Recriminations flew within the Republican party after Mitt Romney's ignominious 2012 defeat, with many in the path pointing to the Democrats' much more sophisticated ground operation, based on a well-developed, tested technology. In a nutshell, their voter database. The fight that ensued involved "tea party upstarts, nonpartisan data geeks, operatives linked to the Koch brothers and insiders like Karl Rove." It also involved competing Republican entities—the Republican National Committee vs.