Bethany Mandel at Commentary has a pretty cool account of the breakdown of Romney’s hi-tech Get Out the Vote Operation (Project ORCA) here.  The technical details are well worth reading, but the nut of the thing is this:

One of the most successful components of Karl Rove’s GOTV efforts with George W. Bush’s campaigns was his small-government ideological approach. Each volunteer was tasked with personally getting a handful of voters from their area to the polls, voters that they were already familiar with from their church, their children’s schools and their community. Instead of this strategy, Boston was the hub; information was sent there and GOTV assignments were delegated from thousands of miles away by Romney staffers largely unfamiliar with individuals and communities. At Ace of Spades, Ekdahl described the organizational approach of Project ORCA: “The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters).”

I’m sure we’re going to hear lots more about this. But one likely takeaway is that Mitt Romney is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.