Mitt Romney loved the Data, but it didn't love him

by Mary

Project ORCA was supposed to be the secret weapon that was going to push Romney over the top. And Romney was intimately involved in this project.

At campaign headquarters in Boston, other volunteers will be taking all the information sent in by those working with Project ORCA and combining it with consumer data the campaign has purchased about individuals. They will use the data to organize last-minute campaign efforts, including social media outreach, phone-banking and traditional door-to-door visits.

In addition, Centinello will be in an "inner war room" with the campaign manager, the national political director and Romney himself.

"The governor loves seeing data, he loves seeing numbers and he's a very strategic person; he's a very smart man," Centinello said on Wednesday's Project ORCA call. "So he actually loves being inside these war rooms, seeing the data come in and seeing exactly what's going on out there, so we can all put our heads together and say, 'Okay, we need to move resources here. We need to shift resources from here.'"

Romney's team were amazingly boastful about how fantastic this application would be. Still, as Sasha Issenberg reported before the election:

Such unfounded “We will bury you”-style bluster is becoming a hallmark of the Romney campaign style.

On the day of the election, ORCA crashed and burned.

Just how much did Romney pay for this fubar?

One of the campaign's top vendors is Targeted Victory, a 3-year-old digital consulting firm whose co-founder, Zac Moffatt, is the campaign's digital director. The Alexandria, Va.-based company has been paid more than $64 million for digital consulting and Web development.

And that was in October before the application was even delivered.

Can the Republicans duplicate the success of Obama's team? Nancy Scola of the Atlantic Monthly says, it's difficult to see how it would be possible.

Last Sunday, Chris Hayes talked with Sasha about why it would be so much harder for Republicans to duplicate the GOTV efforts of the Democrats - the model doesn't scale for rural regions.

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And I'd say that a control freak like Romney sowed the seed of his own comeuppance. He closed his eyes to the real data and failed to realize he was being conned.

No wonder the Supreme Court wants to find better ways to suppress the vote.