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Marc Morano says Trump admin has made lasting changes to energy regulations

Just The News

Trump 2.0 has blown Trump 1.0 out of the water when it comes to climate, energy, and environment regulations!”: Marc Morano details how the Trump ...

Biden's Green Energy Darlings Fear Getting Walloped By The Weather – IJR

Independent Journal Review

Marc Morano, author and the head of Climate Depot told the DCNF. “What do these formerly heavily subsidized tax dollars 'green' energy sources ...

http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2016/07/16/mike-pences-top-adviser-was-a-key-aide-to-georgias-perdue-clan/

The presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign said late Saturday that campaign wunderkind and Cobb County native Nick Ayers would serve as Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s senior adviser.

Ayers had a hand in several big Georgia races involving the Perdue family. (His wife is Sonny’s second cousin.) He helped Sonny with his gubernatorial victories and also aided boost the Senate bid of David as an adviser to the PAC Citizens for Working America.

Also listed as an adviser to Pence is Kellyanne Conway, a pollster who was a close adviser to Newt Gingrich during his 2012 White House run.

The Pence aides will be charged with organizing the day-to-day operations for the running mate and coordinating with Trump’s campaign.

ne of Vice President Mike Pence’s top political advisers is a major investor in the Independent Journal Review,a social media-minded news outlet geared toward young conservatives.

Nick Ayers, Pence’s top strategist outside of the White House, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that he owns part of IJR. He is also playing a major role in America First Priorities, a political group launched by Trump campaign advisers to trumpet the president’s message. He joined Trump’s campaign when Pence was tapped as the vice presidential nominee and later acted as a senior advisor for the vice president-elect during the transition. Ayers previously worked as a political consultant and as campaign manager for former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s presidential bid in 2012.

There’s no indication that Ayers was involved in this week’s controversial State Department decision to grant the sole press spot on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s trip to Asia to IJR’sWhite House correspondent. The move, a break from tradition, has enraged the State Department press corps as Tillerson makes big diplomatic news without a traditional pooler tagging along.

Ayers’ investment in IJR is another example of close ties between Trump’s orbit and a favored media outlet. Steve Bannon, the president’s top strategist, ran Breitbart News for years and has brought with him to the administration a handful of ex-Breitbart staffers. The company has said that it no longer has financial and editorial ties to Bannon. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner transferred his ownership of The New York Observer to a family trust.

There’s no sign that Ayers has had any editorial involvement with his investment, and a person involved in the company noted that IJR notably didn’t benefit from insider leaks during the campaign.

The revelation of Ayers’s investment comes as a series of recent IJR stories attracted wider attention. An IJR reporter had dinner near the president at DC’s Trump Hotel based on a tip from a source. The site scooped the national media when it first reported that Neil Gorsuch would be Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

IJR also faced criticism for a story posted Thursday spreading a conspiracy theory that Barack Obama made a “surprise visit” to Hawaii to sway a judge there to block Trump’s revised travel ban executive order. IJR later retracted the article and posted an editor’s note apologizing. The publication’s congressional reporter resigned Thursday over disagreements with *IJR’s* direction.

IJR was founded in 2012 by Alex Skatell, who previously met Ayers when he worked in Republican politics, and Phil Musser, a former executive director of the Republican Governors Association.

The site has found success in fashioning viral right-leaning web content geared for heartland news consumers, like funny GOP candidate videos (Sen. Ted Cruz fired a gun wrapped in bacon, for instance). IJR has also sought to ramp up its reporting chops, hiring journalists from mainstream outlets and co-sponsoring a GOP debate with ABC.

This week, IJR’s reporting push came at the expense other political news outlets. BuzzFeed News first reported that Erin McPike, IJR’s White House correspondent, was the sole journalist selected for a spot on Tillerson’s trip. “We don’t take this opportunity lightly and recognize the controversy surrounding press access for the trip,” Skatell said in a statement at the time.

McPike’s selection became the subject of a heated State Department press briefing on Wednesday. “Can you explain why, once a seat was identified on that plane that was available, the decision was made rather than to allow the press to send a pooler who would share information and actually allow us to work around not being there personally, the decision instead was made to handpick a conservative outlet to accompany the secretary and not to share that information?” one reporter asked State Department spokesperson Mark Toner, according to a transcript.

