Eric Cumbee

These are my links for February 17th from 13:38 to 13:38:

• GetAFreelancer.com - Virtual Phone Bank Web App - wonder who is behind this?

From Roll Call

Then there is Republican John Stone, a conservative activist and former Congressional staffer, who got slightly more than one-third of the vote in Georgia’s 12th district and blamed his loss to incumbent Rep. John Barrow (D) on the NRCC.

Stone’s own fundraising stunk, and he had no chance in the current environment to win in a 45 percent African-American district that was carried by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) four years ago. But that didn’t stop him from trying to avoid responsibility for his own failure.

Like my good friend Drew Hayes said,

Roses are Red,

Violets are Blue,

We aren’t going to the playoffs,

and neither are you!

While i had much higher expectations for this season, i am somewhat pleased with it. we lost to App State, Elon, and Wofford by a grand total of 4 points. We went to overtime 4 times and won 3 of those. We had the largest 4th qtr comeback in FCS history, and we kept our arch rival out of the playoffs by beating them and the Southern Conference Refs up in Greenville. I know that is not a nice way to look at it but It’s Furman, and they would do, and have done the same thing to us.

All in all i think 2008 was good season to build on. We still have a very young team, but one that has alot of big game expereince to build upon. Alot of people seem to think that the Furman game cements the starting job for Lee Chapel, i disagree, i think we will be going into camp next year with the QB battle being wide open. It is really good to know that we have two real weapons at the QB position.

I know that people have and will be calling for Hatcher’s head, and they are pretty stupid. I was not happy when Brian Van Gorder scraped the triple option, but i can just feel that Chris Hatcher is building something special at GSU.

I want to know if i am wrong about everything that i have said so far, then what really caused barrow to win by 20 plus points. so if i am wrong, i want everyone to tell me what really happend. Also since i have been accussed of being one sided what did the stone campaign do right?

1 thing i think they did well was they went for the student vote, it might not have worked out but at least they did fight for it. Even though they lost bulloch county they got 2000 more votes than Max in 06 from bulloch county.

i am really looking forward to having some time to dig into the precient totals and compare them to past election cycles. I think that is going to be very telling of where we stand for 2010.

i await everyone’s response.

I first want to make it completely clear, that my previous post was not ment as a personal attack against Against John Stone, or any of the Stone for Congress Staff. I have the upmost respect for John Stone, and the members of his staff that i met. However with that being said i apologize if the picture or anything i said was construde as such. The image is satire of many technology webblogs, which use a picture with the word fail on it to denote something that did not go as planned. However, I am shocked and dismayed that a Member of the Stone for Congress staff  Sara Harper Scott would post something so hurtful and frankly disturbing as her facebook status message which is pictured below.

I would hope that everyone could agree, that went beyond even the most heated political discourse. Especially when we are all supposed to be on the same team.  I honestly feel that i provided a technically sound analysis of what went wrong with the Stone Campaign, so that others that come after them may learn from it. Much as i hoped that my experience with social media, and get out the vote efforts that i gained from the 2006 campaign could benifit John Stone’s 2008 Campaign. Needless to say i became frustrated when i saw that the lessons learned from the 06 campaign were not being applied to this years campaign. That is what lead me to write what i did. I stand by the technical content of my previous post, nothing will be gained from recanting that post or simply deleting that post, no matter how painful it maybe for some to hear.

So with that said i want go line by line and offer my retort to Sara’s Comments.

1. Pathetic Fund Raising. There are two issues to refute. Yes, we failed in our fundraising goals. With the economy in recession and people without jobs, there was less money available for people to contribute. We took pride in the fact that most of our money came from individuals in our district, not from PACs and special interests. The other issue is that our fundraising was not FEC compliant. Please search our filings at FEC.gov to see that our submissions were completely within the law. In all types of fundraising, whether online, mail, or event raised there can be questions about the required information. That is why our campaign had a dedicated staffer that was exclusively responsible for our FEC filings. We took pride in being totally above-board in our fundraising and if that type of standard led us to raise less money than our opposition, then we will be happy with those monies raised.

