By Susan Duclos
Time and again I have taken to Twitter and stated on this blog that Republicans don't have a message problem so much as the inability to use new technology in the age of the Internet to get that message across, to bypass a very liberal media and the screeching, very loud noise that comes from the left.
When it comes to technological savvy, Republican leadership act like old dogs that cannot be taught new tricks. They start social media accounts, create go-to places for research and data, but cannot seem to connect with voters or even their very politically active base, so that the supporters can connect with other voters, knowledge in hand.
For example, how many conservative supporters actually know the RNC has a specific site set up called "RNC Research?" Even their Twitter account only has 20,00+ followers. That is a site which provides videos, research, links to data... but what good is setting up the site with relevant information and messaging if no one knows about it?
Some new young tech-savvy blood is jumping into the game to help bridge this gap between Republican leadership and the voters they want to communicate with.
Who better to understand the lack of voter outreach within the Republican leadership and their inability to use modern day technological know-how in getting conservative messaging to the voters in the age of the internet, than the former eCampaign director for the Republican National Committee, Patrick Ruffini.
Ruffini went in, saw the young blood, tech-savvy operations used by liberals and came away with the comparisons.
Via TIME:
What he found at the event came as a sort of revelation: A vast liberal brain trust bursting with young talent who had advanced far beyond Republicans in the art and science of using data, analytics and voter outreach. He live-tweeted his observations, and then began meeting with other young strategists in his party, like Katie Harbath, who handles Republican campaign outreach for Facebook, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a pollster at the Winston Group, and Reihan Salam, a political columnist for the National Review.
They decided that the conservative movement simply did not have what liberals did: An infrastructure to train and nurture the next generation of campaign operatives and develop cutting-edge techniques. So they decided to take a shot at filling the void, by developing a proposal for a suite of new outside groups that would mimic, and eventually outpace, Democratic efforts. “We are not going to start a single group that is going to solve all the problems,” said Ruffini, a former eCampaign director for the Republican National Committee who is now president of the consulting firm Engage. “What it is going to involve is an ecosystem.”
To counter the lefts New Organizing Institute, a place for training and connecting young conservative talent, these talented members of the right have created the Empower Action Group, with the aim of increasing "the ranks of people with digital, data and organizing know-how working for the GOP."
More:
Another proposed effort, provisionally called The R&D Lab, would be a conservative response to the liberal Analyst Institute, which develops and tests new techniques for progressive voter contact and persuasion, all of which informed the Obama campaign in 2012. “Data in all forms—polling, analytics, experiments, policy research—must be at the heart of successful Republican rebuilding,” reads a five-page white paper proposing the new effort, which has already been circulated to donors. “Google famously tested forty-one shades of blue to see which one was best for a graphic, yet Republicans do not systematically tests their assumptions and attempt to simulate outcomes before spending resources on various tactics.”
The group also hopes to create a new organization provisionally called The Venture Fund, which is meant to repeat the success of the liberal New Media Ventures, a start-up incubator founded by the Democracy Alliance, a coalition of wealthy progressive benefactors. “A similar force within the Republican Party should aim to be more disruptive,” reads the white paper, “a startup accelerator patterned after Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator that offers small investments and hands-on mentorship to young conservative technologists.”
The final effort envisioned by Ruffini and his colleagues would be a Club for Growth-style campaign fundraising organization, which would promise donations to Republican campaigns that adopt data-driven techniques. “The entity itself could raise hard money to provide as ‘seed funding’ for campaigns interested in conducting tests within their own campaigns,” reads the white paper.
Republican leadership has to understand by now that they are far behind Democrats in the usage of the Internet, social media and voter outreach using more modern technological tools.
They should not only welcome this young tech-savvy blood, they should embrace them, communicate with them, learn from them, because sometimes old dogs can learn new tricks.
