't an official title for the campaign (for those of you in the know), but I was doing the tasks of the "Data Captain", "Comfort Captain", and "Site Coordinator".

Republicans were mocking Barack Obama for being a community organizer yet they worshiped Palin? If republican cognitive dissonance and projection could be an alternate fuel, we'd have perfectly clean air and warp capable ships by now.