Election 2012: Post-Game Analysis Thread

Be safe in the knowledge that for the most part, that's a GOP pipe dream more than the Obama message. Think about it: Obama's War on Women message was all over every airwave he could find. They weren't microtargeting that to avoid pissing off a demographic. It's an AEI nut trying to explain why Romney's "many messages for different people" failed, and how Obama MUST have been doing the same thing on the down low instead of winning by picking widely appealing messages.

Microtargeting is a thing, but at the Presidential level media is so pervasive that it doesn't work to send out conflicting microtargeted messages. Microtargeting is for shit like Romney's Lyme Disease mailer to northern VA. Not for sending Hispanics a pro immigration mailer and everyone else an anti immigration mailer. The latter is what the AEI idiot is thinking Obama has managed to do instead of taking the real message away: Technology won't help you if your message is shit.

There is no structure in which using 11 back end DBs and one feeding portal would make sense. There has to be more to it than that. Their host not being aware of the usage and locking shit down is expected, every company I've worked at has had at least one short outage due to our upstream deciding suddenly to stand up an IDS that decides our peak usage hours are attacks.

But seriously, why would you even have 11 DB servers like that? I cannot fathom unless they took the adage that apache doesn't need many resources to mean "you only need one of these" instead of "so you can run the farm on 2 socket pizza boxes instead of buying $40k uberservers for your DMZ tier"

Sigh, yeah, it's still everyone else's fault. Not their outdated or insulting platforms that they stand for.

Oh, how I hope their 11 back-end DBs were all living on the same VM host.

There's no technical reason for that! At all! Your DBs aren't crunching under the load a single app server can send it unless your queries are idiotic or your DBs are tiny shit you found under a desk and your app server is the size of a full rack!

Clown Fucking Shoes. I cannot believe they had 1 web -> 1 app -> 11 DB. For the simple fact that "1 ____" in any SaaS design doc should be grounds for immediate harassment until they can articulate why their design was terrible from the start.

What I find interesting is that there is a real divide over on RedState between people who want to learn from this, adapt, and go on to win in the future and the insane who think they just need to keep doing what they're doing, only MORE. It's really interesting to me because I've known those people are batshit crazy, and now it's possible that some of the guys on their own team are just now realizing it.

It really separates out the ones for which personal responsibility is more than just empty words, and really drives home the nature of that divide.

What I mostly see is that it's a failure of marketing. They simply need to get their message out more, and make it a better soundbyte, and explain why it's awesome. At no point is the takeaway that the message isn't popular or agreeable, or that the people are smart enough to understand the message and still think it's terrible.

The issue isn't that your candidates say crazy shit about rape. It's that your candidates THINK crazy shit about rape.

Spotted over at Andy Sullivan's Blog -

Good luck with that.

This will be the motto of my consulting firm if I ever get around to starting one.

So 22 DB servers next time?

That's what struck me about the WSJ recap on Romney's loss - it primarily focused on failures of fundraising and tactical errors within the campaign. Obama's campaign was only mentioned as some outside force, and I don't think they said anything about the increasing amounts of crazy exhibited by the GOP, shifting demographics, or the changing nature of the electorate.

I tried that. I swear to god I ended up with Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown ads invading my dreams.

This is a great map for quickly visualising the 2016 vote, its using population density to control the saturation and the red/blue vote percentages in each district to control the hue :


From:
http://adifferentclass.com/post/35702838310/skepticalavenger-chris-howard-america-really

I'm not actually certain that map tells you anything meaningful. I kind of get why it's going around the liberal end of the internet (look how blue the country really is!) but I'm not certain that the geographic dispersal of voter preferences is meaningful.

It's different, it's pretty, it's appealingly bluish, but I'd basically refer back to the information-density and your-brain-parses-shades-of-purple-intelligibly? problems.

I think it provides an interesting way to look at the US, at least to an outsider. I mean you have the standard pattern there of deep blue cities, mid red suburbs and light red sparsely populated rural areas but there is other stuff that comes through too. Look how you can almost make out some US westward migration history in the way the density, and some of the purple tinge, falls off in an almost vertical line through the centre of the country. Look how you can sort of see migration from the mexican border in the spread of blue around New Mexico, southern Texas and California and, how that blue stretches up into the sparsely populated areas, reaching as high as Colorado and defying the usual pattern of low density = GOP. There is interesting stuff in there that you don't get from just seeing the states coloured in red and blue.

