Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Elahe Izadi

I Lost My Seat in Congress, and All I Got Was This Broken Website

Elahe Izadi and Sam Baker, National Journal — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:34:54 -0500

Vulnerable House Democrats back in 2009 knew that they were risking their political careers by casting votes for the Affordable Care Act. And more than 60 of them--including some who didn't even vote for the bill--lost their seats the following year.

So there's an extra psychological twinge for those forced to watch the administration blunder the rollout of the very thing that cost them their jobs.

"Am I disappointed that they didn't so a better job? Yeah I am disappointed—very disappointed," says former Rep. Baron Hill of Indiana, who served a total of five terms and was ousted in 2010.

Despite holding out hope that the current mess will subside, no one can be happy with how the Obama administration has rolled out the central components of the Affordable Care Act. And for those who bet their jobs on it, the current struggle to make the law work is particularly frustrating.

"The bottom line is, I feel like, why, I did my job," says former Rep. Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota, who lost his seat after nine terms. "Whoever was to do the job of getting this implemented correctly didn't do their job, and I'm mad about it."

But Pomeroy retains some sense of hope that the next six months will bring substantial improvements. "All of these start-up problems are going to fade in the face of what has been achieved by the reforms themselves," Pomeroy says.

Democrats everywhere were caught off guard by the failures of HealthCare.gov, the primary Obamacare enrollment website that crashed as soon as it was launched and is still functioning poorly. "I'm a small business owner, and I make sure when I'm rolling out a new program that it works. I test it out," says former Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, who is a doctor and voted for the ACA. He lost in 2010 to Republican Reid Ribble.

But Obamacare's political problems go deeper than HealthCare.gov. Although the White House announced an administrative "fix" on Thursday, the uproar over cancelled insurance plans has been a major headache for Democrats. They feel they're paying the price for Obama's broken pledge that anyone who liked their health care plans could keep them.

A slew of Democrats with tight races next year have introduced bills they say would follow through on that promise. Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., has also requested an audit of HealthCare.gov's failures.

"Of course it's frustrating for everyone," Kagen says, but he still wholeheartedly supports the law. He also pivots to put the onus on Republicans to do something to fix the current problems, as well.

"I've got confidence [the administration is] going to solve this tech issue, and I'm looking forward to Republicans also helping every one of my patients and constituents," he says.

Pomeroy says he recently spoke with a group about the ACA, and they remarked how they thought he'd be more upset with the rollout. "Oh, I'm apoplectic about it," he recalls telling them. "I'd cast that vote tomorrow. However, that vote was career-ending for many of us. We thought that we did our part; it then shifted to the administration to competently execute the program. They fell short."

Hill also said he knew at the time that his vote might be a career-ending one, but still believes it was worth it. He's frustrated by the rocky implementation, he says, but not bitter.

"Life's too short. I don't even think about those kinds of things. Am I disappointed? Sure, I'm disappointed. But I hold no grievances against the administration or [Health and Human Services] Secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius or anybody else," he said.

At least 13 House Democrats lost their seats as a direct result of their votes in favor of the ACA, according to a 2011 study by researchers at the University of Denver and North Carolina State University. But voting against the ACA wasn't enough to insulate some Democrats from losing their seats.

Take former Rep. Lincoln Davis of Tennessee, who voted against the bill while in Congress after hearing a loud outcry from his constituents against it. Davis says he was taken down in the anti-ACA fervor anyway.

"I voted the way people wanted me, the way they asked me. It still didn't matter," he says. "The result came, and the legislation, and quite frankly the money that came into the campaign from outside groups--we haven't seen that kind of money."

Davis has no regrets about voting against Obamacare, but he still wants the problems with the law to be fixed for the sake of the uninsured.

As he put it, "If we lost that, we've failed more than those who voted for it and lost their races … but also the very people we're trying to help."

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Obamacare Enrollment Data Subpoenaed

Elahe Izadi, National Journal — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 11:19:04 -0500

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., has subpoenaed the administration for data on Obamacare enrollment, making good on an earlier threat.

The subpoena to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency managing the rollout of the insurance exchanges, demands all the data it has on enrollment figures by Friday.

