Project Narwhal is the name of a computer program used by the 2012 campaign by Barack Obama. [1] It was contrasted in the Mitt Romney presidential campaign by Project Orca, so named because the orca is one of the few predators of the narwhal. [2]
Project Narwhal was developed for six-to-seven days a week and 14 hours a day by a staff of very-experienced workers of companies such as Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, Orbitz, and Threadless. [3] The intent of the program was to link previously separate repositories of information, enabling all the data gathered about each individual voter was available to all arms of the campaign. In testing Narwhal, the team, in campaign CTO Harper Reed's words, role-played "every possible disaster situation," including three role-plays where all the systems would go down very quickly on election day. [3] These "game day" practices would prepare them for actual disasters when Amazon Web Services went down on October 21, 2012, and Hurricane Sandy threatened the technology infrastructure in the Eastern United States. [3]
The narwhal, also known as a narwhale, is a medium-sized toothed whale that possesses a large "tusk" from a protruding canine tooth. It lives year-round in the Arctic waters around Greenland, Canada and Russia. It is one of two living species of whale in the family Monodontidae, along with the beluga whale, and the only species in the genus Monodon. The narwhal males are distinguished by a long, straight, helical tusk, which is an elongated upper left canine. The narwhal was one of many species described by Carl Linnaeus in his publication Systema Naturae in 1758.
Willard Mitt Romney is an American politician, businessman, and lawyer who has served as the junior United States senator from Utah since 2019. He served as the 70th governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 and was the Republican Party's nominee for president of the United States in the 2012 election, losing to incumbent Barack Obama.
Richard Samuel Morris is an American political author and commentator who previously worked as a pollster, political campaign consultant, and general political consultant.
Cetology or whalelore is the branch of marine mammal science that studies the approximately eighty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises in the scientific order Cetacea. Cetologists, or those who practice cetology, seek to understand and explain cetacean evolution, distribution, morphology, behavior, community dynamics, and other topics.
Orca is another name for a killer whale, the world's biggest dolphin species.
The political positions of Mitt Romney have been recorded from his 1994 U.S. senatorial campaign in Massachusetts, the 2002 gubernatorial election, during his 2003–2007 governorship, during his 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, in his 2010 book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, during his 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, and during his 2018 senatorial campaign in Utah. Some of these political positions have changed, while others have remained unchanged.
Catalist is a for-profit corporation based in Washington, D.C., that operates a voter database and works for progressive causes.
In the United States, a presidential transition is the process during which the president-elect of the United States prepares to take over the administration of the federal government of the United States from the incumbent president. Though planning for transition by a non-incumbent candidate can start at any time before a presidential election and in the days following, the transition formally starts when the General Services Administration (GSA) declares an “apparent winner” of the election, thereby releasing the funds appropriated by Congress for the transition, and continues until inauguration day, when the president-elect takes the oath of office, at which point the powers, immunities, and responsibilities of the presidency are legally transferred to the new president.
The 2012 United States presidential election was the 57th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. Incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama and his running mate, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden, were re-elected to a second term. They defeated the Republican ticket of businessman and former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
On April 4, 2011, Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, announced his candidacy for re-election as president. On September 5, 2012, he again became the nominee of the Democratic Party for the 2012 presidential election. Along with his running mate, Vice President Joe Biden, Obama was opposed in the general election by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, along with various minor candidates from other parties. The election took place on Tuesday, November 6, 2012.
The 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney officially began on June 2, 2011, when former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney formally announced his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States, at an event in Stratham, New Hampshire. Having previously run in the 2008 Republican primaries, this was Romney's second campaign for the presidency.
Harper Reed is an American entrepreneur and former Head of Commerce at Braintree, a subsidiary of PayPal. In 2011, he served as Chief Technology Officer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
"You didn't build that" is a phrase from a 2012 election campaign speech delivered by United States President Barack Obama on July 13, 2012, in Roanoke, Virginia. In the speech, Obama said: "Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that."
In late October 2012, the post-tropical cyclone once known as Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey. By the time it made landfall, it had merged with other storm systems. Though no longer a hurricane, the combined storm caused over $50 billion in damages and cost over 100 lives in the United States.
ORCA was a mobile-optimized web application used as a component of the "get out the vote" (GOTV) efforts for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. It was intended to enable volunteers in polling stations around the country to report which voters had turned out, so that "missing" Republican voters and underperforming precincts could be targeted for last-minute efforts to get voters to the polls. According to Romney himself, it would provide an "unprecedented advantage" to the campaign to "ensure that every last supporter makes it to the polls."
Project Houdini is a computer program used by the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Although it originally had missteps, it has been credited with helping increase Democratic Party turnout over the 2004 election. It has been compared to ORCA, which failed under similar circumstances for the Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
Double Down: Game Change 2012 is a book written by political journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2012 United States presidential election, in which Barack Obama was re-elected as President of the United States, defeating Mitt Romney. The book, published by Penguin Press, is a behind-the-scenes narrative of the Obama and Romney campaigns. It is the sequel to Game Change, which explored the 2008 United States presidential election. Double Down was released on November 5, 2013.
The planned presidential transition of Mitt Romney, better known as the Romney Readiness Project, refers to the planned transfer of power from President Barack Obama to Mitt Romney, the Republican Party's candidate for president in the 2012 presidential election. As Barack Obama was reelected as president, the transition never took place.
Civis Analytics is a US data science software and consultancy company founded by Dan Wagner in 2013, with backing by Eric Schmidt. Wagner had served as the Chief Analytics Officer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
The Narwhal is a species of whale with a distinctive long tusk.