Patrick Ruffini @ The Atlantic:
The 2012 election should be a wake-up call for those who raise and spend money for the Republican Party.
All too often, how we run campaigns has been untethered from scientific rigor, and without any real-time certainty whether something is working or not. Aggressiveness is praised, and hard-hitting TV ads have come to be seen as the sine qua non of an aggressive campaign. Thanks to this worldview, billions were poured into presidential and down-ballot television advertisements out of a conviction that these ads would move numbers.
Donors, for their part, were continually pressed to double down on more ads. Tweeted Republican media strategist Rick Wilson, quoting a conversation with a mega-donor, “Every *ing conf call, ‘We’re good but we need 1000 more GRP in X state…no one, not even me, drilling in enough.'”
But if all these ads had the desired effect, it was not always apparent in the election returns. That should be obvious to Republicans from the fact that Obama won reelection, while the Democrats picked up two U.S. Senate seats. But it’s also apparent at the county level in some cases, and in unexpected ways.
Take the case of Lucas County, Ohio. For all the talk of the pummeling Romney received in paid media over the auto bailout, Obama fared no better than he did in other urban centers statewide in Lucas County, home of auto-centric Toledo (the town Jeep was supposed to be shipping jobs from, according to a Romney ad). Nor was Lucas County was among the 18 Ohio counties — mostly in the south of the state — where the president did better than he did in 2008.
While television ads still play an important role, particularly downballot, the election results clearly show that Republican campaigns need to be just as aggressive with their grassroots outreach, online persuasion, and data collection and analysis as their media buys.
After the 2008 election, Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe outlined a key shift in how the campaign had set priorities for itself. The campaign spent its first dollars fully funding grassroots organizers in swing states, and then funded TV out of what was left over. A groundbreaking digital operation ensured that the campaign had ample resources to do both. The Obama re-election campaign repeated the strategy.
Given how Obama’s ground game helped him outperform the final polling margins in key swing states this year, such as Florida and Colorado, the fact that the Republican campaign class has failed to adapt is striking.
How might future Republican campaigns and outside groups spend money differently?
A disproportionate amount of postmortem coverage has focused on Obama’s data and technology operation which was bigger — though also qualitatively different — than 2008. Instead of relying on the magic of a youthful candidate, big rallies, and racking up a billion minutes of view time on YouTube, Obama 2012 used quantitative analysis to squeeze out every last advantage it could, reflecting the “grind it out” mentality of this year’s campaign.
Given the attention, it would be only natural for GOP donors and operatives looking for ways to win in 2014 and 2016 to fixate on replicating the Big Data campaign and seek out data scientists, behavioral economists, and silver-bullet technologies in an effort to catch up.
They’ll need to: It is true that the Democrats are ahead in the race to master the science of winning elections. But technology isn’t everything. And if Republicans take the wrong lessons from this defeat, they could find themselves in an even bigger hole four years from now.
