However, if you are only a campaign manager for six months or whatever and have to prove your worth or else move back in with your parents and spend the rest of your working life fetching coffee and slowly paying for your $200k georgetown political science degree, then yeah that app better be out in 2 damn months.
Rat races don't lead to quality, they lead to desperate people taking shortcuts and making mistakes, and fodder for managers to point to on a slide when they have to appear in front of superiors. Things that woudn't otherwise happen if pressure was lowered and we thought about things like burnout and well being rather than whatever meaningless work-related metric is hot right now. This sort of failure is inevitable in fields operating like this.
Well, you aren't technically wrong here, but I disagree with the sentiment. The RNC leveraged a the same kind of data used by the Obama team in '12 to squeak out an Electoral College win in `16.
I think it's easy to get overly ambitious with civic tech and deliver expensive garbage. However, when people stay focused and deliver then I think the results speak for themselves. While the '12 and '16 elections didn't turn on candidates tech strategies alone, it's clear that they contributed.
I personally worked on digital marketing campaigns for years as a data scientist in a previous job, and have become entirely disillusioned with the entire notion (and I am not alone[0]). Its largely snake oil, and its effectiveness is incredibly overblown. But literally billions of dollars, large marketing teams embedded in every company, and some of the largest tech giants on the planet all have an incentive to drink the Kool-Aid.
[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/04/im_not_the_one_you_s...
304 to 227 wasn’t a “squeak”
There is some analysis that boils down to the below:
“He concluded, with help from The Cook Political Report, that the election hinged not on Clinton's large 2.8 million overall vote margin over Trump, but rather on about 78,000 votes from only three counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (by the same logic, Obama won in 2012 due to three counties in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania)
That’s definitely a squeak.
Edit: Seeing downvotes on this, but it's in support of tptacek's comment. The DNC and State democratic parties are separate and the latter run the elections. You might believe that the DNC is fixing the process, but the reality is that they have little influence in how the States choose to run their election/nomination processes.
In all honesty, the Iowa caucases are likely a huge pain in the ass for them and this failure is probably driving a lot of DNC folks crazy right now.
The DNC and the state parties are often at odds with each other. There's a good series of "Reply All" episodes about this, focusing on the Alabama Democratic Party.
https://mobile.twitter.com/taraemcg/status/12239909781277245...
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/02/05/more-manipul...
https://mobile.twitter.com/kendallkarson/status/122481061735...
"Shadow Inc.’s website has scant information about the firm and its employees. But a review of social media accounts shows that three of the Washington, D.C.-based firm’s top executives worked on the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.
The CEO of Shadow Inc., Gerard Niemira, was the director of product on Clinton’s campaign, his LinkedIn profile says."
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/shadow-inc-mysterious...
This is not even close to paranoid. Conflicts of interest are an important issue for nonprofits because it can cause them to lose tax exempt status, and the IRS makes a whole todo about it, and therefore so do competent boards. Trying to brush this under the rug because of politics is disgusting and would not be tolerated at ethical and competent organizations.
(funny substitution tho)
The only thing that could conceivably provide a systematic opening to fix things (ie, not just fixing specific things, after they've become apparent, because they've already catastrophically failed), in the realm of badly-written science fiction and fantasy, would be:
Bernie Sanders (or another equally popular candidate, in the near-future) is ratfucked so badly and obviously (which this could be the start of the perception of, even if it is just sufficiently advanced incompetence to be indistiguishable from malice), then the nominee loses to Trump so convincingly, that it completely shatters the party -- like it is no longer able to function at a basic level, and will clearly, even to the most delusional, never be able to win another election again -- and then... something, I don't even know how this would work. I am not creative enough to write this laughable science fiction any further.
There might also be a route involving Bernie Sanders winning both the primary and the general by a landslide, but that comes with its own and different set of systematic problems that I don't think would make the party's competence at dealing with technical problems, at least, any better.
But in either case, the deepest underlying rot is still the toxic interests of its financial backers, which are reproduced in the very bones of the party, and occasionally pop up in especially ridiculous and very indirect ways like this (and many more that don't get frontpaged as a problem on HN, or the New York Times for that matter). There's no fixing anything without somehow getting rid of them. And there is no realistically traversable path to that.
If they ratfuck him this time anywhere near as bad as they did last time, he'll run independent. In that case, Trump will win even more easily than I've been expecting since February 2017. Of course, Trump has a sort of death wish, so he could invade Canada or something and then Bernie would win without owing anything to the other face of the status quo party.
The most recent results (at 62% reporting, somehow not including urban areas, for many hours now) show Bernie winning the popular vote but trailing in convention votes. I hope I'll hear Democrats complaining about the Electoral College again soon...
Besides, Bloomberg is more of a Republican than Trump is. Why would Bernie care to see him elected?
The reason this happens is because hundreds of millions of dollars are lit on fire during election season and all the sharks, including former Google employees, come out to swim. Even well intentioned projects get slammed by the crunch of the election season (seriously try shipping a well scaled app in < 2 months with terrible product direction) and ultimately fail - failing the needs of the entire citizenship of the country.
After the success of Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns even more money was funneled into IT as a sort of perceived silver bullet. But in 2016 it wasn't, and yet no analysis was done to correct the problems for the 2020 cycle - because the decision makers (all these "CTOs") are clueless fucks who are just there for the money and could care less about the integrity of our democratic system.
- in 2016 I worked for one of the companies in this niche and saw the bidding/sales/engineering processes first hand. FWIW I am a life long democratic voter and this makes me sick to my stomach.