Huffington Magazine Issue 32 | Page 47

BREATHING FIRE such realities. It’s simply that conservatives must do better. “Republicans have done a pathetic job of reaching out to people of color,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said on Fox News on election night. Woodson warned that “outreach” has to begin from the ground up, and that conservatives can’t approach it paternalistically (an approach that has bedeviled liberals, too). “You need to come with an open heart, to really believe that you have got as much to gain from this relationship,” Woodson said. “If you don’t come with an attitude of, ‘I am going to learn something from this,’ it’s patronizing. I would rather you stay home.” MAGIC ROBOTS THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN’S ground game was built around the idea of relationships. Campaign staffers could not get to know every targeted voter, but they leveraged data and technology tools to reach out to undecided voters through preexisting relationships, seeing that as a far more effective tool for recruiting many voters than mere communiques from their own campaign. HUFFINGTON 01.20.13 “A TV ad is intrinsically non credible, even if it’s true,” said Obama digital director Teddy Goff. Goff said that many voters in focus groups, when shown ads from both campaigns with competing “THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS FOR TOO LONG TALKED AT PEOPLE RATHER THAN SPOKEN WITH PEOPLE.” claims, threw up their hands and said, essentially, “It’s all bullshit.” “The best thing we can do at least now with the technology we’ve got is try to get people talking to their friends,” Goff said. “That’s when you have to get into the sort of nitty gritty of how these different [online and social] networks operate and the sort of language and vernacular of each of them and how you can actually be a part of it.” Using tools built by its in-house data and tech teams, the Obama