The other day Nate Silver posted some comparisons of turnout in 2012 vs 2008. It's a pretty interesting read. Unfortunately it seems like it might be a bit early, since he explains away Ohio's low numbers and admits that there are tons of votes as yet uncounted. New York and New Jersey being at the bottom shouldn't surprise anyone. Still, despite the reasons for it, I just love seeing Alaska there at 31% drop from last year. It's pretty easily explained when Silver comments that they've only counted 61% of their votes, but I refuse to give up the image of Alaskans realizing it's election day, double checking to see if Sarah's still off the ballot and just staying home in their igloos.

And another map (with higher res versions). Were I a Republican, this and the one Dan linked above, would worry me a great deal (though I do think there is a problem with visibility of red dots on white).

For what's worth, a quick edit with less overpowering background.

Well, some at least do get it (via Dan Savage):

From the NY Times articles

No True Scotsman. They've learned nothing.

Btw, if the Mormon candidate isn't conservative enough for you, you're probably doing it wrong.

The funniest part of that quote is that they acknowledge that many voters rejected them on the basis of social issues (gay marriage, attitudes towards women), and so they conclude that they need to be even more conservative on social issues.

"We've determined that the knife sticking out of our arm is the source of the pain, and so we propose that the obvious course of action is to push it in farther, and maybe wiggle it around a bit."

"Hey guys, have you tried twisting it yet?"

One can only hope.

Better a knife in the arm than a dick in the ass. That's what I always say.

There was an article I read in October that I thought I would share. It shows a crescent of blue counties in the deep red south that voted for Obama in the 2008 election:

He then shows this map:



This is a map of North America 125 million to 65 million years ago. That same crescent earlier is also here, where, as the water began to recede, it left a crescent of rich soil which produced the most cotton per acre which also brought in large slave populations.









It's the first thing I see now whenever I look at election maps from this year.

Some visualizations about how the red state/blue state split is around the behavior of rich people.

An interesting explanation: Rich voters include social issues, poor voters vote only on economic issues.

I hope this is the right thread for this awesome article:

Analysis: How Romney's "Gift" Theory Misses the Mark

By the same reasoning that Romney expresses, Obama wants to raise taxes on the wealthy to lose their votes, and Romney wants to buy votes with lower taxes, broken medical insurance system, and a new navy.

And apparently no one has a non-vote-buying motivation.

Way back when I was a wee bairn lad in college, in my International Conflict Behavior and Resolution class (though I guess this falls into Social Psychology), this was called "Mirror Image" behavior - accusing someone (person, nation, etc.) of things you do - assuming the party isn't just being a complete disingenuous twat.

Is this signs for hope for the GOP?

And this is nice.

<Facepalm>

I presume this belief would lead to one that people will fake lots of injuries and sickness to get their money's worth - people breaking their arms to get get free casts.

Freud would be in hog heaven with the Republican party and conservatives if he were alive today.

I wouldn't say no one. I think there might be some legitimate non-vote-buying motivations being employed out there.

Somebody must have finally told Romney that ten thousand dollars is a lot of money to some people.

No no, what he means is the families will no longer need to tap into their stock funds to pay the $10,000 annual premium.

The "Asian-American" vote has moved 40 points to the Democrats in 20 years.

Is Erick Erickson stupid enough that he didn't know this already, or is he just trying to stay relevant?

He's not stupid, he's shifting to a stab in the back. You know the drill.

He's working to set himself up for his own congressional run, of course.

Hey, if that's what it takes to get Chambliss out... Where do I sign up? Blood is the preferred ink for these sorts of deals, right?

I just like the comments that the problem is that they need to get even MORE conservative people put in charge. Because it's totally not a conservative capitalist value to do EXACTLY what they're complaining about - putting "I've got mine!" ahead of what they perceive to be the public good.

That's actually a really good point Reldan, and it makes me wonder... Fun semi/joking musings ahead!

Say you're Mitt Romney and his ten best pals. You'd kind of like to be President, but most of all you want to maximize your own welfare, which welfare is defined by the size of your bank account. Here you've got this massive campaign apparatus that is going to try to make you President. If you're made President you may or may not get to do all sorts of stuff in terms of taxation that might affect you and your ten best pals' bank accounts. On the other hand, this campaign apparatus has a billion dollars (give or take a few million) that you can just filter directly into your bank accounts.

How much do you have to change public policy to get an effect equivalent to what you can just milk out of the campaign, in dollar terms? I bet it's a lot, and as a result the rational thing for a maximally Randian Presidential ticket like Romney Ryan is to say screw actually winning and just try to fundraise as much money as possible and filter it through the apparatus in such a way as to make sure your ten best friends get paid.

It's amusing that the relentless focus on maximizing individual welfare that some strains of conservatives espouse could conceivably make it so they cannot get themselves elected!