Para Bellum Labs Will Attempt To Make the RNC a Political-Analytics Player

Nerval's Lobster writes "President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign relied on a sophisticated data-analytics platform that allowed organizers and volunteers to precisely target potential donors and voters. The centerpiece of that effort was Project Narwhal, which brought voter information—steadily accumulated since Obama's 2008 campaign—onto a single platform accessible to a growing number of campaign-related apps. The GOP has only a few short years to prepare for the next Presidential election cycle, and the party is scrambling to build an analytics system capable of competing against whatever the Democrats deploy onto the field of battle. To that end, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has launched Para Bellum Labs, modeled after a startup, to produce digital platforms for election analytics and voter engagement. Is this a genuine attempt to infuse the GOP's infrastructure with data science, or merely an attempt to show that the organization hasn't fallen behind the Democratic Party when it comes to analytics? Certainly the "Welcome to Para Bellum Labs" video posted by the RNC gives the impression of a huge office staffed with data scientists and programmers. However, the creation of a muscular digital ecosystem hinges on far more than building a couple of apps. Whatever the GOP rolls out, it'll face a tough opponent in the Democratic opposition, which will almost certainly emulate the robust IT infrastructure that the Obama campaign instituted in 2012 (not to mention Obama's massive voter and donor datasets). From that perspective, Para Bellum Labs might face the toughest job in politics."

Comments

Waste of Time

[Akratist]

While the Republicans probably have a lot of catching up to do in the tech department, they're still clueless as to why they are losing in the political arena, and it has nothing to do with tech. They've long since given up their founding principles of being pro-liberty (remember, most Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act) and internationally cautious and have instead become a hangout for corrupt Beltway extortionists and moonbat crazies in recent decades. When they do offer a political position, it's about 75 percent of what the Democrats offer, so what's the point of supporting them? Finally, dislike of government is a prominent Republican theme, but they've never seen a defense program they didn't like (by and large). All that adds up to a brand which is more damaged than New Coke and would take a cold, hard look in the mirror before it can ever expect to be resurrected, which they are not capable of doing. In ten years, the GOP will have largely gone the way of the Whigs, maybe winning some local elections, but increasingly irrelevant on the national scene.