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. 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.
If that’s not what the Romney campaign staff were doing in their field offices, then what were Romney field staff getting paid to do?
I’d argue this is a non-issue. Republicans in general run field very, very different from us. Most of their work is months and months of interest group outreach, and getting grasstops to like their candidate and work. President Bush in 2004 had a detailed religious outreach manual to guide just one portion of this. It worked great. Challengers in general really struggle to catch up on the ground. John Kerry had to outsource large chunks of his ground operation to groups like America Votes to try and catch up. Some of it’s a matter of simply not having time, some of it’s resources. Even a very well funded candidate like Romney is at a disadvantage all the way up until the general election officially starts at the convention before they’re caught up. Incumbents can raise huge amounts of money for both the primary and general, then spend it immediately after they have an opponent, build the infrastructure, and start firing early.