"Congress needs to know what you know so Congress, the American people's representatives, can also take corrective action," Camp said in a letter accompanying the subpoena. "Both Republicans and Democrats need to understand the full extent of the crisis if we are going to find a fair and workable solution for the American people."

Camp had sent a letter last week to CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner demanding the same data. House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., also has subpoenaed the Health and Human Services Department for the data.

Tavenner told the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on Tuesday that the enrollment information would be released next week. The administration plans to release enrollment updates monthly.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last week that "we have no reliable data about enrollment, which is why we haven't given it to date."

Republicans point to low enrollment figures as proof that the rollout was a failure. Many Senate Democrats said Tuesday that low enrollment had been expected in the initial months after the rollout but that Healthcare.gov needs to be fully functional soon in order for people to sign up for coverage that begins on Jan. 1.

The administration has said the insurance-exchange website will be functioning properly by the end of November.

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How Republicans Are Looking to Close the Digital Divide Against Democrats

Elahe Izadi, National Journal — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:23:57 -0500

As Robert Draper underscored in last week’s New York Times magazine cover story, the Republican Party is engaged in serious soul-searching about why they were so badly outgunned by the Democrats on the technology front in the last election. One of the most telling anecdotes in the story: The suggestion that Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, Stuart Stevens, could be the last such figure not to tweet as part of strategy.

In conversations with leading Republican digital strategists, there’s an acknowledgment that the path to closing the tech gap will be difficult. Republicans are a more hierarchical party and rely on many of the same consultants that have been around since the days of Ronald Reagan. These digital-first Republican operatives argue that Democrats could have the advantage for years to come unless significant changes are made to the way the party conducts its business.

But they did offer myriad suggestions on how to shake things up, and help the party in the process. Here are the most notable suggestions:

Give ideas room to breathe, and engage GOP techies.

Several GOP strategists said that there are plenty of tech-savvy conservatives who could lend a lot of help to campaigns, but they lack experience on the trail. So they’re usually passed over for jobs in favor of more-seasoned campaign veterans.

“We have to be willing to give [them] an opportunity to flourish and thrive within the party apparatus, and not to partition our resources, meaning to folks who have done campaigning a certain way for so many years,” said Cyrus Krohn, former digital strategist for the RNC who since started his own company.

But to get new ideas into the pipeline, this new wave of engineers and social-media experts need to be brought on board and become an essential part of the campaign infrastructure. Ideas, even if they don’t end up working out, need to be tried out and tested. For a party that hasn’t had the stomach to go experimental lately, it’s a tough sell — but one that’ll need to be made.

“It’s tougher for new ideas to grow and flourish because resources are so heavily focused on things that worked before,” says Kristen Soltis Anderson, GOP pollster and vice president of The Winston Group.

“There’s kind of this reluctance when processes have been guided for a very long time by gut instinct, by experts who have 20 to 30 years’ experience, who have done political campaigns,” said Michael Turk, the RNC’s first eCampaign director.

Many digital-first conservatives tend to hail from the more-libertarian wing of the party, which is another reason they’re not quite so readily accepted — or are interested — in the GOP’s establishment culture.

Come to terms with the hierarchical nature of the party.

Democrats successfully engaged and empowered their grassroots activists. On the flip side, the often-tense relationship between the GOP establishment and tea-party base has made it tough for the party to compete. The problem becomes even more complex once outside groups are thrown into the mix, since they can’t coordinate with official campaigns or parties.

One former national GOP strategist put it this way: “The official campaigns themselves (individually) are very centralized, and always have been. But now these centralized organizations are now one of many silos in an overall decentralized political environment.”

RedState cofounder Ben Domenech suggests that a centralized organization of some sort could actually help lead to better ideas and products. He compared it to a venture-capital model; an organization can invest in small projects that can be tested and then share the lessons with others.

“The Right is always going to be hierarchical,” Domenech says. “But instead of hierarchy getting in the way, what if you essentially said, this is going to be an organization that will be at the center.”

Developing open-source technologies — software that lets users modify and improve upon the code and data — is another important component to empowering the new wave of digital activists.

