I spent the last four days of the 2012 Presidential campaign knocking on doors, sorting campaign fliers, and manning the phones in the call center. I knew something was wrong with the Romney Campaign/RNC data when they dropped me off in my first neighborhood on my first day – more on that later. As the election results show, Obama knew what people to focus on and the Republicans let the loose poll data fool them about who was listening.

On my first day walking the streets and knocking on doors to Get Out The Vote (GOTV – which I thought was some online video channel at first, I admit), the van dropped me off with a map and a clip board with sheet full of names and little bubbles next to them like an SAT test. I was excited. How High-Tech! We had scan codes for each person and then we were going to bubble in their responses. I was told we were going to neighborhoods that had lots of registered Republicans but their turn-out in 2008 was lower than the average. We asked the people who opened the door (our sheets had the name of every registered Republican voter in the house) if they planned to vote for Romney and what time they would go to the polls (the rumor was that ORCA would let the auto-dialers feed them into the call schedule after 12 Noon if they hadn’t been to the polls). We bubbled in their responses. I imagine after I turned the sheets in, they would be scanned and all this great data would go into the system and drive a massive, personalized GOTV campaign. There seemed to be a small problem.

The first neighborhood I was dropped off in was Section 8 housing. “Wow,” I thought, surprised that this group was registered Republican, not surprised they didn’t vote for McCain Palin. Except it wasn’t true. Almost immediately it became clear that:

1. The people on my list didn’t live behind the doors I was knocking on
2. The people on my list that did live at the address, were not planning on voting for Romney
3. I didn’t have enough bubbles to accurately record what I was finding (so I’m sure those same people got phone calls later)

Later as we walked through other neighborhoods where there were a lot more Republicans and a few more people who planned to vote for Romney, I still had the same problem. The data I had was 30% wrong and there was no way to bubble in that many had already voted (I talked to some people the next day who had Early Voted, but still got six plus calls on election day to get out and vote). I had other complaints – including that the door hangars were too flimsy and in comparison to Obama lit, not that interesting and not that tailored to helping people get to the Polls.

So maybe it was just the walking lists that had weak data.

Nope, same thing in the call center. Lots of disconnected numbers, deceased or incapacitated people (very sad talking to the family members and having to ask “Yes, sorry to hear about the Alzheimer’s, but did they get the chance to absentee vote?”), and many, many Obama voters. Once again there was an electronic system for recording the results, but it didn’t have all the choices I would like, including the early vote answer. It seems to me that not being able to record early votes just leads to wasted resources chasing people who already voted (and possibly annoying them in ways that hurt the campaign).

Good data is hard to find. I noticed something that seemed odd to me from the Obama campaign in the last weeks: A big push to gets “Likes” for the campaign. I thought at first it was silly. Then I thought some more. A Facebook “Like” gives the App a lot of data about the “Liker.” If you can ingest that data, you could learn a lot from 750,000 people. Plus you can push “free” advertising messages into their News Feeds to their like-minded friends. That’s a smart strategy. It’s not what it seems Romney Ryan did with Facebook. All I got in my News Stream was more requests to “Like.” Wasted chance?

Finally, there was the vaunted ORCA effort at Romney Ryan. You can read about that debacle here http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/08/Orca-How-the-Romney-Campaign-Suppressed-Its-Own-Vote.

Net, net, the RNC needs to get serious about voter data in the modern era. There is lots and lots of data available, not only do you need to have it so you can husband your resources and spend better with effective media and contact targeting http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/266987-data-drove-obamas-ground-game, you need it to craft messages and contacts that are relevant and appreciated by voters. There were many Romney voters who told me to go away or hung up, just because they were tired of the multiple contacts without clear calls to action.

I am dying to get at the data collected through this past campaign and work on it to get a clean dataset, and then work with the party to put messages out and make contacts that will help make the Republican brand meaningful, relevant, and acceptable to the voters that we need to win national office.