Erick Erickson writes in Red State The Incestuous Bleeding of the Republican Party, 11/28/12. It is a thoroughly researched piece on how the GOP is run by consultants who get paid a fortune and perform very poorly. This point is also made by Pat Caddell in REPUBLICAN ‘CONSULTANT-LOBBYIST-ESTABLISHMENT’ COMPLEX RESPONSIBLE FOR ROMNEY DEFEAT, by Tony Lee at Breitbart, 11/24/12.

Excerpt:

Caddell said Republicans have to go away from a bureaucratic, top-down approach to messaging and outreach and be more imaginative in the future if they do not want to go the way of the Whigs. He said Republicans have been so poor on combating narratives and framing their own messages that minorities — like Asians — voted overwhelmingly for Obama despite sharing conservative values because they think Republicans “do not care about minorities.”

He said the Republican party needed to be more imaginative — like promoting education reform against teachers unions as the new battle for civil rights and running against corruption in Washington, which a Breitbart News/Judicial Watch Election Night poll found 85% of voters were concerned about.

“Why are Republicans not the anti-establishment party?,” Caddell asked.

Meanwhile the Democrats have built a sophisticated network that would take the GOP years to catch up with:

Gordon Crovitz writes Obama’s ‘Big Data’ Victory in The Wall Street Journal, 11/18/12

Excerpt:

Campaign manager Jim Messina pledged to “measure every single thing in this campaign” and built an analytics department five times the size of the 2008 effort. A Time magazine reporter got access to the data scientists in the campaign’s Chicago headquarters on the condition that the reporter would keep mum until after the election. “What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain,” Time recently reported, “was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”

According to the magazine, the campaign created a “single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files.”

The Obama campaign focused on data showing the “persuadability” of voters. Multivariate tests identified issues and positions that could move undecided voters, ProPublica said: “The persuasion scores allowed the campaign to focus its outreach efforts—and their volunteer calls—on voters who might actually change their minds as the result. It also guided them in what policy messages individual voters should hear.”

HKO

certainly the message and policy matters, but politics is an art and a business. Like any business a message is worthless if it is not properly communicated and communication is worthless without a compelling message. It looks more and more like the Dems were far more sophisticated in their political skills, and the GOP was further handicapped by a corrupt group of consultants.

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