Did Romney's ground game cost him the election?

The Presidential campaign was primarily waged by a person with no business experience (President Barack Obama) against a highly experienced business person (Governor Mitt Romney). But, according to Mark Cuban, Obama was the one with the better ground game. Cuban thinks it was a deciding factor in Obama's victory.


Reinforcing Cuban's comments, Breitbart ran a story yesterday about the failure of the Romney campaign's analytics platform, Project Orca (Huffington Post, Nov. 1). It was supposed to tell the Romney campaign which supporters had voted and which should be called to encourage them to vote. Its failure on election day left the Romney campaign in the dark as to what was happening in the field.

Some of Breitbart's information came from this blog entry from the Aces of Spades HQ blog, which appears to be written by a Romney volunteer who was planning on using Orca on election day.

Note to my readers: Usually, only one news source or blogger breaks a story. Once a great story breaks, other news sites and blogs run their own versions, some of which are just rewrites from the original story, others with additional information. I try to track down the original source. In this case, Breitbart claimed to be first ("exclusive") but I'm not sure I believe them. Still, I don't have any proof that Breitbart wasn't first.

Others that ran versions of this story after Breitbart, in alphabetic order:

• Ars Technica
• Human Events
• New York magazine
• Politico
• The Verge

How NOT to start an Internet business

On the LinkedIn group Linked Dayton (registration required) I saw this discussion: "New Consultant directory online at: www.Consultants.info. List for free!" Actually, this was the title; there really wasn't a discussion.

I was skeptical, so I checked it out. After entering some information, including selecting the United States of America from a list of every country in the world, I found no computer programmers listed for either Dayton or Cincinnati. My response to the group: "No computer programmers in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. This is crap."

I received a private message from the person who posted (name withheld to protect the guilty) explaining that I needed to register as a consultant. My response: "Sorry, you can't just start with an empty database and expect people to fill it for you. You need to buy some lists and launch it with data already in it. People will try it once and, if they don't get useful information, will never try it again. ..."

In addition to putting some data in the database, he needs to reduce the scope to the U.S.A. at a maximum and reduce the number of categories from over 200 to a more reasonable number.

I'm sorry if I come across as rude or arrogant, but I really am trying to help this poor guy get a clue. Yes, I am a fan of Shark Tank, especially Mark Cuban. How did you guess?