Operatives linked to insiders like Rove and the Kochs are pushing rival plans. The GOP's data dogfight

The GOP didn’t have an answer for Big Democratic Data in 2012, costing them in close races from Congress to the White House.

Now, they’ve got lots of answers — possibly too many — and a feisty rivalry is brewing between tea party upstarts, nonpartisan data geeks, operatives linked to the Koch brothers and insiders like Karl Rove.


Instead of fighting Democrats, the right’s would-be data wizards are going after each other with claims of cronyism and incompetence, as well as cutthroat bidding wars and threats of legal action.

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This isn’t just about who can hire the most young IT programmers, create the slickest app to optimize door-knocking routes or stave off a repeat of the Election Day collapse of Mitt Romney’s ORCA system.

Rather, in a very real way, it’s about who controls the party through its most precious asset — its voter data — and the multimillion-dollar contracts that could follow.

Rove has begun soliciting donors for a $15 million-plus data project. There are competing systems being offered by a pair of twin brothers. And a programmer who helped start the dominant Democratic voter data system is pitching a copycat setup for Republicans.

The Republican National Committee is encouraging the intramural competition and , at the same time , pushing a data management system of its own.

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“I would hope that the pressure and the desire to win is so great that people will really try to get the best product that is truly going to solve the problem and not just make their decisions based on who has the best connections,” said conservative data entrepreneur Ned Ryun.

Rove earlier this month spoke with major donors in New York about a voter data project that he has estimated could cost between $15 million and $20 million. He has been working with San Francisco-based private-equity investor Dick Boyce, who is fronting a political data concept called Liberty Works, sources tell POLITICO.

The public relationship between Rove and Boyce has been complicated, according to several sources familiar with the project. Rove has openly embraced Boyce’s work, touting it at an invitation-only conference that drew some of the GOP’s biggest names to a swanky Georgia resort in March. But Boyce has established distance from Rove, indicating to prospective donors that he’s not simply a front for the latest project from the Rove-conceived Crossroads groups, which sponsored one of Rove’s New York meetings this month.

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Likewise, Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio, called Liberty Works a “stand-alone” effort.

Meanwhile, POLITICO has learned that a voter database outfit called Themis, established by the political network associated with David and Charles Koch, has been working with an established private political data company called i360. The partnership seems to give Koch World, which until recently had mostly focused on conservative issue advocacy, new reach into Republican Party politics.

On its website, i360 boasts of maintaining a constantly updated database of over 187 million active voters and over 211 million consumers that “provides hundreds of data points on every American adult that is currently or potentially politically active.”

It’s unclear when the Themis relationship began, but since 2010, i360 has worked for Republican candidates and committees ranging from Reps. Diane Black and Tom Cotton to unsuccessful 2012 candidates Allen West, Josh Mandel and Tim Pawlenty, the Maine Republican Party, and a pro-Rick Perry super PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Themis — which cost at least $ 18 million to build in 2010 and 2011, according to recent tax filings — was used in 2012 by Koch-backed nonprofit groups such as Americans for Prosperity to contact millions of voters through phone calls and door-knocks in the run-up to Election Day.

Some critics grumbled about Themis’s performance, and POLITICO has learned that operatives have held post-election meetings on how to utilize it more effectively.

A representative from Koch Industries declined to comment on the record, but a person familiar with the situation said “Koch remains committed to Themis and their technology.”

Multiple sources said that Boyce’s effort has collided with Themis, adding to the rivalry between two of the deepest-pocketed factions in conservative politics — Crossroads and the Koch political operation.

Lighter-weight groups also have made some in-roads into the wide-open conservative data landscape.

Last year, Ned Ryun and his twin brother Drew, in a partnership between their American Majority Action nonprofit and a company called Political Gravity, rolled out a voter data interface called Gravity that helped customers ranging from victorious Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz to the tea party group FreedomWorks.

But the brothers have since split. Drew left American Majority, and they launched competing firms after Election Day.

The Ryuns are “type double As” who have been “competing all our lives,” said Drew Ryun, whose new company, Surge Data Tech, is among a handful of voter data firms pitching state Republican parties.

“Free market competition leads to innovation,” he said. “The conundrum will be when innovation is outside the purview of GOP consultants and therefore their bank accounts.”

Ned Ryun’s firm Voter Gravity is courting campaigns directly, and this month fired off a cease-and-desist letter to a new GOP consulting firm called MGA Holdings founded by a pair of former operatives for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican Governors Association demanding that the new firm stop using the name Gravity-N for its data tool.

MGA Holdings — which says it intends to drop the use of the name Gravity-N — hopes to bring together data streams across a wide array of platforms, including potentially using applications from other companies. Co-founder Alex Skatell, who was digital director for the NRSC and the RGA, says the more, the merrier.

“It’s encouraging that there are others out there willing to put the time, energy and investment into working towards solutions,” he said.

The RNC in its post-election autopsy announced it would seek to facilitate the competition by allowing approved software platforms, candidates and groups to directly access a revamped version of its once-vaunted voter file through the Data Trust database created in 2011 with support from Crossroads.

But it’s also quietly pushed state parties to sign onto a voter data management system — GOP Data Center — created around the same time, which some conservative data entrepreneurs outside the party structure see as stifling competition.

Republicans know what they don’t want: another ORCA — the voter-mobilization system built by Romney’s campaign, which was crippled by balky interfaces that volunteers couldn’t navigate and cataclysmic Election Day crashes.

What they do want is a matter of debate.

Establishment types worry that a truly open data environment could empower tea party candidates and groups to use the GOP’s data to defeat incumbents in Republican primaries, while groups and firms that cater to the base worry that the RNC will shut them out.

