1: Romney's big data app failed on election day which led to ineffective use of their volunteers.
2: Romney's campaign performed exactly as predicted by the likes of Nate Silver.
Therefore: the failure of their big-data app was inconsequential. Otherwise we have to assume that the hundreds of polls were consistently biased in the direction of Obama and that the failure of the Orca big data app exactly compensates for this failure of the polls so that the outcome of the election is nonetheless exactly as predicted!
Second, 1 and 2 are not incompatible results. Nate Silver and others have pointed out that the polls appear to have underestimate democratic performance at the polls... is that due to Republicans failing to turn out? That seems like a likelihood that's at least worth considering.
Nate Silver and others have pointed out that the polls appear to have underestimate democratic performance at the polls
This is what Nate Silver said on election night:
So far, however, Democrats also have an edge in the party identification numbers in the exit polls. In Ohio, 38 percent of voters identified as Democratic in the exit poll as compared with 31 percent of Republicans. And in Virginia, Democrats had a 37-to-33 advantage in party identification. These numbers are similar to what many pre-election polls showed.
I don't believe Nate Silver pointed out that the polls undercounted democrats, do you have a cite? In fact his analysis was basically that the aggregate polling "got it right", coming very close to the final counts in almost all cases.
In the four victory-critical states I still have in my head, Silver's polling averages (which weren't very much different from Wang's or TPM's or RCP's, by the way) nailed it dead on in Florida, undercounted Democrats in Colorado and Virginia, and overcounted them in Ohio. But in no case were the errors more than 1.5% or so.
Two things to consider before immediately going to the "yay Nate Silver" default:
1. GOP had a consistent polling advantage on voter engagement, even going as far back as August. The Romney campaign placed a lot of stock on this. (see here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79665.html) The polls might break for Obama, but the Romney campaign was banking on something else...
2. Polls attempt to account for the simple error that people are more likely to say that they'll vote than will actually vote. (see here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/111268/how-gallups-likely-voter-m...) The Romney campaign was predicated on the idea that GOP voters were likely to get out and vote, while Obama voters would say they were going to vote but then drop out on Election Day. That is a polling blind side that Nate Silver couldn't account for.
The Romney campaign didn't accurately test their engagement assertion. They relied on journalist polling, but engagement didn't turn into votes. The Obama campaign did the opposite: they targeted voters who might be disengaged and directly went after those with their GOTV efforts.
There is a HUGE debate that always goes on around election time with politicos around who matters more. Is it more important to try to sway independents (i.e., go after the middle), or is it more important to fire up your base? Romney won independents but Obama got the base turnout, indicating that a GOTV effort targeted at the base might have worked, had it been used effectively. (see here: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/exit-polls-obama-loses-i...)
Over the past 3 years the GOP voters switched their identification to independent while their beliefs stayed the same. This shift accounted for what the polls were seeing among independents.
See "Independents. State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents. "
> 2. Polls attempt to account for the simple error that people are more likely to say that they'll vote than will actually vote. (see here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/111268/how-gallups-likely-voter-m...) The Romney campaign was predicated on the idea that GOP voters were likely to get out and vote, while Obama voters would say they were going to vote but then drop out on Election Day. That is a polling blind side that Nate Silver couldn't account for.
Actually Silver did account for something similar: That polls could be systematically biased against Romney. Not for political reasons, but incorrect LV models. The accurate pollsters of this cycle used an LV model that was shaped by 2008 exit polls. Others used those based on 2004 or 2010 (Rasmussen). Those that banked in this being an '04 or '10 electorate were way off.
The Occams Razor answer is that the "Obama supporters are stoned slackers, they won't even turn out to vote" hypothesis was wrong, not that it was counterbalanced by a failure within the Romney campaign.
To the degree we find any blogspam title plausible, yes.
In other words, no.
The original article was titled "The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA" and merely pointed out what a custerfuck it was. It made no claim that it turned the election.
Fully agree with your point about polling, but it's worth reading the original blog post (by a GOP campaign volunteer, but otherwise apolitical) to see in detail just how badly their system failed: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php
It's a classic example of 'fail late, fail terminally.' I still think Obama would have won, but it should have been a bit closer than it was. 'Get out the vote' operations are important.
According to Politico (I don't know if this is the best data, but it was high on the list in Google) Obama won Florida by about 60,000 votes (out of almost 10 million cast).
Now, that Romney volunteer says:
the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc
Now, if those volunteers had been engaged, could that have tipped the state to Romney? I don't know how many of those volunteers were in Florida, and how many votes each dedicated volunteer can turn out, but it's entirely plausible.
(Of course, even if Romney had won Florida, Obama still would have won.
A related story (http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/08/Orca-How-...) observes that Obama won by about 5-700,000 votes in swing states. Given that there were 37k 'Project ORCA' volunteers in swing states, the author estimates that if each had brought only 20 additional voters to the polls the election could have gone to Romney.
