Last night, Rick Santorum swept into victory in three states. The least funded candidate won decisively among a field of four.
There are those who look at Romney's money and organization and see a juggernaut. Last night, that notion was tucked into bed and the lights were turned out.
Newt Gingrich has money, went negative, and flaunted his grandiose big government ideas, but despite his gift of gab and a recent influx of big money into his Super PAC, he was nowhere near the top of the pile.
Ron Paul - that vaunted organization of his... it didn't do well.
The guy who came in first? He has neither organization nor money.
So why did he win?
It's very simple, and those of you on the left who read this blog won't understand a thing of what I'm about to say, to your detriment.
In early 2010, I bet a very liberal guy named Bruce Stone $20 that Marco Rubio would win the senate seat in Florida. This was before he was nationally known, and before Charlie Crist had lost the primary and before it became a three-man race.
I believed Rubio would win for a single reason: the Tea Party.
When you take a candidate who is a solid family man, believes the right things, states them in well-spoken terms, he has a good shot. When that man has a sizable grassroots organization underneath him, he'll likely win.
Marco Rubio didn't own or organize his organization that catapulted him to victory - and by the way, he beat Crist and the Democrat combined. Instead, the organization decided to get behind him and - ta-da - he won.
After Rubio's victory, I told Bruce (who throughout the campaign gave me silly statistics he had at his fingertips that proved not even close to correct) that his ridicule and lack of understanding of the Tea Party was his Achilles Heel. But he was all full of conventional wisdom and best practices - and he was wrong.
Santorum won last night, for only a single reason: in the last three years, the conservatives of the country, the ones who can muster hundreds of thousands to Washington for Tea Party rallies, figured out that rallies are fun and interesting, but mostly ineffective. So we instead went very quietly under the radar to start running for local offices and to get into the central committees and to support the candidates of our choice. But we've been organizing, make no mistake, in an almost undetectable way.
When a conservative candidate finally came out swinging for capitalism and against Romneycare, for limited government without the trappings of big government solutions, the Tea Party, a very organized group, communicated their approval to each other. That organization showed up last night in three states.
Money in politics is nice, but it's only a means to an end. The end, of course, is to get out the vote, and getting out the vote is all about one thing: bodies and ballots. At the end of the day, you can have all the money in the world, but if you don't have the bodies or the ballots, you lose.
Romney has been trying to win without the base. He's been running a general election campaign since he started because he felt that he was the presumed winner. Sorry pal - you still need us in the cheap seats to carry you over the line. I have yet to meet a Tea Partier who strongly supports Mitt. (And no, Ann Coulter is not a Tea Partier. She's an Ann Partier.)
Mitt might still win it. But the reason Santorum won last night is that the stealth-organized Tea Party believed him, just like they believed Marco Rubio. Against conventional wisdom, Santorum could win this, if he, like Rubio, remains true to his beliefs and his supporters throughout the campaign.
I watch the left and the elite media folks, neither of whom ever tried to really understand the Tea Party, sit in shock today at the results. But every Tea Partier I know looks at the race today and understands Santorum's victory and how he won it.
And we smile.
I have my disagreements with Rick, but he's a full-throated capitalist, and I know where he stands. Good for him and for his acquired organization that lifted him to victory.
ETC: I found this later in a thread at HotAir, from a person in Colorado, and it cinches what I'm saying.
This shook up the GOP establishment in Colorado, make no mistake.
Its pretty simple: The state GOP apparatus, with former McCain people and all the Romney people, supported Romney. Large numbers of LDS voters here as a pool to draw on. Lots of money spent on direct mail, and he was basically the only one making robo-calls – some folks got 4 of them plus a live call! On top of that, Romney won Colorado in 2008. Romney had everything going his way in CO - yet despite all those advantages, Romney still didn't get more than 35%, and got beat by a guy on a shoestring budget. Why? Message, Obamacare, and state/local politics.
We don't trust the so-called GOP elites here anymore. And we are now angry enough to get out and do something. The rest of us, the "grass roots" GOP members, especially the newly active Tea Party types, got trained in how to do caucuses and precinct elections, and showed up in larger numbers than the establishment expected. And Santorum was the beneficiary. At our precincts, Gingrich was seen as an untrustworthy beltway bandit, Romney as the ultimate sell-out establishment guy, and many of us were simply tired of both of those types of GOP "elites". So we voted for the only other viable conservative choice we had: Santorum. He has flaws, but they are probably the most easily mendable.
