Project ORCA: The necropsy

John E at AoSHQ explains what went wrong with ORCA...

I haven't been this sad since Free Willy died...

So, 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. 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.

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.

I'm on Twitter at @JohnEkdahl if you have any questions.

The Orca story—it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse: commentarymagazine.com/2012/11/09/rom… @commentary
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) November 9, 2012

ICYMI: Team Romney tries to excuse their ORCA failure. I respond. minx.cc/?post=334825
— John Ekdahl, Jr. (@JohnEkdahl) November 10, 2012

 From the Commentary story:   

Was ORCA’s failure the reason why Romney lost Virginia by almost 116,000 votes, Ohio by 103,000, Iowa by 88,000 or why Florida is still, days later, too close to call? It’s impossible to know what a Romney campaign with working GOTV technology would have been able to accomplish. Ekdahl explained that with the failure of Project ORCA’s organization and its later meltdown on Election Day “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.” The possibility that all of the efforts of Romney’s campaign, all of the enthusiasm, went unharnessed and dormant on Election Day when they could’ve at least led to a closer election result, if not a victory, is becoming beyond frustrating for thousands of his staffers, for the millions of Americans who gave their time and money to elect Mitt Romney president as they come to learn just what a disaster ORCA seems to have been.

Twitchy:  Epic Orca Disaster 
Gateway Pundit:  With the classic Oregon DOT blowing up the dead beached whale video...
The Other McCain:  Romney's Killer Fail
Gay Patriot:  New media micro targeting may be more effective than visual image...
More from Andy at AoSHQ
Ben Howe at Red State
Jerry Wilson at Goldfish and Clowns notes a target rich voter block that is going un-mined, like an oil field only reached by fracking.
Ouch.
How to prevent another ORCA beaching
Checkmate?