The nightmare scenario for many on the right has Data Trust, the Kochs and possibly operatives like Rove and the Ryun brothers building their own competing voter files, creating a money vacuum that could produce conflicting or overlapping data and further splinter the conservative movement.

Democrats built their voter data advantage partly because their data is more centralized. A few well-connected firms like Catalist and NGP VAN have earned de facto endorsements from the Democratic establishment and used those blessings to build near monopolies on the left. As a result, Democratic candidates and liberal interest groups have benefited from enhancing and sharing the same data through the same interfaces.

“That came as a result of a competitive marketplace where there were five or six players, and, over time, over half the states decided that they thought VAN was the superior product, and then the [Democratic National Committee] stepped in and expanded the NGP VAN contract to 50 states,” said Stu Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN.

Trevelyan rejected criticism that his company has stifled competition or been slow to innovate, saying, “we continue to provide more innovation than anyone on the Republican side.”

Bruce Willsie, the president of a nonpartisan data firm called Labels & Lists, said there’s no clear answer about what’s better.

“On the plus side, the competition may be healthy and result in better technology and data,” said Willsie, whose company in 2012 was paid $68,000 by conservative and liberal candidates and committees ranging from unions to FreedomWorks, according to FEC reports. “On the minus side, the lack of coordination may introduce inefficiencies.”

NGP VAN’s dominance could make Democrats susceptible to losing their data edge, suggested Jim Gilliam of the nonpartisan firm NationBuilder. It was started by liberals but has recently made inroads with GOP groups, drawing fire from NGP VAN and liberal activists suggesting Democrats should be wary about doing business with firms that play both sides.

“I believe the choose-a-side card is in its last days,” Gilliam said. “The competition is definitely going to help, not hinder the Republicans. It will encourage a bit more of an open ecosystem as they will need to share data.”

Steve Adler, a Rhode Island programmer who helped start one of the companies that became NGP VAN, has switched sides and developed a parallel system for Republicans called rVotes.

Adler’s company has had meetings or calls to present its system to some of the most influential Republican data consultants — from the Romney campaign’s digital gurus Zac Moffatt and Michael Beach (who got a demonstration in the spring of 2011) to the RNC (first back in 2009 and again in March, when he pitched to chief of staff Mike Shields and top adviser Jeff Larson) to Rove (who talked with an rVotes supporter after the election).

Despite the meetings, Adler says there’s a reluctance among GOP bigwigs to award data contracts to anyone who’s not part of the insider Beltway consultant class. “They just don’t know what they’re doing,” Adler charged, adding “They’re not qualified.”

As for his efforts to get traction for rVotes among Washington’s GOP elite, he said, “It’s like trying to sell beauty products to ugly people, but they’re blind, so they don’t know that they’re ugly.”

His company failed to land any big federal or state GOP contracts last year, with federal records showing rVotes earned only $18,000 in 2012 mostly from longshot or tea party congressional candidates such as Will Cardon of Arizona, Barry Hinckley of Rhode Island and Jamie Radtke of Virginia.

Moreover, Adler says there’s little incentive for consultants to let anyone else try their hand, since “even though they’ve failed, they succeeded, because they still made money off of ORCA and Data Trust.”

To wit, the companies that handled the bulk of the data business for Romney’s campaign and the RNC — Targeted Victory, FLS Connect and Target Point Consulting — since the beginning of 2011 have received $190 million from Romney, the RNC and other federal Republican candidates, committees and groups , FEC records show.

The huge windfalls drew harsh criticism from Republicans, who — noting the firm’s close ties to the folks picking vendors (Targeted Victory was created by Moffatt and Beach, while Target Point was founded by Alex Gage, whose wife Katie Gage was Romney’s deputy campaign manager, and FLS Connect was founded partly by Larson and counted Romney political director Rich Beeson among its partners) — called it everything from “ racketeering” to the “ incestuous bleeding of the Republican Party.”

RNC chairman Reince Priebus defended Larson, who served as RNC chief of staff during the 2012 election, pointing out that he stepped down from FLS Connect. But the decision to open the data file to outside firms was seen in some quarters as a response to the argument that the party didn’t welcome outsiders.

The idea, as expressed in the autopsy, was that the RNC should be “supporting competition in the marketplace to ensure that the best ideas rise to the top.” But even that announcement was greeted skeptically, with grass-roots critics pointing out that the RNC only recently created GOP Data Center, which it pays FLS Connect to maintain and encourages state parties to adopt.

“Volunteers have been very frustrated” with GOP Data Center, said Steven Kuivenhoven, a Michigan GOP official during the 2012 cycle who encouraged activists to use alternative voter outreach interfaces last year. He has emerged as an rVotes evangelist, supporting a proposal Adler submitted this month to the state party, and he expressed concern about state parties relying primarily on GOP Data Center, which Michigan’s GOP this year agreed to use.

GOP Data Center and Data Trust are “a patchwork of apps built on an old database structure,” he said. “This is very inadequate as compared to what the Democrats use.”

Interoperability, said Moffatt, was “one of the challenges that we ran into in 2012. The systems on the Republican side weren’t built to talk to each other. If you’re building new technology and you’re doing it properly, then the systems should talk to each other.”

RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said GOP Data Center will work with other applications — not against them — partly by allowing them to interface with Data Trust. “There has been an appetite for one central open data platform for others in our party to access data and build innovative tools and applications that will help make our party better,” she said.

Adler, the rVotes creator, says the GOP’s biggest challenge may stem less from technological deficiencies than from a fundamental approach to politics.

“The technology supports a philosophy that isn’t there,” he said. “Most Republicans don’t want to knock on doors. They don’t want to motivate people at the grass-roots level. It’s just not what they want to do.”

Steve Friess contributed to this report.