Karl Rove’s involvement hasn’t helped appeal to Silicon Valley programmers. Silicon Valley not buying GOP plan

A California investor — with help from Karl Rove — won the highly competitive contest to help build the Republican National Committee’s data platform.

But he’s having trouble winning over Silicon Valley.


Dick Boyce, once a partner at Bain & Co. and the former CEO of J.Crew, launched Liberty Works with the goal of helping Republicans catch up to Democrats in the digital data world.

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Liberty Works was hired to create an open-source voter data platform, meaning outside groups and campaigns would have access to the information for outreach and fundraising and also be able to build on it with their own applications. The RNC describes the goal for the shared data as “iPhone-like.”

Since the RNC announcement on May 1, Liberty Works has gotten off to a shaky start. Top engineers in Silicon Valley who have been looking for ways to help Republican campaigns question Boyce’s vision and say the company’s outreach is underwhelming — as are its salary offers.

“At a minimum, they should buy a round or two of drinks before they ask the tech community to get into bed,” said Garrett Johnson, the chief executive of SendHub, an Internet communications firm in Menlo Park.

Liberty Works is also discussing plans to outsource the voter data platform it was charged with building to another company called Originate, POLITICO has learned, further upsetting the GOP tech community.

“You’re not going to get great quality if you keep passing the responsibility down the line,” said Chris Abrams, a Bay Area engineer, who said he met with Boyce and members of his team, including Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

The big risk for the RNC is that any delay or failure to keep up with the Democrats’ vaunted data operation could hurt their already uphill efforts to win the Senate next year and further cement the GOP’s reputation as behind the times in the digital data world.

Complicating things for Liberty Works is competition from other conservative quarters, including the Koch brothers, whose network has also been in the Valley looking for GOP-friendly tech talent to build on its voter data outfit called Themis, which cost at least $18 million to build in 2010 and 2011.

The Charles Koch Institute will co-host a hackathon, a collaborative coding event bringing together programmers and designers to work on a proposed problem in partnership with some of the top engineers in the Silicon Valley, POLITICO has learned.

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The proposed problem for this event is “How do you engage voters on economic liberty issues that matter to them?” according to an engineer organizing the event set for June 21-22 in San Francisco.

“A lot of groups are in early stages for the same idea,” Abrams said. “Are they going to work together, or are they going to compete?”

Boyce had it easier selling Liberty Works to the Washington establishment, with Rove as his Sherpa. Boyce met with Beltway insiders, including RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, chief of staff Mike Shields, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and others from Team Romney, according to a person close to Liberty Works.

“He was really interested in talking about what worked and what could have been better,” said Zac Moffatt, digital director for Mitt Romney’s campaign, who spoke with Boyce both during and after the election. “They’re trying to build something that’s more than just one campaign.”

Boyce declined to comment for this story.

Rove’s involvement, while useful in Washington, hasn’t helped appeal to Silicon Valley programmers.

“Karl Rove, to me, doesn’t mean engaging an open-source community,” said Aaron Ginn, director of growth for StumbleUpon, who also worked for the Romney campaign.

Rove does not have an official role or financial stake in Liberty Works but has been the company’s biggest cheerleader, actively fundraising for the startup, and several sources say Rove remains heavily involved in the effort.

But Rove’s attachment to Liberty Works has raised eyebrows among tea party and other conservatives who worry that he will make it difficult for outsiders to make an impact in GOP politics. Rove has not previously been known for his work in the digital field.

“[F]or all of Karl Rove’s fine attributes, he is also largely a direct mail guy who learned at the foot of Lee Atwater and never really learned anything after Atwater passed,” RedState’s Erick Erickson wrote earlier this month. “I’m just not sure, after the 2012 race, that this is a wise investment. Direct mail guys believe the data is the value, and what Team Obama discovered is that the tools to analyze the data are the value.”

A spokeswoman for Rove declined to comment on his relationship with Boyce and Liberty Works.

The RNC has been actively discussing the yet-to-be-built platform with outside groups, educating them and familiarizing them with the project with the hope that they will eventually sign on.

“We’re excited about our progress after launching an unprecedented effort to restructure around data and digital efforts in order to foster innovation to the Republican Party,” said RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski.

Another company, Data Trust, which was created in 2011 for Republicans to exchange voter lists, will remain part of the RNC partnership by managing the initiative. Former RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, who runs Data Trust, is also the chairman of the board for Rove’s American Crossroads, which received $100,000 from Boyce during the 2012 election.

The RNC has a rare window of opportunity to get its voter data platform right. The Democratic Party’s tech operation for the past six years has revolved around President Barack Obama’s campaign, GOP sources say, and the campaign’s resources have now been leased to the president’s political arm, Organizing for Action.

The Democratic National Committee has its own voter file and Catalist, a third-party vendor that provides Democrats with data, but their information doesn’t come close to what the Obama campaign was able to compile and integrate from different lists.

Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who also ran for governor in California in 2010, described Boyce in an interview with POLITICO as a “very successful businessperson” who can bring a fresh perspective to the RNC’s tech troubles.

“My view is that it was an appropriate time to bring eyes from the outside,” she said. “It’s not like he doesn’t understand politics. He’s been deeply involved in three campaigns. He hasn’t been a political operative. He has seen the good, the bad and the ugly. He understands what goes on here.”

But the Valley engineers who would build the platform say Boyce has been unwilling to engage with them — which the Obama campaign excelled at in 2012 — and is resistant to using anything the Obama campaign did as a model. The RNC’s autopsy report in March also commended the Obama campaign’s tech efforts.

“If we are going to be serious about this, we have to approach it from a best practices perspective, and the Valley is where meetups were born,” said SendHub’s Garrett Johnson. “There needs to be better engagement to try to build a community and base here in the Valley who are in a position to help the GOP.”

Johnson held two happy hour events in April not connected with Liberty Works to reach out to GOP tech people to figure out how they can help the party.

The engineers also said Boyce was offering salaries nowhere close to what the Obama campaign paid.

“The Republican Party’s technology is just so bad that anything anyone is going to do will improve it,” said Abrams. “They’re missing out. I don’t think Dick understands that the price for a Silicon Valley engineer is well above the price in other parts of the country. Top talent is expensive.”

Ethan Roeder, who was the data director for Obama for America in 2012 and is now the executive director of the New Organizing Institute, said Democrats initially struggled with many of the same voter data questions that Republicans are facing and noted it took several election cycles to get it right. But he warned that the issues for the RNC could be more cultural than technical.

“The leadership needs to understand that they have to step back from feeling they have to be an expert,” he said. “They need the data to inform the decisions they make.

“There is a bit of misperception that the Democrats have more success because they have more talent,” Roeder added. “The fact of the matter is that we have been fighting these battles internally longer than they have.”

Michelle Quinn reported from San Francisco.