First i think we both know that there was plenty of money, because i am sorry but Barrack Obama didnt print 680 million dollars on his own, nor did John Barrow print 2 million and change that he had for this election cycle. And most of those were small donations of 5,10 and 15 dollars for obama. I want to make it clear that i am not questioning the quality of the contributions, i would take pride in the fact that most of the contributions came from in district, we all know where barrow’s money comes from. But at the end of the day out of district money buys just as many points worth of media as in district dollars. Secondly i am not questioning the quality of your FEC disclosures, i am questioning the way your online contribution form is setup. It’s a purely technical matter, that i have raised before. If you look at the federal candidates and parties, and the form layouts of 3rd party contribution processors you will notice that they all look pretty much the same. There is a reason for that, people that know way more about campaign finance laws and regulations have been over it with a fine tooth comb, there has been user eye tracking studies performed, those layouts comply with fec law as much as humanly possible while still being able to make it easy for people to donate. I have done work trying to implement Paypal using a variety of methods to accept political contributions. And every time i and my clients have come to the same conclusion. PayPal as a contribution system is nothing but a bag of hurt. A proper implementation just takes to much work and does not deliver the desired result that most state and federal candidates want. I offered alternatives such as CampaignMall and SlateCard, that are both free, and offer rich reporting for FEC disclosure purposes. And the point of these services is that it requires less overhead of staff members so they can focus on working the phones getting big donors, instead of entering data into a report.

2. Website/eCampaign sucked. Both of our websites were donated to our campaign. Our websites were meant to deliver information to prospective voters. They are not meant to be shining examples of campaign websites. Your basic problem with our sites/online campaign is that JSFC did not enlist YOUR help with this part of the campaign. Uploading our ads to youTube was not a priority to the campaign.

That still really does not excuse anything. Im sorry to say but they did a poor job of delivering information to voters, as most information was scattered around with out any logical placement. Secondly Youtube takes all of 30 minutes to setup and less than 5 to upload a video, for the number of potential extra plays that of your ads that you could have gotten from youtube, the effort required would have been trivial compared to the reward.

And no my problem with the JSFC website, is it looks like it was put together with front page. I offered to help, was rebuffed and moved on to other things. My only regret is that i was not allowed to contribute, in the best way that i knew how.

GOTV. JSFC has been walking/flyering neighborhoods since prior to the primary up until the last nights of the general election. We proudly say that we visited every county and walked quite a few neighborhoods in every county. In the last weeks of the campaign we were certainly more visible, but the GOTV part of our campaign were ongoing. Our statistician was integral to our walking/flyering efforts. He is well-versed in VoterVault and other voter information databases. Again, your problem with our GOTV efforts is that we did not enlist YOUR help.

I do not know if i can really refute this, my analysis was based on what had been communicated to me by the campaign and by others. I am simply going off of the 2 messages i recived about GOTV efforts in the last 2 weeks of the campaign. Although Being that i have studied GOTV efforts for the last 2 years, and helped run one of the largest GOP GOTV efforts ever undertaken in this district, i would have hoped that i could have contributed in this effort. The only regret i have is that John Barrow is my congressional rep for the next 2 years at least.

I wont lie i have had GOTV tools on the drawing board for the last two years that i was really hoping to implement, i think they are and will be even better tools in the future. I just hate that i didn’t get the chance to implement them this go round. And your campaign Statistician was that the same person that did the poll that yall ahead of barrow by one point? Did they miss a decimal point when calculating  P-values? Because i know alot of people, loyal stone supporters who felt betrayed after the results, after beliving that a poll had Stone up by one point. I am really sorry but polls are often wrong, but not that wrong.

Media Sucked. I appreciate that you wish that our budget would have allowed us to place our ads in better time slots. While we did not blast ads on broadcast TV, effectively placing our ads allowed us to spend our smaller budget reaching more 12th district voters. Obviously someone was watching to see that our ads were being run at 3am on FoxNews. Those were rotator spots that cost very little, but pick up some audience. (It seems that YOU were watching)

Hey if you have no money you have no money what else can you do to get your message out there. Oh yeah thats right Youtube, why didnt i think of that? You Still didnt answer why you were still running Energy ads when gas prices were sinking like a lead ballon. And for the record i missed special report with Brit Hume that night so i popped a DVD in my recorder to record special report and happened to catch them in that. I am sure the insomniac bloc is big in the 12th though.

I am not saying that this would have won the election, i mean its safe to say this was a really bad year for republicans in general. I think the goddard campaign did what i would have suggested to the stone campaign if asked, and while they did not fare much better, they did do slightly better.

But it begs the question how so many people voted for John McCain, and Saxby Chambliss, but turned around and voted for john barrow. It worries me that it is possible that barrow is that deep into our backfield. As republicans in the 12th district i think that is something we should really be concerned about.

But i hope once all of the hurt feeling heal, that we learn from 2008 and know what to do better in 2010. Whoever the nominee maybe.

