I think that just hits on a larger organizational problem that seems to be common to both national parties:
A staggering amount of the services and resources that I would think the state/national party would build up and have on-hand, they simply don't appear to have. (To say nothing of the coordination they don't seem to have)
e.g. Obama wasn't building/running a DNC-wide system and sharing it with all the candidates. His campaign built it on their own, for their one race and now-built, all indications are that it's going to be wound-down or morphed into a citizen mobilization sort of effort to drive "call your congressman"-type efforts.
Maybe political campaigning laws prohibit massive transfers of 'property' like that. I don't know. But it doesn't even sound like the DNC is looking to build their own system to share with future candidates.
And perhaps political campaign laws prohibit the national party from transferring down that much assistance to local races. That, I also don't know. I don't even know if, say, the GOP could legally lock up a sweet bulk price for buying signage/buttons/tshirts/etc and act as cheaper-middleman for their candidates.
There seems to be a hard line between each campaign and the rest of the organization and that leaves each campaign is largely 'on their own' for anything other than maybe lining up endorsements or speaking dates to get friendly faces to show up for local campaign events.
As I understand it, a lot of the infrastructure is contained in private companies (some non-profit, some not) closely associated with one of the two parties and available to all the campaigns associated with that party.
For instance, the Democratic Party's contact databases are in NGP VAN's VoteBuilder or in Catalist, and campaigns in 2014 will both be using the information entered there in 2012 and updating the contact information for the next race. Much of the Democratic Party's institutional knowledge about voter contact and outreach lives at the non-profit Analyst Institute. The insights gained in the 2012 campaign will stay there instead of evaporating.
The Republican Party has a little of this - there's the GOP Data Center, formerly Voter Vault - but they haven't been building infrastructure as aggressively as the Democratic Party, and it's costing them. In 2004 the GOP had a superior technical organization, but they seemed to rest on their laurels, and in 2008 they were slightly weaker. In 2012 they were totally lapped.
They will do better by 2016 - thanks in part to the utter failure of ORCA - but the Democrats have built up a pretty healthy infrastructure lead that'll be hard to top.
e.g. Obama wasn't building/running a DNC-wide system and sharing it with all the candidates. His campaign built it on their own, for their one race and now-built, all indications are that it's going to be wound-down or morphed into a citizen mobilization sort of effort to drive "call your congressman"-type efforts.
Maybe political campaigning laws prohibit massive transfers of 'property' like that. I don't know. But it doesn't even sound like the DNC is looking to build their own system to share with future candidates.
And perhaps political campaign laws prohibit the national party from transferring down that much assistance to local races. That, I also don't know. I don't even know if, say, the GOP could legally lock up a sweet bulk price for buying signage/buttons/tshirts/etc and act as cheaper-middleman for their candidates.
There seems to be a hard line between each campaign and the rest of the organization and that leaves each campaign is largely 'on their own' for anything other than maybe lining up endorsements or speaking dates to get friendly faces to show up for local campaign events.