Now, I think this is rather unlikely, and reminiscent of the 'Bargaining' stage in the Kubler-Ross model of the grieving process; polls last weekend in critical states like OH and FL showed strong support for Democratic senate candidates and >70% support for Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy, and the poll momentum was already headed Obama's way. Likewise, Republican voters who can't stand the President were highly motivated to go out and vote against him anyway and likely did so with or without a phone call - indeed, I heard from some Romney supporters that the campaign relied far too heavily on robo-calling in the leadup to the election, to the point that they were sick of getting reminders.
But having 37k field volunteers confused and dispirited on election day is still a disaster. It's very ironic that a campaign that was nominally against 'trickle down government' was run in such a centralized, dictatorial fashion. Psychologically, it seems like a classic case of projection - unconsciously ascribing one's own personality traits to other people in one's life. Romney's reported preference for abundant data and tight control robbed tens of thousands of his most enthusiastic supporters of their autonomy and initiative.
Obama's tipping point state was CO, which he won by almost 5 points, or somewhere in the vicinity of 80-90k votes. People will pay a lot of attention to Ohio, Florida, and Virginia (crazy that OH was closer than VA!), but Obama could have lost all three and still won.
I agree. I think Romney lost mostly because he flip-flopped. I watched the Frontline episode called "The Choice 2012" and it was quite insightful. The two candidates come across as quite similar in many policy/thinking respects. Because Romney had to cater to the right wing fringe, the republicans essentially ate themselves.
Effectively, the country moved right because the republicans effectively shut Obama down and caused him to polarize. Basically negating the "yes we can change" hypothesis. In 2008 people were sick of unilateral Bush action, the wars, and wanted people who would work together. By the midterm elections fringe groups got super worked up about Obamacare and death panels. Tea party hyperbole basically, a very effective and vocal minority. In addition the vote for Obamacare was drawn down party lines which I believe contributed to the democratic losses. It was a sign of not working together even though the republicans basically stonewalled the entire time.
Essentially, Obama, the great listener who could bring people together was shut out and shut down by politics.
He was shutdown as an outsider essentially. We had hoped that an outsider could bring change, but the system itself refused to. Romney himself was an outsider too but would have had the initial advantage of a republican congress.
Romney's flip-flopping was only one reason for his loss. Obama's ground game played a much bigger role, IMO. Rather than trying to woo mercurial independents, Obama simply used the changing demographics to his advantage to turn out a lot of new voters who simply hadn't voted in previous elections. Romney's ground game was much weaker because Obama had been developing his over the last 4 years and didn't have to waste time and money on a long primary campaign.
In swing states like FA and CO, he got many US-born Hispanics who hadn't previously voted (many of whom recently became adults) registered and got them to vote for him by telling them that Romney would deport their foreign-born family members who are in the country illegally. As explained by the NYT[0]:
> In Chicago, the campaign recruited a team of behavioral scientists to build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of undecided voters and potential supporters. The ever-expanding list let the campaign find and register new voters who fit the demographic pattern of Obama backers and methodically track their views through thousands of telephone calls every night.
> That allowed the Obama campaign not only to alter the very nature of the electorate, making it younger and less white, but also to create a portrait of shifting voter allegiances. The power of this operation stunned Mr. Romney’s aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla.
In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Obama partially relied on the black vote. These are people who are guaranteed to vote for him, so the main issue was getting them to vote in the first place. He set up neighborhood election stations in black community gathering places like barbershops and beauty salons, getting people to register their friends and family and encourage them to go to the polling stations on the day of the election. In fact, the voting rate among blacks was higher than among whites in Ohio - an amazing coup.
Another key constituency in Ohio and PA was the auto workers and other blue collar voters, mostly whites. This one was pretty easy - Obama bombarded the airwaves with TV ads portraying Romney as a corporate asset-stripper who cackled merrily all the way to the bank as he shipped blue collar jobs to Mexico and China. Obama also reminded them about the auto bailout he engineered, which saved many blue collar jobs in those parts of the country.
In Ohio and PA, as well as places with low minority populations, like Wisconsin and Iowa, Obama relied on the female vote. He associated Romney with Senate candidates like Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin, who made controversial remarks about abortion and rape. I believe Paul Ryan made some similar comments as well. He played up the angle that Republicans want to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies.
69 million people voted for him in 2008, and 61 million in 2012. This is the most objective metric available. These more subjective ratings show his potential for bringing people together: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/13/obama-does-...
"According to Pew, 92 percent considered him a “good communicator,” 87 percent deemed him “warm and friendly,” 81 percent said he “cares about people like me,” 79 percent thought him “well-informed,” and 76 percent judged him “trustworthy.” Since then, each of those numbers has declined between 10 and 20 points. But they began at such stratospherically high levels that even with the drop, the public’s perception of Obama as a person remains remarkably cheery."
