Rich Beeson, the Romney political director who coauthored the now-discredited Ohio memo, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match.
I have no opinion on whether an aggressive ground game actually works. I hope it does. It's a more optimistic view of politics if it does. But either way, it's clear the grifters on the Romney campaign were in it for the grift. They had enough money to do whatever they wanted, and they chose to... pay themselves.