A good post-mortem on the soon-to-be-infamous Project ORCA.

Short version: it was designed to help Romney’s GOTV.  It did not work, in much the same way that the sun is warm.  That first link will give the gory details; this second one will give you more; and there’s going to be more coming.  I anticipate a good deal of useful under-the-hood analysis to come out of this; which should … no.  Which will help us do better next time.

For my own part – and I plan to be repeating what I’m about to write to GOP party officials in the very near future – I have a very basic attitude.  In 2012 the RNC had just come off of a successful rebuilding and won a series of extremely tricky elections against well-funded and dedicated opponents.  The next Presidential campaign that wants to override that kind of institutional strength had better have the track record to justify it.

7 thoughts on “A good post-mortem on the soon-to-be-infamous Project ORCA.”

  1. Hopefully some good will come out of this, but I can’t help but feel like RNC, Romney campaign and other organizations were more interested in doing what they wanted to do than doing what they needed to do.

    Also, there were so many new volunteers this year and now I see that many of them were not used to fully exploit their strengths. If a volunteer feels like they aren’t being effective, they won’t be back. The same can be said for contributers.

    I am concerned that the GOP has lost for good some new supporters that believed in the cause. The nature of the loss (unexpected by many, reaching down to Senate and other downticket races) makes it all the more harder to convince people to come back aboard a broken train.

  2. It’s the now largely unstoppable regulatory burden we are to be saddled with as a result of this loss that depresses me. We may fix the Republican party, but regulators answer to no one. And if O gets to replace a right side justice or two on the SC? Might as well not have elections anymore, cuz they just won’t matter.

  3. My first reaction to reading about ORCA was to suspect deliberate sabotage. Then I remembered Clark’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

  4. Actually, reading about stuff like this is kinda of comforting. Knowing that there’s one or more really, really big GOP/Romney screw-ups involved in the campaign means that maybe, just maybe, all the doom and gloom about the the inevitability of demographic defeat is … well, less inevitable, at least.I mean, yeah, it’s frustrating to find out that they screwed up, big. Especially when it’s something that ought to have been easy to sort out (Was there really no back-up plan in place? That’s … ballsy. Also, foolish. Very, very foolish.)

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