The GOP's digital opportunity

[Commentary] The Republican Party’s failure to invest in high-level technology and analytics in 2012 has become shorthand code for the party’s woes: this alone wasn’t the reason Mitt Romney lost, but it was emblematic of a party whose leaders had stopped innovating — in policy, messaging, or campaign tactics.

Last week, the Republican National Committee hired Andy Barkett, a senior Facebook engineer, as its new chief technology officer. The party is also pressing the reset button on its previously close relationship with Liberty Works, a Silicon Valley-led consortium that was to manage access to the GOP’s voter file. Barkett’s hiring — along with the RNC’s other reform-minded hires — shows that the party may finally be serious about stopping the brain drain of recent years and closing the innovation gap with the Democrats. Yet, while the broad outlines of the RNC’s technology initiatives have been greeted favorably, many of the details are still being defined. Ask most political operatives what those details should be, and you’ll get wildly different responses. One of the key promises made following the release of the party’s 2012 postmortem report was opening up the voter file to outside developers and allied groups to access and contribute back to in real time. This small technical change could go a long way towards solving the data sharing problems campaign staff have griped about for ages. Done right, it could seed a whole new technology ecosystem on the right.

[Ruffini is president of Engage, a digital strategy firm in Washington]