Consider this article by Robert Draper in the New York Times Magazine a must-readif you want to know how Republicans are responding to the 2012 election. There's good news and bad news.
Good news: Democrats continue to hold a technical edge over the Republicans, assuming the freakishly unlikely event of Republicans catching up in just a few months hasn't happened, which the linked article seems to confirm is the case.
Bad news: Some Republicans get how far behind they and are trying to catch up.
They [tech-savvy Republicans] walked me through a series of slides showing the wide discrepancies between the two campaigns. 'And just to make them [Republican clients] feel really bad," [Bret] Jacobson said as he punched another image onto the overhead screen. 'We say, 'Just wait ' this is the most important slide.' And this is what kills them, because conservatives always look at young voters like the hot girl they could never date." He read aloud from the text: '1.25 million more young people supported Obama in 2012 over 2008."
In the light of his Apple monitor, Jacobson's grin took on a Luciferian glow. He is 33, wiry and well dressed and has the twitchy manner of a highly caffeinated techie. 'And then we continue with the cavalcade of pain," he said. The next chart showed that while the Romney campaign raised slightly more money from its online ads than it spent on them, Obama's team more than doubled the return on its online-ad investment.
Good news: The Democratic edge isn't just technical. The field operation and messaging are working better too.
Bad news: Once again, some Republicans get this.
The unnerving truth, which the Red Edge team and other younger conservatives worry that their leaders have yet to appreciate, is that the Republican Party's technological deficiencies barely begin to explain why the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The party brand ' which is to say, its message and its messengers ' has become practically abhorrent to emerging demographic groups like Latinos and African-Americans, not to mention an entire generation of young voters. As one of the party's most highly respected strategists told me: 'It ought to concern people that the most Republican part of the electorate under Ronald Reagan were 18-to-29-year-olds. And today, people I know who are under 40 are embarrassed to say they're Republicans. They're embarrassed! They get harassed for it, the same way we used to give liberals a hard time."
It's reasonable to look at Obama's success appealing to younger voters and the concerns of the quoted younger Republicans that the problem is generational. Though younger Republicans are frustrated, one of them pointed out something interesting: David Axelrod is the same age as Karl Rove. Axelrod is actually five years younger, but that's close enough that the point is right. The support for innovating new everything in 2012, despite the success the same people enjoyed in 2008, came from people essentially the same age as their GOP counterparts. So the problem isn't just age, though few Republicans seem to have picked up on that.
Good news: As much as younger Republicans seem to have picked up on the problems with demographics, field operations, and technology, they still obey the ideological dogmatism they're starting to recognize as a problem. Perhaps the single most interesting statement in the article was a parenthetical statement, "(Today Republicans of all age groups strenuously avoid describing themselves as 'moderate,' a term that the far right has made radioactive.)". Catch that? "Moderate" isn't merely a word they don't use. It's a word they took the time to demonize among themselves. That seemed like a good use of resources to them.
Nor are they ready to get past the aversion to facts. They still believe the public agrees with them and the problem is basically messaging. The article quotes conservative pundit S.E. Cupp saying, 'Public polling still puts the country center-right on a host of issues." Which polling? This poll?:
I wrote a post in January about how giving away the Obama campaign code base is a bad idea, and some commenters suggested the technical edge came from a cultural difference between the parties that makes developers more attracted to the Democrats and facilitates better dissemination of information. Draper's article suggests they have a point:
On Nov. 30, more than 2,000 progressives shuffled into the Washington Convention Center to participate in RootsCamp, an annual series of seminars hosted by the New Organizing Institute, where the most cutting-edge digital and grass-roots organizing techniques are discussed. The shaggy and the achingly earnest are well represented at RootsCamp, which makes it an easy target of derision from the right. A reporter from the conservative publication The Daily Caller attended the postelection gathering in 2010 and made great sport of the 'unconference," with its self-conscious inclusiveness, which the reporter termed 'multilingual, multicultural and multi-unpurposeful."
But the handful of conservatives who attended the conference this past November were in no mood to sneer. One was Patrick Ruffini, a 34-year-old leader of the G.O.P.'s young-and-restless digerati. At RootsCamp, his breathless tweets of the sessions held by top Obama organizers ' 'In eight years, calling people will be obsolete"; 'Digital organizing director and field director will be one and the same" ' set off a buzz among Republican techies. Ruffini was plainly impressed by the openness of the experience. 'I'm like, Wow, they're doing this in front of 2,000 people, and the system seems to actually work," he told me a month later. 'The thing I was struck by at RootsCamp was that in many ways, the Democratic technology ecosystem has embraced the free market ' whereas the Republican one sort of runs on socialism, with the R.N.C. being the overlord."
Ruffini has his definitions of "free market" and "socialism" reversed, but his point is right. I suppose to get conservatives to agree to change, he has to get them to associate their current methods with the evil word "socialism". There's that dogmatism again. On the broader point, it is odd how Democrats have maintained a technical and field advantage. Republicans had an advantage in 2004, so it was no surprise defeated Democrats learned and figured out how to beat it in 2006. It seems natural that if you win, your opponent changes so as to overcome your advantage. When you lose, you figure out how to overcome his. Yet this is four elections in a row with a Democratic advantage, and Republicans seem pessimistic about catching up in 2014. The 2010 debacle apparently wasn't the loss of that advantage, but merely this massive wave that better software and phonebanking couldn't overcome.
This cultural theory does have me thinking that I see a common thread in Rootscamp spreading ideas, Obama campaign developers wanting to release the software code, and the decision to have the speakers at the Wellstone memorial speak from he heart with no vetting all come from the same impulses. Sometimes they serve us well, and sometimes not. Likewise, I see the top-down rigidity on the Republican side sometimes serving them well, like enforcing message discipline, but sometimes not, like epistemic closure against uncomfortable facts.
Still, I'm no fan of complacency. If the theory that a cultural difference confers a permanent advantage is wrong, then Republicans can catch up and pass us. We've shown them what they have to invent. I make no assumption they can't recreate for themselves what we've done. I make no assumption we won't ossify. I do assume that if even a fundraising machine like Obama's got outspent when independent groups are counted, then we'll never match the money advantage Republicans get from their billionaires and corporate executives, the occasional exception like Michael Bloomberg's spending in the IL-02 special election primary not withstanding.
We can innovate, or sit around hoping the Republicans don't learn. Hope is not a strategy.