Also Susie D, to say the youth did not turn out is just plan wrong, i have photos from my polling place that prove that.

Note: Ive removed the photo, it was bad judgment on my part to use that photo. It set the wrong tone for the rest of my post.

It really irritates me after working so hard to defeat Barrow in 2006, to see the pathetic effort that was mounted by the Stone Campaign this year. Lets face it even in what i think everyone will agree was a very bad year for republicans, John Stone ran well below the Generic Congressional Republican Ballot. Now i am willing to concede that the Surge in new and african american voters had something to do with it, but i think mostly it is due to the pathetic campaign that was waged in this district.

Stone did not even win Bulloch County, Saxby Chambliss and John McCain did. I am sorry but when a state or federal republican can not win Bulloch County you have serious problems.

Why Did this happen? Let me give you a quick run down on why

1. Pathetic Fund raising- I heard they only raised 400,000 dollars that’s not much when you consider max burns raised over 1 million dollars and barrow raised 1.5 million in 06. and barrow had 2 million and change in his warchest this go round. That might be the cause of some of their other woes. it would not have hurt to have a contribution form on your website that actually complies with FEC law, and didn’t require you to have a paypal account. Quiet a few people mentioned that to them, and even offered to help for free, and some were yelled at, and some were told they had it covered.
2. Your Website/ecampign  Sucked or was non existent- Which kind of feeds back into #1 im sure they could have raised some more money using something like slatecard.com,  or campaignmall.com both of which are free. Did i mention the website sucked, both of them. I still can not believe they payed someone for either of them but apparently they did. Where was the ecampaign in general, i mean its not hard to upload your ads to youtube, those are free plays. And i am sorry but having a facebook page and group is not a ecampaign sure it is part of one but you actually have to use it properly. I offered to help with that for free but  they said they had it covered.
3. GOTV- 2006 we mounted a pretty impressive ground campaign, we were knocking on doors and making phonecalls from micro-targeted lists back in early july 06.  Apparently they started knocking on doors 2 weeks before the election, and even then it was not targeted.  Again being a voter vault expert i offered to help but they said they had it covered.
4. Ads sucked and ad placement sucked- I mean come on running ads on high gas prices when gas prices are sinking like a stone probably isnt the smartest thing to do, and then run them at 3am back to back on Fox News probably isnt the smartest thing to do either.

Of course things like this will come out right at the tail end of my college career.

Alot of what i have been focusing on lately is how social networks and webservices can be leveraged to create a enchanced voter file. I do not really want to get into the implementation, because i am not entirely sure myself how exactly such a system would work. But, i do want to go through what i see wrong with current systems, and what should be done differently.

