GOPers need to figure out how to standardize voter information to include all kinds of data. GOP seeks to up its online game

Republican digital gurus are starting to chart a path forward for 2014 and beyond after conceding that they were badly outgunned by Barack Obama’s campaign in cyberspace this past November.

About 50 top Republicans, both staffers for the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee as well as outside GOP digital consultants, huddled in Washington Thursday morning to rehash what Mitt Romney did wrong, digitally speaking.


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They also discussed next steps for their party in strengthening and standardizing its digital operation.

The group, led by Romney campaign digital director Zac Moffatt, RNC digital director Tyler Brown and RNC Chief of Staff Jeff Larson, included about a third RNC and Romney campaign staffers and two-thirds outside GOP operatives and representatives from companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

GOP digital strategists, both inside and outside the Romney campaign, said the biggest challenge for the party will be in centralizing and standardizing its databases to hand off to future Republican candidates.

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How both Republicans and Democrats decide to use their 2012 data headed into the 2014 midterm elections and the next presidential race could determine who has the digital edge for the forseeable future at a time when television ads are becoming less important and more voters are turning to the Internet for their political information. Unlike the Romney campaign, the Obama political operation is holding on to its vast treasure trove of voter data, and won’t decide until later whether — and how — to share it with the party and individual candidates.

The Romney campaign is in the process of transferring all of its voter contact data to the RNC — a database that includes one million donor contacts and 2.2 active email addresses from the Romney list, as well as 300 pages of strategy memos and analytics information.

How to build on those contacts in the next four years and continue to grow the party’s email database is the central question facing the GOP now, said veteran GOP strategist Peter Pasi, a partner at Emotive who did digital work for Rick Santorum’s campaign, among others, and who attended Thursday’s meeting.

“How can we build structures … that can last 10 years and be refined no matter who’s the chairman and who’s in the White House?” he told POLITICO earlier this week, adding that the party needs to build “a digital infrastructure that reflects kind of a movement and a belief — not just [one] campaign.”

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In addition to building that database, Republicans need to figure out how to standardize their voter information to include all kinds of data like the Obama campaign did in 2012. The Obama campaign was able to micro-target voters by cross-referencing such things as television-viewing habits and information collected from Facebook and email.

“The Obama campaign found a way to integrate social media, technology, email databases, fundraising databases and consumer market data,” said GOP digital strategist Vincent Harris, who did digital work for Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry in 2012. “That does not exist on the Republican side to that degree.”

Moffatt and other Republicans in attendance at the Thursday meeting argued Romney was disadvantaged by the short time frame he had to put together a digital and data operation, compared with Obama’s longtime digital team that began its work pre-2008. Then again, Romney has been running for president in one way or another since 2007.

“Clearly what we did this cycle wasn’t enough, but we did a lot of good things with the time and resources we had and our efforts have steadily improved over the past decade,” an RNC official told POLITICO. “This [meeting] is the first step in a multistep process as we lay out the direction our party goes with its digital presence and how we get there.”

Moffatt called the short time frame that Romney had to prepare “exceptionally frustrating” at a Google/CNN panel on digital and the campaign earlier this week.

“If I could do it again, I’d do it as an incumbent,” he said. “[The Obama campaign] are the greatest digital operation in the history of politics.”

Because of the extra time Obama’s team had to prepare and the built-in advantages of being an incumbent, Moffatt argued, Obama already had a large platform and online following to make its efforts even more effective.

“In many ways, we built many of the same digital tools [Obama’s team] did, but the challenge was more people adopted it on their side, for example, because they had more people to push it to,” he said.

Republicans who attended the digital meeting said it was constructive in nature and that it provided a comprehensive overview of everything Romney’s team did right and wrong.

“It was remarkably civil — I expected it to be a lot more contentious and it wasn’t,” one attendee, who asked not to be named, told POLITICO after the meeting. “It was much more positive … I think everyone knows there’s a lot of work to be done, and there are going to be different people involved going forward.”

Another source, too, said the lack of infighting was surprising, given some of the often-anonymous criticism of the Romney digital operation that’s taken place since Election Day. One key failing of the Romney campaign was ORCA, the smartphone app the campaign used to gather information about who was voting and identify which supporters turned out on Election Day that wasn’t tested adequately and crashed on Election Day.

“People … have made their frustration known, a lot of them on background, but none of that came through when everyone was in a room together,” the source said. “All of the questions that were asked were really constructive, genuine questions.”

Though there were discussions of the things that went wrong, including ORCA, Moffatt said the meeting also focused on things the Romney campaign did well.

“Elections are zero-sum games, but digital is not — I think people are concerned that when you lose, all the ideas are bad and when you win, all the ideas were good,” Moffatt said. “As a party, we’re in a much better place than we were four years ago, and we have an opportunity to be much more successful going forward.”

Harris said some retrospection on 2012 is helpful, but that the sooner the party starts planning for upcoming elections, the better positioned it will be to catch up.

“The Republican Party’s sitting around now and kind of flogging itself,” he said. “And I feel like some of that is worth doing — but at the same time, we also need to pick ourselves up and get back on the horse and point forward, quickly.”

Sources say that who the RNC chooses to direct its digital operations will signal how serious the party is about catching up to Democrats’ digital and data advantage.

“I do think that the RNC has an ability to shape what every campaign does and the RNC has a lot of incentive to be the leader when it comes to the Republican resurgence online,” said Rob Saliterman, who manages Google’s political ads on the Republican side. “It seems like in politics, it’s pretty typical that if one party gains an advantage in one cycle, the other party comes back in the next cycle.”

Crucial to Republicans’ next steps, though, is funding — as one attendee said: “Starting from scratch to build this stuff isn’t cheap.”

Moffatt stressed the importance of choosing a strong RNC digital director going into 2014 and 2016, but said none of the GOP’s plans can be laid without funds — which, because the RNC is still working to erase its debt and is heading into an election off-year — could be challenging.

“Who they pick is vitally important, but it only matters if they fund it,” Moffatt said. “You have to have the resources to be successful … the organization has to choose to make this a priority.”

Further complicating Republican digital efforts in four years is that the party will have a similar problem in 2016: Their best digital strategists will likely be divided between the top candidates in a competitive primary — then again, Democrats will also likely have a primary four years from now. That makes the RNC’s role in the process even more crucial, one strategist at the meeting said.

“It’s a blessing that Republicans have so many great candidates that are going to run, but that probably means there’s going to be a drawn-out primary,” the strategist said. “If the RNC doesn’t [take a leadership role], I don’t know how the Republican Party would come back in the digital area just because of the contested primary.”

“If you were a [Tim] Pawlenty person, or a [Ron] Paul person, or … some of the best minds were divided among those campaigns,” Pasi said, whereas for Democrats wanting to do digital, working for “Obama’s [campaign] is kind of like going to Oxford. So you’ll want to do that.”

Harris, too, said the party’s most influential digital strategists need to pool their collective ideas to make the party more successful in the future.

“We all compete, but we have to band together or we’re going to lose,” he said.