Romney problems deeper than widely known, assured his defeat. Ground staff tiny compared to Obama's, campaign heavy says had no idea about massive disparity in ground staff until election was over. Son Tagg says Romney never wanted to run, would've been ecstatic to get out of it-Boston Globe, Dec. 2012

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No Republican has ever won pres. without Ohio:

12/23/12, "Mitt Romney was hesitant to reveal himself," Boston Globe, Michael Kranish

"A reconstruction by the Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation....

Rich Beeson, the Romney political director who co­authored the now-discredited Ohio memo, said that

 

only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground.
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"Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 

500 for

Romney,

and hundreds of thousands of volunteers. 

“Now I know.

what they were doing with all the staffs and ­offices,” Beeson said.

“They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” 

something that Romney did not have the staff to match....

While candidates often try to portray themselves as reluctant, Tagg insisted his father’s stance was genuine.

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . 

he would have been ecstatic to step aside...he doesn’t love the attention.”... 

Tagg Romney could not figure it out. 

Why had Obama spent so heavily during the primaries 

when he had no primary opponent?  

Only later did Tagg realize 

this was a key to Obama’s victory

“We were looking at all the money they were spending in the primary and we were thinking ‘what are they spending all their money on? They’re wasting a lot of money.’ They weren’t. 

They were paying staffers in Florida” and elsewhere....

Building on its 2008 field organ­ization, Obama’s campaign had 

far more people on the ground,

for longer periods, and backed by better data.  

In Florida, for example, the ­Romney campaign said it had 
fewer than 200 staff members 

on the ground, a huge commitment of its total of 500 nationwide. 

But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida  

out of 3,000 or so nationwide.

“They had more staff in Florida than we had in the country, and for longer,” 

said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman. 

Indeed, in swing state after swing state, the Obama field team was much bigger than the Romney troops. 

Obama had 123 offices in Ohio, compared with 

Romney’s 40. 

Obama had 59 offices in Colorado, compared with 

Romney’s 15, 

accord­ing to statistics compiled by the Obama campaign.

Stevens said he expressed alarm about the Democrat’s early advantage in money and staff.

He said Obama’s decision to reject public financing for the fall campaign (a move Romney followed) worked to Obama’s advantage ­because Obama used primary funds to prepare for the general election, and it meant there was no ceiling on how much could be spent....

...

Ground game.. 

Obama’s field organization was too strong. In Florida, 266,000 more Hispanics voted than four years earlier. 

“They altered the face of the election by driving up the Latino turnout,” Romney political director Rich Beeson said. 

“They told us they would do it. 
I didn’t think they would do it, and they did.”...

  Ohio was the greatest surprise of all.

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Romney pollster Neil Newhouse calculated that 209,000 more African-Americans voted this year than in 2008 in Ohio, 

while 329,000 fewer whites had voted.

“I don’t know how that’s possible,” Newhouse said. “If that is what the Obama campaign achieved,  
hats off to them.’’

A key difference was the depth of voter contact. Romney took comfort in polls that showed voters had been contacted equally by both campaigns. But the polls were misleading, perhaps equating a recorded robocall on the phone with a house call by a worker.

“It wasn’t well understood what they were doing,” Newhouse said. “We asked the question in polls, ‘Have you been contacted by campaigns?’ Our overall contact was pretty similar. But their in-person contact was beating us by 3 to 2.”...

Organizing strategy [Community organizing strategy] 

President Obama’s strategy had very different roots. His national field director, Jeremy Bird, drew his inspiration from the time around 2001 when he witnessed, as a young Harvard Divinity student, a group of African-American students in a Roxbury church, pressing their case for school funding with members of the Boston City Council.

It was a model, in miniature, of grass-roots engagement that would shape Bird’s career in politics and attract him to Obama, who had himself been a community organizer.

Bird was confident that Obama would commit massive resources to building an organization that zeroed in on individual voters. It would be like that Roxbury church encounter, multiplied a thousand times.

“I had watched a group of young people come together; I watched them organize at the local level,” Bird said.

And Bird had learned another lesson. He lived in Massachusetts when Romney was elected governor, had studied him and voted against him, and was determined to do everything possible to prevent him from ­becoming president.

So it was that Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to ­expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama.  

In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon” strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. 

“Faith captains” were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama.  

“Condo captains” were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. 

The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: 

Each Obama worker would be ­responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts

over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. 

Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker.

It would prove to be a crucial difference....

Recommendations are already pouring in for the party to create 

a ground-game infrastructure 

long before a nominee is selected, 

to catch up to the Democratic advantage."...
...

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The "Colorado Model" turns red states blue: 
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7/21/2008, "The Colorado Model," Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes, "The Democrats' plan for turning red states blue."

"The Democratic surge in Colorado reflects the national trend, but it involves a great deal more. There's something unique going on in Colorado that, if copied in other states, has the potential to produce sweeping Democratic gains nationwide."...
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. 12/28/2011, "The Colorado Model and The Left’s Stratagem For Turning Red States to Blue," Labor Union Report
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"Although it’s being deployed in several states like Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania and others, there are still many who have never heard of the Colorado Model. What’s worse, despite all the Left’s bemoaning of the “vast right wing conspiracy,” Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or whatever enemy they can dream up, there is still nothing like the Colorado Model on the Right.

In sum, the Colorado Model is one of the Left’s most effective stratagems that was “built” to turn “red states” into “blue states” in a very short period (with the exception, perhaps, of the 2010 election cycle). When combined with the tactics of Saul Alinsky and his disciples, the Colorado Model is akin to a Soviet platoon armed with AK-47s mowing down a militia armed with slingshots.
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According to a 2008 expose in the Weekly Standard, in 2004 and 2006 “routed Republicans, capturing the governorship, both houses of the state legislature, a U.S. Senate seat, and two U.S. House seats.”
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. Conceived by four rich liberals, the Colorado Model is a fairly simple strategy:

Eric O’Keefe, chairman of the conservative Sam Adams Alliance in Chicago, says there are seven “capacities” that are required to drive a successful political strategy and keep it on offense: [1] the capacity to generate intellectual ammunition, [2] to pursue investigations, [3] to mobilize for elections, [4] to fight media bias, [5] to pursue strategic litigation, [6] to train new leaders, and [7] to sustain a presence in the new media. Colorado liberals have now created institutions that possess all seven capacities. By working together, they generate political noise and attract press coverage. Explains Caldara, “Build an echo chamber and the media laps it up.”

Unfortunately, the Right still doesn’t seem to embrace or, more importantly, understand the Colorado Model. What’s worse, because the Colorado Model requires cooperation, it is unlikely the Right will ever be successful in creating a model similar to that which the Left is deploying across the country.
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Unlike Barack Obama’s OFA, which coordinates with the institutional Left, the Moveon.orgs of the world, hundreds of 527s, think tanks, unions, and the like,

the Right largely consists of groups who work disparately, in disagreement with, and, often, openly fighting with one another. On the Right, we have the Keystone Cops facing the Red Army on the Left.
 As opposed to disarray on the Right, the Left is largely unified in their vision, their messaging, and their tactics. As such, the Colorado Model is a prime example of the Left putting their ideas into action and, in so doing, turning America from a country of individuals into a country of collectivists.
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Again, from 2008:

The Democratic surge in Colorado reflects the national trend, but it involves a great deal more. There’s something unique going on in Colorado that, if copied in other states, has the potential to produce sweeping Democratic gains nationwide. That something is the “Colorado Model,” and it’s certain to be a major topic of discussion when Democrats convene in Denver in the last week of August for their national convention.
While the Colorado Model isn’t a secret, it hasn’t drawn much national attention either. Democrats, for now anyway, seem wary of touting it. One reason for their reticence is that it depends partly on wealthy liberals’ spending tons of money not only on “independent expenditures” to attack Republican office-seekers but also to create a vast infrastructure of liberal organizations that produces an anti-Republican, anti-conservative echo chamber in politics and the media.
Colorado is where this model is being tested and refined. And Republicans, even more than Democrats, say that it’s working impressively. (For Republicans, it offers an excuse for their tailspin.) Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, a conservative think tank based in Denver, says Republicans around the country should be alarmed by the success of the Colorado Model. “Watch out,” he says, “it’s coming to a state near you.”

On the Right, after nearly three years of being engaged in the battle to save America from tax and spend collectivists, there is still a large knowledge vacuum in the nature of the battle, the groups and strategies involved, as well as the tactics used. America is nearing the end of a century-old ideological war waged by Marxists of varying degree—an ideological war that will determine the future of America. Until such time as the Right understands that fact and begins to work together, any “victories” at the ballot box will be fleeting and, in the long run, futile."

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