Salon.com > Romney campaign

Romney aides cut off by the cab ride home Tuesday night

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 13:58:00 +0000

NBC News reports that very soon after Mitt Romney's loss on Election Night, the campaign's "massive infrastructure" began to come down:

"Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked.

'Fiscally conservative,' sighed one aide the next day."

Heckler interrupts Romney rally to bring up climate change

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:36:00 +0000

In a real-life scene reminiscent of George Orwell's Two Minutes Hate, a protester at a Romney rally today was booed and escorted out after yelling, "What about climate? That's what caused this monster storm!" After his removal, the crowd erupted into a patriotic chant.

via ThinkProgress

Four-year-old girl tired of “Bronco Bamma” and Mitt Romney

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:51:00 +0000

One girl cannot wait for the campaigning to end.

We're with you, Abigael:

Romney’s ridiculous baby ad

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:16:00 +0000

It just gets better. This election season has been like a bloopers reel for a real election, as Romney’s “strategy” unfolds before us. Let’s put aside that in the last two days alone he's said that half the country is a bunch of ungrateful serfs and that there's “no hope for Palestine,” his continued attempt at reaching lady voters baffles. This week, the Romney campaign puts out a video targeting the ladies titled, “Dear Daughter.”

So is that supposed to be a daughter? Or a daughter’s daughter? I’m so confused!

Romney mines personal data to target donors

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:13:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Mitt Romney's success in raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the costliest presidential race ever can be traced in part to a secretive data-mining project that sifts through Americans' personal information - including their purchasing history and church attendance - to identify new and likely, wealthy donors, The Associated Press has learned.

For the data-mining project, the Republican candidate has quietly employed since at least June a little-known but successful analytics firm that previously performed marketing work for a colleague tied to Bain & Co., the management-consulting firm that Romney once led.

The head of Buxton Co. of Fort Worth, Texas, chief executive Tom Buxton, confirmed to the AP his company's efforts to help Romney identify rich and previously untapped Republican donors across the country. The Romney campaign declined to discuss on the record its work with Buxton or the project's overall success.

The project shows that the same strategies corporations use to influence the way we shop and think are now being used to influence presidential elections. The same personal information that we give away, often unwittingly when we swipe our credit cards or log into Facebook, is now being collected by the people who might one day occupy the White House.

Must-see morning clip

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:02:00 +0000

Is Romney on your Pandora playlist?

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:22:00 +0000

North Carolina resident Crystal Harris was listening to Garth Brooks' "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)" when an ad appeared on her iPhone screen, followed by a pop-up message.

"To help Mitt Romney become the next president, Romney for President, Inc would like to use your email address — tap OK to let Pandora share this info," the message read.

Harris took a screenshot of the request and tweeted it with a one-word comment: #fail.

"Don't harass me on my email. Don't stalk me on the apps that I use. To me, that just crossed the line," Harris said in an interview with ProPublica.

Pandora's targeted email sharing pitch isn't new, but it's being offered to political advertisers for the first time this year, a company spokeswoman said. Both Democrats and Republicans, and both local and national campaigns have used the service to collect voter emails.

It's among the latest in a series of increasingly sophisticated tactics that campaigns are using to target narrow groups of voters online — from sending ads to Internet users who have visited a candidate's website, to creating a mobile app for campaign volunteers that marks the names and addresses of nearby voters on a Google map.