“In this specific trip and instance, it was decided to take – to make an outside-the-box, if I could put it that way, decision to bring somebody in who doesn’t necessarily cover the State Department, a media outlet that isn’t steeped in foreign policy and give it a new, fresh perspective,” Toner said.

On Friday, reporters complained on Twitter that McPike had not filed a piece yet, even though Tillerson made newsmaking comments about North Korea and decided cut his trip to South Korea short. “While external advice is noted, I’m working on a longer piece per explicit instructions from my supervisor, and I always have been,” McPike tweeted. Skatell tweeted that he is to be blamed for McPike’s silence: “View is a series of tweets not best medium to convey a long form piece.”

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Last week, with the midterm elections fast approaching, the conservative website Independent Journal Review was not focused on the control of the Senate or crucial statehouse races. Instead, it led its home page with a gruesome beheading on Long Island and a video of a belligerent drunk being arrested at a Dallas airport.

But sprinkled throughout the attention-grabbing fare was a steady stream of articles critical of President Obama and other Democrats. “Obama’s schedule from today shows how toxic he is to Democrats running for Senate,” read one headline. Another asked, “Did Hillary intentionally talk over a crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her?” (The sub-headline: “If elected president, she would be the second oldest in history.”)

IJReview, a two-year-old site started by a pair of Republican operatives, has emerged as one of the most popular online destinations for conservatives. The site mixes entertaining, shareable topics like pets through a conservative-values lens (for example, a recent piece about a dog helping to heal a sick veteran) with articles about politics and policy.

“It’s like if you crossed RedState with BuzzFeed,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican political consultant and an adviser to IJReview.

IJReview has roughly 24 million unique visitors a month, according to the most recent Quantcast rankings. Its traffic exceeds that of more seasoned right-wing sites like the Drudge Report, Newsmax and Breitbart News, and is not far behind other conservative brands like Fox News and TheBlaze.

The site’s founders, Alex Skatell and Phil Musser, say that its popularity comes from having mastered “social sharing” on websites like Facebook and Google. They boast of the ability to generate maximum traffic from a minimum number of articles. In August, for instance, IJReview received 14 million shares on Facebook from just 646 articles, according to NewsWhip, a site that tracks social sharing. By contrast, Huffington Post, the leader in Facebook shares, had four times as many shares at nearly 55 million, but with 38 times as many articles.

Such a model has economic advantages. IJReview generates revenues in the low seven figures a month, up 500 percent from this time a year ago, the men said. The Media Group will earn revenue of$30 million this year,they said. While they declined to disclose their bottom line, Mr. Musser said, “we have been profitable from Day 1.”

When Mr. Skatell, a former digital director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, looked to start a site after the 2012 election, he saw a huge gap in reaching what he calls “a more mainstream center-right audience.” He teamed with Mr. Musser, a former executive director of the Republican Governors Association. The two “bonded over being generally dispirited about our party’s approach to all things digital,” Mr. Musser said.

They pledged to change things. “We shared a goal of building a new ecosystem to communicate our message,” Mr. Musser said, “and to develop practitioners who could deliver it.” Mr. Skatell, 28, had already earned a reputation as a digital wunderkind in the Republican Party. At 22, he started the Republican Governors Association’s first Facebook page and increased online fund-raising.

He had also started his own Facebook page, called Conservative Daily, that aggregated stories across the web. Mr. Skatell experimented with how to promote the page (including paid ads), and it took off, inspiring him to start IJReview as an independent website.

Using $40,000 he had saved from a game app he made in college and $20,000 from his parents, he hired Bert Atkinson, a friend known as Bubba who had been working as a waiter, as editor and chief writer.

While the site continued repackaging content from others with eye-catching headlines, Mr. Atkinson and a growing staff began adding their own content too, like amusing explainers of current events. They also began to be fed content by readers. When Mr. Obama told a factory worker at a plant that he had been using Obamacare the wrong way, IJReview received a video of the exchange and posted it.

In 2013, Mr. Skatell joined with Mr. Musser to build a larger company. At the time, IJReview was still receiving fewer than two million unique viewers a month. The men started to focus on audience development.