The party had actually been moving toward a more open tech environment. In the lead-up to the 2008 election, the Republican National Committee developed an open-source API platform that would have let state parties and others access the central party’s database and build upon it. That project was shut down after years of development, something Turk has called “a tragic miscalculation.”

Pour resources into digital nuts and bolts.

You can’t just have useful technology or good databases if you don’t have the digital platform that can actually make use of it and let it grow over time – it’s like trying to run a good smartphone app on an outdated smartphone. GOP political strategist Soren Dayton uses a war analogy to illustrate the conundrum: “Part of the reason World War I was so bloody was that they had the basic tools of modern warfare, but they didn’t know how to use them in smart ways. So they just sat in trenches and shot at each other,” he said. “We need technology, but we need to use it more effectively.”

Building out a technological infrastructure that isn’t so centralized and that can adapt over time, like that open-source API platform the RNC had been working on, could counteract some of the issues the national party has experienced with the changing of hands. “There’s very little continuity because chairmen come in and they want to make their mark, and they bring in their own people and we’re in this perpetual state of resetting,” Krohn says.

Resources are already going into digital initiatives. One of the GOP’s congressional campaign committees has begun to beef up its digital game. The National Republican Congressional Committee expanded its digital team from three to 10 members, with the committee billing it as the largest such team in Republican politics. Other strategists are starting to explore ways to utilize the behavioral sciences, much like the Democrats did in 2012.

Develop and test like crazy in 2013.

If Republicans want to get ahead of the Democrats’ digital game by 2014’s midterms, their best chance is during the off-year 2013 gubernatorial and senate special elections. It’s a time when the GOP could develop and fund applications and tech solutions.

“Once we hit January 2014, it’s going to be heads down on focusing on the midterms, and people aren’t going to have the tolerance level to experiment and test or fund new capabilities, because we as a party fall into a traditional campaign cycle,” Krohn said.

The Virginia governor’s race, in particular, could end up a technological battleground.

The gubernatorial race between Republican Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Terry McAuliffe is shaping up to be very competitive, and could serve as a bellwether for the 2014 midterms. State law allows unlimited contributions, which could help fund some proposed innovations.

But remember, technology isn’t the silver bullet.

The Democratic technology edge wasn’t the only reason President Obama won in 2012.

“We can target people really well, we can build systems that allow us to have a lot of data about every voter,” says Anderson. “We also have to make sure that the message we’re delivering and the policy behind that message is worthy and relevant to younger generations.”

Of all of the identity crises the GOP is grappling with, the tech gap is probably the least controversial. Many people within the party acknowledge it’s a problem, says Domenech. “There is no big group force of people saying we don’t need to do anything on tech,” he said.

But, he added, “That’s separate from the message part. You have to have a message to connect with people. Otherwise, just being better at the connection part is not going to be enough.”

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A tale of 2 strategies: The Twitter genius of Chuck Grassley and Cory Booker

Elahe Izadi, National Journal — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:04:30 -0500

If you’re on Twitter and not following Sen. Chuck Grassley, you’re not using Twitter correctly.

The Iowa Republican is known for his colorful and personal Twitter feed. Take a gander: He personally tweets about everything from the History Channel to "Obamacare" to an incident in which he hit a deer with his car (“assume dead"). Grassley’s tweets take us along for a ride, one that's often riddled with spelling errors (which he has said is due to his distaste for typing and the iPhone’s auto-correct function).

Contrast Grassley’s tweets to another lawmaker known for his active and personal feed: Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker. On Twitter, he’s part mayor, part celebrity. Booker tweets about city services and was widely praised for how he utilized the platform in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy to connect directly with residents. But then he’ll retweet someone who says she’s going to get a Cory Booker quote tattoo or someone who has a “political crush” on him. Sometimes, Booker tweets like a Kardashian.

Obviously, Booker is savvier with Twitter than Grassley, and he's utilized the platform effectively, as he vies for statewide office. Booker's a PR genius with social media. Grassley's himself--typos, rants, and all. So while Booker probably doesn't need to take Twitter lessons from the nine-term senator, there's something decidedly old school and earnest that's kind of appealing about Grassley's feed, something that would be nice to see in Booker's feed, too.

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