But the big thing is that we put our people in as delegates to the county and state instead of the usual people who have been there for decades in some cases - we will be making changes to the bosses; we are out to kick in the door of the old boy network personified by the Owens clique, Dick Wadhams et al, who have been running the GOP in Colorado for nearly a decade, and who have blown every election cycle since 2004.
We aim to misbehave.
OrdinaryColoradan
So again, for those who think the Tea Party is dead, you just keep thinking that. It works to our advantage.
Tonight's the night when I connect the programmable dots between payment processing and membership management, and as I worked on it earlier, it occurred to me that membership management isn't much different than subscription management, just as a few days ago it occurred to me that fundraising management isn't really that different from membership management.
I can use my own dogfood, as it is, for my clients to resubscribe. My clients are no different than members of an organization, and the annual "dues" are $239.40 ($19.95 x 12).
Kinda cool.
And while that was dawning on me, it occurred to me that the storefront capability I'm putting into the platform later in the spring will fit real nice in the same module - no longer Fundraising, but Financial.
Reminds me of a quote from Anne Lamott:
The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it... If one of the characters wants to say, 'Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?' you let her.
Which borrows a page from Edward De Bono's Green Thinking Hat, the uncritical, anything-goes, just-get-it-out way of working out a problem.
I always loved Boggle, the game where you have to find as many words as you can among 16 letters.
Zynga, the Words with Friends folks, recently came out with Scramble, their version of online Boggle. After about 3 days of play, I'm diggin' it.
Here's my high score to date:
I think 3,000 is possible... but it would be awfully tough to get to it.
One of my favorite moments in this past year was when our kids and us were in our living room, all staring at our phones, playing massive Words with Friends games with one another. Hilarious to look at all of us staring intently into our phones.
The joys of technology - bringing us all closer.
ETC: And a new high score.
I never play with Power Ups. I prefer the challenge of seeing what I can do myself - plus, I have more tokens that way for more games.
I did play one guy who said he'd scored above 3,000, but he was definitely using Power Ups. Let's see if I can do it without.
I've argued for a while that it's our children that will inherit and have to pay off these massive deficits. I was worried about it during the Bush years and railed on Bush for it. I was worried about it when Obama first came into office, and the debt ceiling just grows and grows because they're just spending and spending.
Fascinatingly, MoveOn.org agreed with me back then, and even created the above ad. But of course, no such worries when Obama is office. They could just as easily swap Bush's name in that commercial with Obama's, and it's just as true. But they won't - it's a partisan thing.
Me - debt is not a partisan thing. It's a "save my children's future" thing. At least when a Republican is in office, the press cares about such things. Not so when a Democrat is in office. Maybe we should all vote Republican just so that there's a public accountability required of our president by the media, eh?
Tonight is a big 247Toolset night. I'll explain more tomorrow, but now that it's getting into commercial venues, and now that it's in its second university, the future looks like it could be busy.
ETC: Last night, 247Toolset was used by Prom DSM, an prom fashion show.
Why in the world would they use 247Toolset, which is an organizational productivity suite?
We (Jonathan and I) wrote a technology piece last summer that allows for text messaging to a 247Toolset portal. Through 247Toolset, you can declare what we call "text words," which are single words, such as "kindle," that people can text to the web site. Upon doing so, it will either recognize your cell number from having texted the web site before, or it won't, in which case it will create a new account for you when you do.
This gives the administrator all of the cell numbers for those who text, and it allows for interaction from a hand-held device. And it allows for things like voting, polling, etc.
Based on a couple of requests that they made, we extended that functionality to allow for what we call "text phrases" - anything not a recognized "text word" was simply put into a queue and managed by an admin to screen what was put forth to be displayed.
Last night, they used a big projection screen to have this at the front of the event:
What you see there is what was actually on screen. Imagine hundreds of teenagers having their texts pushed to a central screen for everyone.
Now imagine sporting events, conferences, etc.
Of the 324 people who texted their portal last night, we accurately captured 282 of the people, which is a success rate of 87%. We can see what we need to do to address those we missed, but the event hosts are quite pleased, and will be pushing this to colleagues of theirs. As I was asked earlier today after the event, "And after paying my $280, I can continue to use this for the rest of the year?"
Yes, she can. She then said that she intends to use this in Chicago for an event soon.
Our server took in over 5,000 text messages and never broke a sweat.
