e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Quick Hits, Post-Election Analysis Edition — November 13, 2012

November 13th, 2012

Fan fave Quick Hits returns, this time rounding up some of the best post-election analysis of the digital campaign. Note the great coverage from Slate.com in particular, but there’s plenty of excellent reading below.

• A Vast Left-Wing Competency. How Democrats became the party of effective campaigning—and why the GOP isn’t catching up anytime soon. Contrast with The GOP’s Gray Revolution. What happened to the Republicans’ post-2008 digital push, featuring plenty of friends-of-e.politics.
• In Petraeus downfall, hubris meets high tech. C.f What 20,000 Pages of Inappropriate Emails Look Like.
• Why It’s Going to Be Hard for Republicans to Match the Big Data Advantage Democrats Have Built. C.f. Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win, Everything We Know (So Far) About Obama’s Big Data Tactics and Obama’s Microtargeting ‘Nuclear Codes’.
• Where Obama’s Ground Soldiers Were, and Who They Are.
• Book review: ‘The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns’ by Sasha Issenberg. Really looking forward to reading this one.
• ORCA vs. Gordon, a Battle of Election-Day Poll-Monitoring Systems, which Democrats won. C.f. Romney Campaign Acknowledges High-Tech Election Day Monitoring System ‘Had Its Challenges’ and Romney digital director: Orca wasn’t a loss. Plus, Romney Political Director: ‘The Ground Game Worked Fine’. Apparently doesn’t know what hit him.
• New Technologies Boosted Obama Campaign’s Efforts. Campaign CTO talks about Dashboard and other field tech.
• NGP VAN Provides Technology Backbone that Powers Democratic Ground Game Victory. Press release with some grassroots numbers.
• How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File, and The GOP’s media cocoon. C.f. How Cute: Fox News is worried about media bias.
• Drudge Handled Obama’s Win Just About How You’d Expect. C.f. After election results, Donald Trump throws fit on Twitter and The 20 biggest sore losers of election night.
• Watch Mitt Romney’s Facebook Likes Decrease in Real Time, via Political Wire. Ouch.
• Here’s Facebook’s Most-Liked Photo of All Time, and The Real Story of the Most-Liked Photograph of All Time.
• MoveOn’s Vote Buddy Uses Facebook to Influence Friends’ Voting.
• QR and NFC Help Rock the Youth Vote.
• 5 Things We Can Learn From This Year’s Political Campaign.
• Election interactives: 3 visual presentation insights from last night.
• Big Bet Six Months Ago Paved Way for President. Behind the ads that defined Romney in battleground states.
• Romney’s Transition Site briefly visible. In other news, Dewey Defeats Truman!
• The Rise and Fall of Social Media in American Politics (And How it May Rise Again).
• How Ridiculous Gerrymanders Saved the House Republican Majority.
• Facebook Obama Is Getting Desperate, judging from his posts. C.f. Women Are Absolutely Crushing Men at Clicking Facebook’s “I Voted” Widget and Obama Just Locked Up the Crucial Internet-Procrastinator Vote.
• Study on Voting and Social Media Demonstrates Stupidity of Laws Against Instagramming Your Own Ballot.
• How TV trounced the Internet when it came to reporting Obama’s victory.
• EU Plans Groundbreaking Project To Monitor Internet Censorship Around the World.
• When Victorious Obama Spoke to “Distant Nations,” China’s Web Users Were Listening.
• Is Occupy Wall Street Outperforming the Red Cross in Hurricane Relief?
• ControlShift Labs brings deep member engagement to the masses.
• Top 10 Politics Websites – October 2012, by traffic.
• The Prop 37 Phenomenon on Facebook. Admiring an online ad campaign.
• The Obama Campaign’s Technology Is a Force Multiplier.
• Facebook: I Want My Friends Back. C.f. Family Feud: Tense Thanksgiving for Facebook and George Takei. Plenty of folks unhappy with the ever-decreasing reach of Facebook posts.
• Online videos gaining in US campaign: study. Also, Obama vs. Romney: Who’s Winning the YouTube Vote?
• Political Campaigns Target Off-the-Grid Voters with Digital Armies of Volunteers, and Tracking Voters’ Clicks Online to Try to Sway Them.
• Why the Tea Party Failed, including a look at various GOTV systems that crashed on election day, like this one.
• Latest sign of the impending Apocalypse: Anthony Weiner Returns to Twitter.
• Chart: Almost Every Obama Conspiracy Theory Ever. I so totally forgot that he went to Mars!
• And finally, How the internet connects people with a quicksand fetish.

– cpd