Email Doodlings: NH GOP - Bang! There goes one foot - Granite Grok

Email Doodlings: NH GOP – Bang! There goes one foot

BackStory: Since the national election, much has been made of the Obama Data Machine – hundreds of millions of dollars spent, hundreds of people employed, and a use of advanced IT married with Big Data and Behavioral Engineering / Science for the singular purpose of keeping Obama in the Oval Office seat.  Certainly, the GOP, the NH GOP, needs to learn that lesson (one among many) that the terms, conditions, and actions of campaigning have been forever changed.  The ability to find, persuade, motivate, and get new and low information voters to go and vote was a model of technology – far beyond what has been yet defined, spec’d out, implemented, and used.

Agreement all around: the GOP, heck – the NH GOP, has to get with it and soon.  Or either be relegated to minority status for a long time -or come out with another kind of disruptive technique (perhaps totally orthagonal to even the “new normal” of Big Data / Behavioral Science / Campaigning. If the latter happens, great but in the mean time, it is pretty much agreed that Tech must be upgraded.  Pretty much, it is a must – anything to better connect with voters.  One email that came in over the transom:

As for the news network… I don’t think it could be supported in NH. Population isn’t big enough, especially when you consider what small percentage of the population actually pays attention to politics. I’m starting to think that at some point, we have to get off-line and actually connect with people, you know, on a HUMAN level. Actually build a relationship that goes beyond a screen. Glenn Beck used to talk about this years ago (saying we should get to know our neighbors again), and I still agree.

 I agreed with the comment “on a HUMAN level”.  My thought was:

For all of the huge cost of Obama’s huge data machine that we’ve all been reading about, it was done for one and only one reason – to reconnect with people with emails tailored for each person, phone calls tailored for each person, and personal face to face contacts with people at their doors.

<redacted> is right. Door knockers need apply

Story: For all of the Obama Tech, it was all to do one simple task: enable Democrat Door Knockersin making  them more efficient and successful.  It worked.  In response, both of the NH GOP Chair candidates, Jennifer Horn and Andrew Hemmingway campaigned that the Technology used by the Republicans here in NH WAS going to be upgraded to put us, if not on parity, at least put us on the field.  Over and over again, that was stated and promised it HAS to happen.

Well, I recently learned that a Tech Committee was formed.  It met a few times and turned in some proposals to NH GOP Chair Jennifer Horn.  I learned about it in an email in (paraphrased here):

Is this true?  There was a tech committee formed by the NH GOP, met a few times, and now is dissolved?  What the heck??

Sadly to hear, I had a confirmation today about this: es verdad!  It met, it wrote, it seemingly is gone.  So where does that leave us?  Do we notch this as a campaign promise fulfilled (“hey, at least we tried?”) or a campaign promise fluffed?  To not even authorize anything, without making some kind of attempt, even if to string together some open source (re: free) and get some techie volunteers to at least start something?   Are we to compete or not?

Or are we going to do the same old-same old; rely on the next Presidential Campaign and ride coattails once again?  Yes, we are a very small state and limited money resources, but to completely abandon any effort at all to be any kind of self-sufficient instead of being a docile lap-dog waiting for crumbs to fall from the Big Adult table?  I have a hard time with this – essentially it makes us completely dependent on others for elections every four years and completely nekkid (database wise) in the out years.  And Buckles has, at his disposal, the use of data compiled by Democrat State heads in a co-op apart from the national Democrat effort.

We have – bupkis.  Not the best of decisions.

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