Comment Re:Campaign team (Score 2) 501
The whole point is that they weren't contractors, or at least that they were individual contractors rather than a single contract firm. Romney went the contract firm route and his tech operations went down for the count 30 minutes into election day. That and the guy in charge of Obama's tech was ex-Twitter and made decisions that scaled really well.
In 2008, there were techies who volunteered to work on the Obama campaign who were told to go knock on doors. The 2012 campaign realized that that was a tragic misuse of skills and put a ton of effort into DevOps on AWS and centralized data services so that they could deploy an app written in any stack. That let them organize small, decentralized teams to code individual projects in whatever stack the developers were comfortable using. Romney outsourced the whole thing to contractors. Come election day, the Obama team had people manning the phones all around the country coordinated by software running in AWS. Romney had his entire team at the TD Garden in Boston. 30 minutes in, the spike in traffic led Comcast to believe that they were being DDoS'd and they cut off all connectivity. It's impossible to say whether anything would have been different had Romney's setup worked as well as Obama's did, but the fact that Obama's team had very few problems both on election day and in the months leading up to it was a significant advantage.
Back on topic, the site that was setup to take campaign donations likely had the same class of traffic as healthcare.gov does. Had Obama brought in the head of that project as a FTE with a workforce consisting of a few FTEs and mostly individual contractors and they could have designed a far superior application running in AWS for probably 1/10th the price. By bringing it in-house, he could have avoided the entire process of bidding for the contract, saved a ton of money and had something that actually worked.