1. Every user should be encouraged to associate there account with there voter record- Alot of data, and most of my ideas are based on the idea that you have a 1 to 1 association between a Voter in a voter file, and a user, because the data collected, can only do so much if it can not be attributed to a real voter. If a person isnt registered they should be offered the chance to register and data from that registration should be storied in a temporary table or file, so that the user can be connected to a voter when the voter file is refreshed.
2. Organizations Want to Own the Entire System- To often Organizations want to control the system from end to end. McCainSpace and Storm, are prime examples of this. Getting people into your database requires them to sign up, That is a major nag of alot of social networking and web services these days, luckily initiatives like Google’s OpenSocial, Facebook Connect, and to some degree OpenID are helping to mitigate the hassle of joining new social networks. I am in no way discouraging campaigns from using there own custom social network, they just need to be willing to play in other peoples sandboxes, and part of the reason i think that organizations dont, is that they want to play by there own rules. While playing in other peoples sandboxes you may not be able to deliver the exact experience you want, or collect the exact information that you want, but the big factor is audience size. I went and tallied up how many users there are on STORM, according to my tally there are 133,106 users registered in STORM, and there is no way to know how active those users are, but based on the number of users i see in my own chapter and in the GACR chapter, i would say most do not use it that regularly. Now take Facebook for example, 612,964 people support John McCain for President, that is a 461% more users than STORM. So my basic point is it is all about the pre-installed user base, people are more likely to see your application in a pre-existing social network than finding your own social network.
3. There is free data everywhere- Another Big thing that i think a lot of people are ignoring is the wealth of data that can be gleemed from simply watching users actions and feeds from other social media, and web services. Twitter as an example is nothing but short text messages sent over the web. They manage to filter through all the tweets in the system to create a election 2008 feed, and hashtags have emerged as a completely separate system of organizing tweets by certain categories and topics. All you need to do is offer some whizbang feature that gets people to add there twitter stream to your application, and a well maintained database of keywords and hashtags and all you have to do is sit back and watch while a pretty decent profile is built of individual voters. Same goes with Facebook News feeds, it would not be hard to parse news items into profile data. Yelp is another possibility, the GOP has learned that certain people with certain commercial habits tend to increase the probability that they vote a certain way, so would it be to far of a stretch to say someone that reviewed a sushi or vegan food place is more likely to vote democratic, than say someone who reviews a steakhouse?
4. Donor Data should map to Voter Data- This is the Same Basic concept as #1. When someone donates to your campaign there voter profile should be updated to reflect that. This serves two purposes, you do not want to waste time and money targeting voters in a persuasion campaign that have already donated to your campaign, if they donate to you, then they will more than likely vote for you. Secondly if you can integrate contribution data from past campaigns, you have a heads up on identifying likely supporters, and generating a list of donors to hit first in your next campaign is a simple query away.
5. Have an API, Let others play in your sandbox- No matter how many developer hours you have, your system will not be everything to everybody. By having a well thought out and properly implemented, can add immense value to your application, not to mention the wealth of data that you gain from allowing other applications to pump data in. Plus a API will allow you to enforce your rules in your sandbox.
6. Let users tell you as much about themselves as they want- Back during the democratic primary, i kept hearing about the robustness of the Obama web tools. So being the curious technologist that i am i decided to register for my.barrackobama.com with a fake name (Ron Mexico i think) and my junk email account (Hey i didnt want to give obama my real email and name, and if i can put bad data in, they just might get bad data out).  It gave me the option of filling out a very comprehensive survey of demographic data, and issue stances, and social habits. Basically they give supporters the option of giving them all sorts of targeting vectors to create microtargeting profiles with.
7. Unless you are running for president dont build your own social networking site- The last thing we need as a party, is to have every republican candidate having there own social network. I think the better approach is to have one massive network at the state or even the national level, with each candidate being able to plug into that infrastructure and create a micro-social network. each user would only have to register once, and could become engaged in a candidates micro-social network with a a click of a mouse. the initial data collected at user sign-up would then be shared with the candidate, and any custom data could be requested at the time of the user joining the micro-social network.  This would help strengthen the party by putting more eyes on each candidate, and giving people more chances to get involved. This model of having multiple entities contributing to a common base of knowledge, has served the RNC and State GOP parties well with voter vault, why not take it to the next level with social networks?

These are just a few ideas that i feel that i have fleshed out to some degree, i will post more as i feel they are ready.

I just finished writing a post where i took the CRNC to task about what is either shoddy webdesign, or an intentional attempt to force people into handing over there contact information to be bombarded by email and invites to there STORM social networking system.

Basically we had a Field Rep from the CRNC come to table at Georgia Southern. He never actually talked to me in advanced our lovely state leadership directed him to GACR Vice Chairman Jesse Tyler, who out of some sort of delusional fantasy still believes he is the chairman at Georgia Southern. Who of course gave him permission to come, and even requested a table outside of the Russell Union for him as College Republicans. But of course we have told him he can not do that, but you can not tell jesse tyler what he can not do. So i start talking to the CRNC field rep, and he convinces me to give him my chapter list (which by the way was a very nicely formatted excel spreadsheet, which i went through the painstaking task of appending it with data from facebook,etc.) and he would of course send me a list of the information he collected at Georgia Southern.

So of course i send him my spreadsheet, which i am very proud of the very next day. So fast forward about 3 weeks to today, when i see him online on facebook and ask about the list. He never replies by im but sends me this message.

Check our website www.collegerepublicans.org

view Georgia Southern. Add members to your Chapter list at GSU accordingly from new fresh members i signed up from recruiting. Since there was only about 50 members on your Chapter list before i recruited it shouldn’t be diificult(sic) to discern which were the students that I recruited from my visit to Statesboro.

Its fair to say that i have never been a big fan of the GACR and the CRNC. They have always acted like god handing Down commandments from the top of the mountain, instead of actually supporting the individual chapters. The Few times that i visit the CRNC website i have found that it is generally a pretty nice website. but today when i went to it i was greeted with a poorly designed ajax popup, which is pictured below.

now im not a big fan of nag screens asking for personal information, what i really do not like about this one is that at first glance there is no way skip past it with out submitting your info. after i decided to write this post i went back and looked, and yes there is a skip link, can you see it? I did not see it at first, it is a very light almost white grey. Thats just bad design practices, you alienate users when you try to force them to give up personal information that is not needed for the basic operation of the site.

Edited for Spelling