“We put more of an emphasis on watching how our audience responded to certain content, tracking real-time analytics much more closely, and lastly reinvesting in growing our distribution channels: Facebook and email lists,” Mr. Skatell said.

A breakthrough insight was figuring out that if they could identify readers who felt strongly about health care and alert them to all their Affordable Care Act articles, there was a higher likelihood they would share them. Putting the right content in front of the right audience became their mantra. Traffic took off. “There is an art and science to this,” Mr. Musser said.

IJReview’s roughly 30 reporters and editors work from an open-office space in Old Town Alexandria, Va. At a recent news meeting, the young staff members sat on beanbags while brainstorming how to compare the Obama administration to characters in the 1990s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” (The idea never panned out.) The half-dozen reporters at the meeting said they did not do reporting outside the office, although one ventured she would look up something health-related on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.

The IJReview’s lighter approach belies the deep political focus in the rest of Mr. Skatell’s and Mr. Musser’s business, Media Group of America. The 62-employee company also runs IMGE, a digital consulting firm for Republican candidates and corporate clients, and IMGE Labs, which builds technical tools like mobile apps for clients, also largely Republican campaigns.

Mr. Skatell and Mr. Musser said they plan for the site to widen its reach by becoming a platform for other viewpoints — including Democrats. That could alienate their core readers, but they say they believe that will not happen because of their ability to target specific content to specific readers.

For now, their audience reflects the typical conservative base, with an outsize share of readers under 18 and over 45. A broader base would be good for politics and good for business. “This isn’t just a Republican primary voter play,” said Mr. Castellanos, the consultant. “It is much bigger and more valuable.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 3, 2014, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Young Website Catches the Eyes of Conse

nyt

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https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/independent-journal-review/

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Press corps blasts Tillerson for cherry-picking reporters

State Department invites right-wing outlet on trip to Asia, snubbing the regular pool.

By HADAS GOLD 03/15/17 07:09 PM EDT Updated 03/15/17 10:30 PM EDT

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The Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite the rules for media coverage reached a furious peak on Wednesday as veteran State Department reporters expressed outrage over Secretary Rex Tillerson’s decision to take only a reporter from a conservative website on his first trip to Asia.

“The State Department is the beacon of press freedom around the world. The message now to China in particular when he gets to Beijing is that press freedom doesn’t matter,” MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who is following Tillerson’s trip and broadcasting from Tokyo, said in a recent appearance on air. "Up until now, secretaries of state have made it a key demand that our press corps gets into meetings … that there be access for the media … A key component of foreign policy is being undercut by this.”

Tillerson’s move caught most of the media off guard, in part because he has more to gain than lose by courting the diplomatic press corps, which has enjoyed generally good relations with all secretaries of state going back to the Reagan administration. Indeed, of all the branches of the Washington press corps, the State Department's is widely considered the most staid and serious, the type who actually care about policy versus palace intrigue.

But those same reporters are now furious, frustrated and, in some cases, disgusted by what’s been deemed a violation of tradition and a public trust, with Tillerson’s decision to bring only Erin McPike of Independent Journal Review, a conservative news outlet which made its name with lighthearted videos featuring politicians and viral stories.

McPike has been with IJR for only a few weeks and doesn’t even cover the State Department: She’s its White House reporter and is often in the briefings. McPike won’t be acting as a pool reporter for the rest of the diplomatic press corps, meaning she won’t be sharing information about the trip with other reporters, which is what would normally happen if there were limited space for reporters and only a few were chosen.

"Is this really the message they want to send to the public, as well as other nations? Really? They must, on some level, realize that no one is fooled by the explanations,” said CNN’s senior diplomatic correspondent, Michelle Kosinski.

Mitchell and Kosinski are just two of many reporters who have strongly protested the decision, which also drew the ire of many Washington bureau chiefs and the State Department Correspondents’ Association....

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the holl 50 most beutiful

HOMETOWN:

Cincinnati

AGE:

33

RELATIONSHIP STATUS:

Single

PARTY AFFILIATION:

Independent

Erin McPike had a successful run in political journalism, working her way up from the early shift at National Journal to stints at RealClearPolitics and CNN.

But she decided she wanted a new challenge in March and jumped to 1776, the global startup incubator just blocks from the White House.

“I think you always want to be working different muscles and diversifying your knowledge base,” McPike says.

