My hunch is that this project was started way too late. At the start of the Republican primary in 2011, Romney's fundraising wasn't aggressive, and it's unlike

My hunch is that this project was started way too late. At the start of the Republican primary in 2011, Romney's fundraising wasn't aggressive, and it's unlikely his team prioritized a "Big Data" initiative from day 1. In the ensuing primary slugfest, Romney probably needed to put a ton of resources into advertising to win. He also had a very large campaign payroll: his people were well compensated, but that didn't leave a lot money left-over for things like Orca. Based on this conjecture, Orca probably got started sometime in the Spring, essentially giving the campaign 5-7 months to ship a bullet-proof GotV app.... alongside all the other stuff the team had to build (Tons of miscellaneous internal tools, the public mobile apps, etc). A lack of time and resources probably doomed it. Moral of the story? Software is hard. Don't take it lightly.