4 ms·

Didn't the latest Ars article suggest Orca wasn't a contractor concoction after all? [1] I think all we really see, is that the Obama campaign had experience a

by roc 14y ago

Didn't the latest Ars article suggest Orca wasn't a contractor concoction after all? [1] I think all we really see, is that the Obama campaign had experience and no primary campaign distractions. The Obama campaign had a v1 in 2008 and were merely updating it for 2012. Yes, they had to figure in mobile and the enhanced scale of the problem, but they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008. The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

MichaelSalib 14y ago
they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008 Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech? The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool. But the national party could have started working on this 08 and just sold/licensed the tech to the campaign after the nominee was selected....
- roc 14y ago
  I think that just hits on a larger organizational problem that seems to be common to both national parties: A staggering amount of the services and resources that I would think the state/national party would build up and have on-hand, they simply don't appear to have. (To say nothing of the coordination they don't seem to have) e.g. Obama wasn't building/running a DNC-wide system and sharing it with all the candidates. His campaign built it on their own, for their one race and now-built, all indications are that it's going to be wound-down or morphed into a citizen mobilization sort of effort to drive "call your congressman"-type efforts. Maybe political campaigning laws prohibit massive transfers of 'property' like that. I don't know. But it doesn't even sound like the DNC is looking to build their own system to share with future candidates. And perhaps political campaign laws prohibit the national party from transferring down that much assistance to local races. That, I also don't know. I don't even know if, say, the GOP could legally lock up a sweet bulk price for buying signage/buttons/tshirts/etc and act as cheaper-middleman for their candidates. There seems to be a hard line between each campaign and the rest of the organization and that leaves each campaign is largely 'on their own' for anything other than maybe lining up endorsements or speaking dates to get friendly faces to show up for local campaign events.
  - gyardley 14y ago
    As I understand it, a lot of the infrastructure is contained in private companies (some non-profit, some not) closely associated with one of the two parties and available to all the campaigns associated with that party. For instance, the Democratic Party's contact databases are in NGP VAN's VoteBuilder or in Catalist, and campaigns in 2014 will both be using the information entered there in 2012 and updating the contact information for the next race. Much of the Democratic Party's institutional knowledge about voter contact and outreach lives at the non-profit Analyst Institute. The insights gained in the 2012 campaign will stay there instead of evaporating. The Republican Party has a little of this - there's the GOP Data Center, formerly Voter Vault - but they haven't been building infrastructure as aggressively as the Democratic Party, and it's costing them. In 2004 the GOP had a superior technical organization, but they seemed to rest on their laurels, and in 2008 they were slightly weaker. In 2012 they were totally lapped. They will do better by 2016 - thanks in part to the utter failure of ORCA - but the Democrats have built up a pretty healthy infrastructure lead that'll be hard to top.
- xradionut 14y ago
  "Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech?" The GOP probably leveraged a Orca-like system, sold the hardware and outsourced the software for a short term profit gain.
socialist_coder 14y ago
That doesn't explain nor excuse the fact that Orca was launched the day of the election when the Narwhal team was practicing with severe outage scenarios a month before that, preparing for the worst.
charleshaanel 14y ago
I think there's a deeper story here.... Politics -good or bad - tends to attract people with strong political views. I mean how many brilliant (ex.)far-right, feminist vegans would work on a campaign for a left-of-center, sexist-"I love to eat nearly-extinct Northern Finnish deer" candidate? The bigger question is why the Obama campaign was able to attract this level of engineering/technical talent. I'm sure these individuals were not in want of a job. I'm not sure how persuasive the argument "any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development" is. According to the GOP and the Fox News machine, the only people who supported Mssr. Obama were maxists-femi-nazi-pro-baby-killers and/or illegals who were offered free, student-loan forgiveness (not that they could ever get into Swarthmore or Reed or MIT without affirmative action)....or free cheese. Either that or marvelously agile illegals who took a pass on self-deportation (the New Black Panther Party let them vote anyway). But alas, I digress here.... I'm by no means unbiased myself. I think the 2 party political hegemony in the USA is a relic of the past.

by roc 14y ago

MichaelSalib 14y ago

they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008 Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech? The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool. But the national party could have started working on this 08 and just sold/licensed the tech to the campaign after the nominee was selected....

roc 14y ago
I think that just hits on a larger organizational problem that seems to be common to both national parties: A staggering amount of the services and resources that I would think the state/national party would build up and have on-hand, they simply don't appear to have. (To say nothing of the coordination they don't seem to have) e.g. Obama wasn't building/running a DNC-wide system and sharing it with all the candidates. His campaign built it on their own, for their one race and now-built, all indications are that it's going to be wound-down or morphed into a citizen mobilization sort of effort to drive "call your congressman"-type efforts. Maybe political campaigning laws prohibit massive transfers of 'property' like that. I don't know. But it doesn't even sound like the DNC is looking to build their own system to share with future candidates. And perhaps political campaign laws prohibit the national party from transferring down that much assistance to local races. That, I also don't know. I don't even know if, say, the GOP could legally lock up a sweet bulk price for buying signage/buttons/tshirts/etc and act as cheaper-middleman for their candidates. There seems to be a hard line between each campaign and the rest of the organization and that leaves each campaign is largely 'on their own' for anything other than maybe lining up endorsements or speaking dates to get friendly faces to show up for local campaign events.
- gyardley 14y ago
  As I understand it, a lot of the infrastructure is contained in private companies (some non-profit, some not) closely associated with one of the two parties and available to all the campaigns associated with that party. For instance, the Democratic Party's contact databases are in NGP VAN's VoteBuilder or in Catalist, and campaigns in 2014 will both be using the information entered there in 2012 and updating the contact information for the next race. Much of the Democratic Party's institutional knowledge about voter contact and outreach lives at the non-profit Analyst Institute. The insights gained in the 2012 campaign will stay there instead of evaporating. The Republican Party has a little of this - there's the GOP Data Center, formerly Voter Vault - but they haven't been building infrastructure as aggressively as the Democratic Party, and it's costing them. In 2004 the GOP had a superior technical organization, but they seemed to rest on their laurels, and in 2008 they were slightly weaker. In 2012 they were totally lapped. They will do better by 2016 - thanks in part to the utter failure of ORCA - but the Democrats have built up a pretty healthy infrastructure lead that'll be hard to top.
xradionut 14y ago
"Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech?" The GOP probably leveraged a Orca-like system, sold the hardware and outsourced the software for a short term profit gain.

socialist_coder 14y ago

That doesn't explain nor excuse the fact that Orca was launched the day of the election when the Narwhal team was practicing with severe outage scenarios a month before that, preparing for the worst.

charleshaanel 14y ago

I think there's a deeper story here.... Politics -good or bad - tends to attract people with strong political views. I mean how many brilliant (ex.)far-right, feminist vegans would work on a campaign for a left-of-center, sexist-"I love to eat nearly-extinct Northern Finnish deer" candidate? The bigger question is why the Obama campaign was able to attract this level of engineering/technical talent. I'm sure these individuals were not in want of a job. I'm not sure how persuasive the argument "any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development" is. According to the GOP and the Fox News machine, the only people who supported Mssr. Obama were maxists-femi-nazi-pro-baby-killers and/or illegals who were offered free, student-loan forgiveness (not that they could ever get into Swarthmore or Reed or MIT without affirmative action)....or free cheese. Either that or marvelously agile illegals who took a pass on self-deportation (the New Black Panther Party let them vote anyway). But alas, I digress here.... I'm by no means unbiased myself. I think the 2 party political hegemony in the USA is a relic of the past.