It’s a mantra that extends to her workout regimen. This year, she decided to sign up for a sampling of trial classes to attempt different exercise programs.

And although she’s out of journalism now, she doesn’t see the move as a goodbye forever.

“I have several books and an award-winning screenplay rattling around in my head. I just have to write them down,” she says.

“I will always fancy myself a journalist.”

— Ben Kamisar

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SPN's Legislative Agenda Is Frequently Buttressed by Its Forays as "Press" and the Echoes of Its Allies in the Growing Right-Wing State "Press" Corps. As CMD was one of the first to document, SPN groups like the Goldwater Institute are hiring people to act as reporters, and the legislative agenda of SPN is increasingly echoed by the growing right-wing infrastructure of groups that pose as press. Some even get their stories or "reports" picked up as news and delivered to state newspapers as a "wire" service like the Associated Press, as with theFranklin Center's Watchdog.org groups and the Ryun brothers-allied "American Majority" and "Media Trackers" operations.

big data:

Karl Rove, Koch brothers lead charge to control Republican data

By: Kenneth P. Vogel and Maggie Haberman

April 22, 2013 05:04 AM EDT

The GOP didn’t have an answer for Big Democratic Data in 2012, costing them in close races from Congress to the White House.

Now, they’ve got lots of answers — possibly too many — and a feisty rivalry is brewing between tea party upstarts, nonpartisan data geeks, operatives linked to the Koch brothers and insiders like Karl Rove.

Instead of fighting Democrats, the right’s would-be data wizards are going after each other with claims of cronyism and incompetence, as well as cutthroat bidding wars and threats of legal action.

(PHOTOS: Republican money men)

This isn’t just about who can hire the most young IT programmers, create the slickest app to optimize door-knocking routes or stave off a repeat of the Election Day collapse of Mitt Romney’s ORCA system.

Rather, in a very real way, it’s about who controls the party through its most precious asset — its voter data — and the multimillion-dollar contracts that could follow.

Rove has begun soliciting donors for a $15 million-plus data project. There are competing systems being offered by a pair of twin brothers. And a programmer who helped start the dominant Democratic voter data system is pitching a copycat setup for Republicans.

The Republican National Committee is encouraging the intramural competition and,at the same time, pushing a data management system of its own.

(Also on POLITICO: DSCC outraises NRSC by $2 million)

“I would hope that the pressure and the desire to win is so great that people will really try to get the best product that is truly going to solve the problem and not just make their decisions based on who has the best connections,” said conservative data entrepreneur Ned Ryun.

Rove earlier this month spoke with major donors in New York about a voter data project that he has estimated could cost between $15 million and $20 million. He has been working with San Francisco-based private-equity investor Dick Boyce, who is fronting a political data concept called Liberty Works, sources tell POLITICO.

The public relationship between Rove and Boyce has been complicated, according to several sources familiar with the project. Rove has openly embraced Boyce’s work, touting it at an invitation-onlyconference that drew some of the GOP’s biggest names to a swanky Georgia resort in March. But Boyce has established distance from Rove, indicating to prospective donors that he’s not simply a front for the latest project from the Rove-conceived Crossroads groups, which sponsored one of Rove’s New York meetings this month.

(Also on POLITICO:Obama political arm strikes fear in GOP)

Likewise, Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio, called Liberty Works a “stand-alone” effort.

Meanwhile, POLITICO has learned that a voter database outfit called Themis, established by the political network associated with David and Charles Koch, has been working with an established private political data company called i360. The partnership seems to give Koch World, which until recently had mostly focused on conservative issue advocacy, new reach into Republican Party politics.

On its website, i360 boasts of maintaining a constantly updated database of over 187 million active voters and over 211 million consumers that “provides hundreds of data points on every American adult that is currently or potentially politically active.”

It’s unclear when the Themis relationship began, but since 2010,  i360 has worked for Republican candidates and committees ranging from Reps. Diane Black and Tom Cottonto unsuccessful 2012 candidates Allen West, Josh Mandel and Tim Pawlenty, the Maine Republican Party, and a pro-Rick Perry super PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Themis — which cost at least $18million to build in 2010 and 2011, according to recent tax filings — was used in 2012 by Koch-backed nonprofit groups such as Americans for Prosperity to contact millions of voters through phone calls and door-knocks in the run-up to Election Day.