And that was during an election with a flood of attack ads from both sides. The cause of the double digit drops will attenuate with time.
Nate Silver predicted a range of outcomes including closer losses and victories for Romney. Republican "Get Out The Vote" outperforming history was probably a necessary condition of that 10% shot at winning. Instead it looks like the Romney campaign dropped the ball on it. No conspiracy theory needed.
Well, it's probably better to say that the 10% included all known error estimations. Given the skew between final polls and actual results seen over history, Silver's model figured it was 1 in 10 that some "unknown" factor would pollute the numbers enough to produce a Romney victory. In this he was actually much more conservative than Sam Wang, who AFAICT looked only at the poll sampling error and arrived at a muc higher (e.g. 99%) chance of victory.
And actually, I think you can make the case that Silver was too conservative. Looking at the results, the poll averages were well within sampling error in all battleground states. And sorting the states by margin, Romney would have had to pick up FL, OH, VA and CO to win. Obama won Colorado by 4.7% (not too far from the predicted ~3.5%, I believe), which is comparatively huge and absolutely not explainable by polling error (a Romney victory there looks like about three sigma to me).
In hindsight, the known state of the election on Tuesday morning was never winnable for Romney. Wang was right (even though his averages came down on the wrong side in FL), Silver was too timid.
And actually, I think you can make the case that Silver was too conservative.
Based on what I know about methodology of polls, Silver's approach is better. If your possible errors are all independent, then Wang's approach is correct. But when you introduce methodology dependencies between polls, it is going to be much more confident than it should be.
Ironically if Silver is right, then he'd also predict that with some high probability, at a guess somewhere in the 70-80% range, Wang's numbers are likely to look better than his. But in those outliers there are some shocking results.
For the record, a fundamentally similar methodological error to Wang's helped Wall Street think that bonds backed by subprime mortgages were safe.
Exactly, there's some epistomolgy at work here. There are no first-principle models of polling bias that fit the data. Silver took a history of poll-vs-election skew as a proxy, while Wang ignored the issue and looked only at sampling error (I think -- honestly I don't know for sure).
As it happens, in this election (and across hundreds of polls) there was no poll bias. The polls were right.
Now, is that because we're lucky or because polls have gotten better, or both? I don't know that this is answerable. My intuition (but that's all it is) agrees with you: I wouldn't have put down a bet for Obama given Wang's 100:1 odds, though I might have at Silver's 10:1. Arbitrage vs. Intrade's 2:1 looks a lot like a sure thing in hindsight...
I don't think that analysis is correct. Silver's analysis did not include the effect of Romney's app in the input, and so the expected result of Romney's app failing is to make the result more in line with Silver's prediction.
The whole point of Romney's app was to make Silver's prediction turn out wrong, by changing one of the conditions contributing toward Silver predicting an Obama win.
No. Obama won by 313 to 225 electoral votes. Florida had 29, Ohio 18, and Virginia 13. If you switch all three states to Romney then Romney would have won 285 to 260.
Sorry, I was looking at the wrong page while I wrote that. But the greater point stands -- swinging Florida, Ohio, and Virginia would not have swung the election.
No, the parent was correct. 313 to 225 was Nate Silver's prediction (note "Forecast"). The actual electoral vote was (assuming Obama won Florida) 332 to 206.
The main point is that the 'app' was not ready and the system failed to perform. The speculation that it could have made a difference in some states was secondary.
The key mantra about Get Out The Vote is that the battle is mostly won in the long campaign.
The key technique is to get a voter to make an emotional commitment to voting by talking personally to an actual human being (think Asda/Walmart having someone greet you on entrance - it works).
Weakly identifying voters (switchers, intermittent voters) are preferentially contacted by the candidate, other more grounded ones get ordinary party members on their doorsteps, plus personal letters etc.
So this failure is likely symptomatic of a general failure of GOTV planning - which means the polls are likely to be correct.
You sure tore that strawman a new one, but did anybody say that Orca would have facilitated a win, or even a significant vote gain for Romney?
The closest I could find: "We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity's sake."
It's right there in the article's title: "An inside look behind Romney's loss". I take that to mean that the article attempted to explain (partially) why Romney lost.
Exactly. "We actually won, but (x) failed us so OBAMA was able to steal the election." Totally expected from Bullshit Mountain. I'd like to see two parties that have some barest grasp on reality in America rather than just one, but I can't say that watching the Republican party disappear even further up its own asshole isn't going to be a hell of good time, in the coming years.
1: Romney's big data app failed on election day which led to ineffective use of their volunteers.
2: Romney's campaign performed exactly as predicted by the likes of Nate Silver.
Therefore: the failure of their big-data app was inconsequential. Otherwise we have to assume that the hundreds of polls were consistently biased in the direction of Obama and that the failure of the Orca big data app exactly compensates for this failure of the polls so that the outcome of the election is nonetheless exactly as predicted!
Absolutely 100% ridiculous.