The political world was full of speculation about the breeds of the Senate and whether the Republicans would take over most of the higher house. When this happened, I spent time, finding out what was really going on in the Republican world.
All this began when I had the opportunity to see the presentation of Andy Barkett, the first technology director of the Republican Committee (RNC). What I listened to aroused my interest. It’s like RNC finally came to life. I wrote a column about the challenges facing the party during the confusion after the 2012 election and the Reince Preibus election as chairman of the RNC, re -installing Mr. Preibus as the head of the party. Working in the last four presidential elections, I saw first -hand the possibilities of the party and what was needed to win. In this column, I was in favor of an integrated vertical system that used RNC assets to support in choosing offices for a local sheriff with information repeated to the national party. It seemed that I had just heard from Barkett, but I wanted to examine the status of party information possibilities more.
This led me to an interview with Chuck Defeo, digital director and deputy chief of staff of the RNC. Defeo, a graduate of political sciences of the Missouri-Kansas University, fell into being a technology a bit. In 1996 he began working for the then senator John Ashcroft, when all the delayed nights of computer geeks led him to organize a computer side of the senator’s operation. Defeo used this as a stepping stone with other political technical concerts, which then landed as a person who organized digital efforts in the Bush re -election campaign in 2004. These were the days when the Republicans overtook the organizational game. Since then, Obama’s campaigns have left Republicans in their efforts to choose voters, collect money and win the election.
So what did Defeo discover when he came on board last July? Surprisingly, he found a very positive attitude – readiness to change and improve to support republican candidates in winning in 2014, approaching 2016.
The perception of Republicans was left behind for two reasons, as stated by Defeo. First of all, RNC has four different leaders since 2004 and in this period underfinuation in this area of ​​technology has been seen. Secondly, Obama had a billion dollars in two cycles of presidential elections. In 2012, they had barrels of money, and also had a four -year election course to introduce their team and strategy. I spent 12 days in Columbus, Ohio, just before the election day and you could see and feel the benefits that Obama’s team had over Romney – only 90 days from the time of winning the nomination. When it comes to looking to the future, Defeo told me: “DNC has just received data from the Obama campaign last year and will not have one billion dollars in 2014.”
The test case for the work done by Defeo and his team was this year’s March 13th Special elections in Florida at 13th District Congress seat. In this race, David Jolly, a Republican, defeated the privileged democrat Alex Sink, a former governor’s candidate. Contact with the voter, which was carried out by the RNC, was very precise, because Defeo told me that they got in 415 votes from their oriented voices absent from the list of over 20,000. This very effective campaign and the opportunity to vote the vote allowed Jolly surprised the sink and take Place by almost 2%.
Defeo and his team are now focusing on increasing effort to compete in thousands of races throughout the country. This is a large task, the results of which we will see on November 4th. As for the integration of the network from RNC to local races, Defeo said: “The database was built. We need to improve access to data for our candidates and receiving data from these candidates and their campaigns. ”
It is obvious that RNC has committed to create a first -class technological base to provide tools for republican candidates to compete in every race in the country. Soon we will see if the fruits of their efforts overcome the earlier technological advantage, which Obama created for Democrats. These things are swinging like a pendulum and we will soon find out if they went back.