Some critics grumbled about Themis’s performance, and POLITICO has learned that operatives have held post-election meetings on how to utilize it more effectively.

A representative from Koch Industries declined to comment on the record, but a person familiar with the situation said “Koch remains committed to Themis and their technology.”

Multiple sources said that Boyce’s effort has collided with Themis, adding to the rivalry between two of the deepest-pocketed factions in conservative politics — Crossroads and the Koch political operation.

Lighter-weight groups also have made some in-roads into the wide-open conservative data landscape.

Last year, Ned Ryun and his twin brother Drew, in a partnership between their American Majority Action nonprofit and a company called Political Gravity, rolled out a voter data interface called Gravity that helped customers ranging from victorious Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz to the tea party group FreedomWorks.

But the brothers have since split. Drew left American Majority, and they launched competing firms after Election Day.

The Ryuns are “type double As” who have been “competing all our lives,” said Drew Ryun, whose new company, Surge Data Tech, is among a handful of voter data firms pitching state Republican parties.

“Free market competition leads to innovation,” he said. “The conundrum will be when innovation is outside the purview of GOP consultants and therefore their bank accounts.”

Ned Ryun’s firm Voter Gravity is courting campaigns directly, and this month fired off a cease-and-desist letter to a newGOP consulting firm called MGA Holdings founded by a pair of former operatives for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican Governors Association demanding that the new firm stop using the name Gravity-N for its data tool.

MGA Holdings — which says it intends to drop the use of the name Gravity-N — hopes to bring together data streams across a wide array of platforms, including potentially using applications from other companies. Co-founder Alex Skatell,who was digital director for the NRSC and the RGA, says the more, the merrier.

“It’s encouraging that there are others out there willing to put the time, energy and investment into working towards solutions,” he said.

The RNC in its post-election autopsy announced it would seek to facilitate the competition by allowing approved software platforms, candidates and groups to directly access a revamped version of its once-vaunted voter file through the Data Trust database created in 2011 with support from Crossroads.

But it’s also quietly pushed state parties to sign onto a voter data management system — GOP Data Center — created around the same time, which some conservative data entrepreneurs outside the party structure see as stifling competition.

Republicans know what they don’t want: another ORCA — the voter-mobilization system built by Romney’s campaign, which was crippledbybalky interfaces that volunteers couldn’t navigate and cataclysmic Election Day crashes.

What they do want is a matter of debate.

Establishment types worry that a truly open data environment could empower tea party candidates and groups to use the GOP’s data to defeat incumbents in Republican primaries, while groups and firms that cater to the base worry that the RNC will shut them out.

The nightmare scenario for many on the right has Data Trust, the Kochs and possibly operatives like Rove and the Ryun brothers building their own competing voter files, creating a money vacuum that could produce conflicting or overlapping data and further splinter the conservative movement.

Democrats built their voter data advantage partly because their data is more centralized. A few well-connected firms like Catalist and NGP VAN have earned de facto endorsements from the Democratic establishment and used those blessings to build near monopolies on the left. As a result, Democratic candidates and liberal interest groups have benefited from enhancing and sharing the same data through the same interfaces.

“That came as a result of a competitive marketplace where there were five or six players, and, over time, over half the states decided that they thought VAN was the superior product, and then the [Democratic National Committee] stepped in and expanded the NGP VAN contract to 50 states,” said Stu Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN.

Trevelyan rejected criticism that his company has stifled competition or been slow to innovate, saying, “we continue to provide more innovation than anyone on the Republican side.”

Bruce Willsie, the president of a nonpartisan data firm called Labels & Lists, said there’s no clear answer about what’s better.

“On the plus side, the competition may be healthy and result in better technology and data,” said Willsie, whose company in 2012 was paid $68,000 by conservative and liberal candidates and committees ranging from unions to FreedomWorks, according to FEC reports. “On the minus side, the lack of coordination may introduce inefficiencies.”

NGP VAN’s dominance could make Democrats susceptible to losing their data edge, suggested Jim Gilliam of the nonpartisan firm NationBuilder. It was started by liberals but has recently made inroads with GOP groups, drawing fire from NGP VAN and liberal activists suggesting Democrats should be wary about doing business with firms that play both sides.

