For the Want of a Nail

Why did Mitt Romney lose an election which most pundits thought he was sure to win (including myself … a non- pundit). Other than the voting loyalty of obvious major blocs that worshiped at the feet of Obama -- single women, Hispanics and blacks, Romney may well of lost because his team could not get out the vote. In fact in 2012, the Romney/Ryan ticket received 464 thousand fewer votes than the McCain/Palin ticket did in 2008. This was a shocker to me … particularly given the surge that Romney and Ryan seemed to be receiving in the waning days of the campaign.

When you couple this with another surprising statistic – the Obama/Biden ticket got almost 6.3 million fewer votes than they did in 2008, one is even more perplexed. Obviously something was seriously wrong with both candidates’s ground games, but Romney had an opening through which he could have driven an American Motors car … and he flubbed the dub. If he just could have picked up half the votes that Obama surrendered, he might well have been elected. But alas, not to be.

The question then is, what happened? And I think I have a little-reported answer. The Romney/Ryan team was depending on a piece of software dubbed ORCA to get out those voters that were expected to and should have pulled the Republican levers. This software was supposed to identify for more than 34,000 eager Romney poll-watchers specific names of those voters in key districts who needed to be rounded up and brought to the polls. However, this lauded software pooped the bed and did not perform as anticipated. And what is worse, the Romney team had no back-up plan … so perhaps millions of their expected Republican voters stayed home and watched the sad results on television … see: National Journal Article

Exactly why this software crashed to the point of non-functionality on election day is probably now being hotly debated … lack of beta testing, lack of user training, insufficient computer power, a denial-of-service attack from the Obama team, a Democrat techie mole, etc.; but what is clear is that Romney, despite his reputation for getting things done, did not have the right techies and technical managers on his campaign staff. See: SD Times Article for additional details. Too bad … for all Romney’s psychic and organizational efforts and the hundreds of millions of dollars that were expended on his behalf … the lack of this one I.P. nail may well have cost him the election battle.