Now Chairman Schostak announced his intention to stand for reelection back in November via press release.  In no particular order, the topics he covered were:

• The amount of support he already had state wide (a number that has since grown, but that's another story)

• Through a record number of voter identification contacts, built a list of 2.4 million positively identified republican voters

• Worked with the grassroots to build a republican firewall against Obama's momentum

• We held on to majorities in our congressional delegation, the state house, and the state supreme court; and we defeated proposals 12-2 and 12-4

• Bobby has visited nearly all 83 counties (including three visits to the Upper Peninsula) and attended more than 500 face-to-face meetings with activists, leaders and donors, apparently as part of a "listening tour" intended to get input straight from the grassroots.

• In April, 2012, MRP began opening and staffing field offices, called "Victory Centers," across Michigan.  By October, 2012, there were 23 of these victory centers open, equipped with VOIP phone systems and a full-time staffer responsible for recruiting volunteers and coordinating door-to-door efforts to identify likely Republicans.

• The results of the field program were:  more than 4 million voter contacts, the recruitment of more than 10,000 volunteers, and the identification of an additional 1,051,312 likely Republican voters in Michigan.

• To protect the integrity of Michigan's ballot, MRP worked with Romney for President, Inc. to recruit and train 2,253 poll challengers for Election Day.  In 2010, only 33 Michigan Counties were covered by Republican volunteers.  This year, Republicans had volunteers in 81 of 83 counties.

• Chairman Schostak had record results fundraising:  $26 million raised, $20 million spent over operating expenses, and the Michigan Republican Party added 4,958 new low dollar donors

• For the second cycle in a row, Republicans in Michigan put forward a full slate of strong candidates, with at least one candidate in every legislative race, congressional race, Supreme Court race, and all statewide education board races.

• MRP worked with Michigan-based Compuware to build an Election Day application to maintain ballot integrity, and assist in GOTV efforts.  This app was field tested on Election Day, and will be used in years to come.  The Michigan Republican Party was also one of the first parties to launch its own custom phone app, which features information about upcoming events, related news, and allows activists to remain informed and up-to-date.  The app was launched in September of 2012.

• MIGOP retained its majorities in the State House, on the State Supreme Court, and in the Congressional Delegation.

• MIGOP wasn't able to deliver a republican senator or Electoral College delegation, but it wasn't because we didn't try.

Look, I get that anyone running for election is going to put the most positive spin possible on his record.  In that sense, I don't suppose it's much different than any other job applicant; make sure that your references are going to speak well of you, structure your resume to highlight your accomplishments and strengths, and so forth.  Here's the thing, though; as I've said before, in any functional and effective management team, everything ultimately comes down to the results that are directly linked to the strategies and objectives developed by the team.  In other words, what did they actually accomplish when all was said and done?

As I pointed out in an earlier article, when the dust finally settled on Election Day, RIS had delivered a grand total of two statewide wins . . . period . . . and those two were in non-partisan judicial races where incumbents have a clear advantage by design, two statewide races where the party had little, if anything, to do with campaign strategy, tactics, and financing.

If we managed to identify 2.4 million Republican voters, including over 1 million previously unidentified Republican voters, then how come Mitt Romney lost by 449,313 votes statewide and Pete Hoekstra lost by 968,440 votes statewide?  (We should also note that, based on the total votes cast for the two races, the 2012 turnout was off from the 2008 turnout by about 347,141 voters, give or take; why it that?)

Why, if we had better than 1-1/2 victory centers per congressional district, working 10,000 volunteers, making a total of over 4 million voter contacts, did we get our fannies handed to us in the statewide partisan races?

Why, if we raised and spent record amounts of money, did we fail to flip two congressional seats that at one point were within reach (and fail to elect Kerry Bentivolio to finish the partial term of Thad McCotter)?

Why, in Oakland County (which has a deserved reputation as a republican stronghold in Southeast Michigan), did we go 2 for 6 among the county executive positions, losing two incumbent positions, specifically including losing the County Clerk (the vote counter) to the "vagina queen" of the state legislature?

In Michigan, there are a total of 4,873 voting precincts, not including Absentee Voter Counting Boards (which is a municipality-by-municipality decision each election).  That means that the 2,253 poll challengers recruited, trained, and deployed by the party - when you consider that they're supposed to work in pairs - accounts for about 23.12% of the total precincts in the state, not including AVCBs.  Maybe that's a big deal and maybe it isn't, because, as I mentioned in August of 2011 when I discussed the "ten percent of ten percent" rule, as long as the challengers were trained properly and deployed wisely, any shenanigans should have been minimized.

But RIS mentions that he didn't cover two counties.  Which two were they?  Genesee and Wayne Counties, two known democrat fortresses, didn't completely report in until the afternoon of November 7th (the day after the election, and long after any republican challengers had likely called it a night, if they were there in the first place).  If those were the two counties that didn't get covered, then we essentially let the dems make the outcome of Wayne and Genesee be whatever they wanted them to be.  Even if those two counties were covered, the question would be whether the challengers were properly trained and wisely deployed within them.

I think that, more importantly than poll challengers, would be the attention paid to the Precinct Delegate program.  Given the Anuzis Amendment to the state party convention rules, I suspect that way too many newbies to the Grand Old Party view the PD position as nothing more than a means to an end; the end being going to County Convention and getting selected as a State Convention delegate.  However, as I discussed back in July of 2010, the Precinct Delegate is the official and duly elected liaison between the neighborhood and the state and county parties.  Convention voting is a perq of the job, not the reason for it.

The iCaucus has a maxim that, if we have two of our people in a precinct who are committed to doing the work required to win, then we own that precinct.  This is what the Precinct Delegate is actually for.  A precinct delegate who's effectively doing the job is both a wealth of voter identification information as well as the main channel for neighborhood GOTV efforts.  So if RIS claims to have recruited 10,000 volunteers for the 2012 election cycle, how many of those recruits were recruited as precinct delegates?  Of Michigan's 4,873 precincts, what percentage of them were covered by delegates?  I'd like to know that number, mister empower-the-grassroots.

I ask the question because, quite frankly, 9,746 precinct delegates who are actually active in their neighborhoods would have saved the party a ton of money on victory center phone banks and television advertising.  Seriously, just how effective do you think it is to have a person sitting in a centralized phone bank, cold-calling voters halfway across the state to do data mining?

I'll admit to being a tad puzzled as to why someone who purports to be a successful business executive would develop a software application that's going to be the centerpiece of his election-day operations, and then use Election Day as the actual field test of the software.  The detailed post-mortem on the epic fail of Project ORCA is easily unearthed by a simple Google search.  Suffice it that this should be used as a defining case study for why central planning and control is a really bad idea when the crap hits the fan.

Ultimately, no matter how Chairman B. S. wants to spin it, nor how effectively we can deconstruct it and pick it apart, everything in his record comes down to what the party, under his leadership, did or didn't deliver on Election Day 2012.  Given that there's not one good reason that we shouldn't have done better than we actually did, it's not a surprise that there are other options available.