“I believe the choose-a-side card is in its last days,” Gilliam said. “The competition is definitely going to help, not hinder the Republicans. It will encourage a bit more of an open ecosystem as they will need to share data.”

Steve Adler, a Rhode Island programmer who helped start one of the companies that became NGP VAN, has switched sides and developed a parallel system for Republicans called rVotes.

Adler’s company has had meetings or calls to present its system to some of the most influential Republican data consultants — from the Romney campaign’s digital gurus Zac Moffatt and Michael Beach (who got a demonstration in the spring of 2011) to the RNC (first back in 2009 and again in March, when he pitched to chief of staff Mike Shields and top adviser Jeff Larson) to Rove (who talked with an rVotes supporter after the election).

Despite the meetings, Adler says there’s a reluctance among GOP bigwigs to award data contracts to anyone who’s not part of the insider Beltway consultant class. “They just don’t know what they’re doing,” Adler charged, adding “They’re not qualified.”

As for his efforts to get traction for rVotes among Washington’s GOP elite, he said, “It’s like trying to sell beauty products to ugly people, but they’re blind, so they don’t know that they’re ugly.”

His company failed to land any big federal or state GOP contracts last year, with federal records showing rVotes earned only $18,000 in 2012 mostly from longshot or tea party congressional candidates such as Will Cardon of Arizona, Barry Hinckley of Rhode Island and Jamie Radtke of Virginia.

Moreover, Adler says there’s little incentive for consultants to let anyone else try their hand, since “even though they’ve failed, they succeeded, because they still made money off of ORCA and Data Trust.”

To wit, the companies that handled the bulk of the data business for Romney’s campaign and the RNC — Targeted Victory, FLS Connect and Target Point Consulting — since the beginning of 2011 have received $190 million from Romney, the RNC and other federal Republican candidates, committees and groups,FEC records show.

The huge windfalls drew harsh criticism from Republicans, who — noting the firm’s close ties to the folks picking vendors (Targeted Victory was created by Moffatt and Beach, while Target Point was founded by Alex Gage, whose wife Katie Gage was Romney’s deputy campaign manager, and FLS Connect was founded partly by Larson and counted Romney political director Rich Beeson among its partners) — called it everything from “racketeering” to the “incestuousbleeding of the Republican Party.”

RNC chairman Reince Priebus defended Larson, who served as RNC chief of staff during the 2012 election, pointing out that he stepped down from FLS Connect. But the decision to open the data file to outside firms was seen in some quarters as a response to the argument that the party didn’t welcome outsiders.

The idea, as expressed in the autopsy, was that the RNC should be “supporting competition in the marketplace to ensure that the best ideas rise to the top.” But even that announcement was greeted skeptically, with grass-roots critics pointing out that the RNC only recently created GOP Data Center, which it pays FLS Connect to maintain and encourages state parties to adopt.

“Volunteers have been very frustrated” with GOP Data Center, said Steven Kuivenhoven, a Michigan GOP official during the 2012 cycle who encouraged activists to use alternative voter outreach interfaces last year. He has emerged as an rVotes evangelist, supporting a proposal Adler submitted this month to the state party, and he expressed concern about state parties relying primarily on GOP Data Center, which Michigan’s GOP this year agreed to use.

GOP Data Center and Data Trust are “a patchwork of apps built on an old database structure,” he said. “This is very inadequate as compared to what the Democrats use.”

Interoperability, said Moffatt, was “one of the challenges that we ran into in 2012. The systems on the Republican side weren’t built to talk to each other. If you’re building new technology and you’re doing it properly, then the systems should talk to each other.”

RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said GOP Data Center will work with other applications — not against them — partly by allowing them to interface with Data Trust. “There has been an appetite for one central open data platform for others in our party to access data and build innovative tools and applications that will help make our party better,” she said.

Adler, the rVotes creator, says the GOP’s biggest challenge may stem less from technological deficiencies than from a fundamental approach to politics.

“The technology supports a philosophy that isn’t there,” he said. “Most Republicans don’t want to knock on doors. They don’t want to motivate people at the grass-roots level. It’s just not what they want to do.”

Steve Friess contributed to this report.

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