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Analysis: Why Mitt Romney may have taken so long to concede
(Yahoo News) – In an election season dominated by names like Gallup, Rasmussen and Nate Silver, the Romney number crunchers had their own methods. A campaign release described Project ORCA as a “massive undertaking” involving nearly 35,000 volunteers and designed to “conduct the world’s largest exit poll” and win the White House.
The project operates via a Web-based app volunteers use to relay the most up-to-date poll information to a “national dashboard” at the Boston headquarters. … Another key component to Project ORCA is state-of-the-art dashboard. For the past several months, a “brain” has been built into this dashboard and it will take in, analyze and recommend actions on the millions of pieces of incoming data. In the fast-paced environment of an Election Day command center, having this programmed “brain” will alert decision-makers to key findings and suggest reallocation of resources.
The human brains behind that brain came as a result of what Slate reported as a “summertime personnel spree ” that included engineers who used to work at Apple, Google Analytics, Omniture and even Overstock.com, as well as “commercially available services.”
The success, though, would have to depend on volunteer troops united by a Web-based smartphone app. Romney himself called these forces, armed with the technology, an “unprecedented advantage on Election Day.”
Romney Campaign Enlists Help of Orca Project to Get Vote Out – see video in 1st comment
In Boston, stunned Romney supporters struggle to explain defeat
(Examiner) – Indeed, what was striking after Fox News called the race for Obama, at about 11:15 p.m., was how stunned so many of Romney’s supporters were. Many said they were influenced by the prominent conservatives who predicted a big Romney win, and they fully expected Tuesday night to be a victory celebration.
“I am shocked, I am blown away,” said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff. I thought there was a trend that was going on underground.”
“We were so convinced that the people of this country had more common sense than that,” said Nan Strauch, of Hilton Head, South Carolina. “It was just a very big surprise. We felt so confident.”
“It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” said Marianne Doherty of Boston. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.”
Some Romney aides were surprised too, especially since they had put an enormous amount of effort into tracking the hour-by-hour whims of the electorate. In recent weeks the campaign came up with a super-secret, super-duper vote monitoring system that was dubbed Project Orca.
Orca, which was headquartered in a giant war room spread across the floor of the Boston Garden, turned out to be problematic at best. Early in the evening, one aide said that, as of 4 p.m., Orca still projected a Romney victory of somewhere between 290 and 300 electoral votes. Obviously that didn’t happen. Later, another aide said Orca had pretty much crashed in the heat of the action. “Somebody said Orca is lying on the beach with a harpoon in it,” said the aide.
Going Ballistic and In Denial …
Fox News [and Karl Rove] Slowly Loses Its Mind Over Election Results
When Fox News called the election for Barack Obama just before 11:30 p.m., it was the culmination of a night-long sigh by the right-wing network, capped off with a climactic hissy fit seeped in denial, courtesy of Karl Rove. The polls didn’t look good going into the day, but the channel’s well-manicured hosts put on a happy face and crossed their fingers, as they have for weeks now, kicking off election night with similar refrains of hope and favorable internal polling from the Romney campaign, plus predictable mentions of unemployment, Libya, and paths to a win without Ohio. But the excuses started early and then things got weird.
“The white establishment is now the minority,” said a resigned-sounding Bill O’Reilly, long before any swing-state had been decided. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.”
“The demographics are changing,” he added. “It’s not a traditional America anymore.”
Trump’s Twitter rant after Obama win: `We should march on Washington and stop this’
