Take the case of Lucas County, Ohio. For all the talk of the pummeling Romney received in paid media over the auto bailout, Obama fared no better than he did in other urban centers statewide in Lucas County, home of auto-centric Toledo (the town Jeep was supposed to be shipping jobs from, according to a Romney ad). Nor was Lucas County was among the 18 Ohio counties -- mostly in the south of the state -- where the president did better than he did in 2008.

While television ads still play an important role, particularly downballot, the election results clearly show that Republican campaigns need to be just as aggressive with their grassroots outreach, online persuasion, and data collection and analysis as their media buys.

After the 2008 election, Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe outlined a key shift in how the campaign had set priorities for itself. The campaign spent its first dollars fully funding grassroots organizers in swing states, and then funded TV out of what was left over. A groundbreaking digital operation ensured that the campaign had ample resources to do both. The Obama re-election campaign repeated the strategy.

Given how Obama's ground game helped him outperform the final polling margins in key swing states this year, such as Florida and Colorado, the fact that the Republican campaign class has failed to adapt is striking.

How might future Republican campaigns and outside groups spend money differently?

A disproportionate amount of postmortem coverage has focused on Obama's data and technology operation which was bigger -- though also qualitatively different -- than 2008. Instead of relying on the magic of a youthful candidate, big rallies, and racking up a billion minutes of view time on YouTube, Obama 2012 used quantitative analysis to squeeze out every last advantage it could, reflecting the "grind it out" mentality of this year's campaign.

Given the attention, it would be only natural for GOP donors and operatives looking for ways to win in 2014 and 2016 to fixate on replicating the Big Data campaign and seek out data scientists, behavioral economists, and silver-bullet technologies in an effort to catch up.

They'll need to: It is true that the Democrats are ahead in the race to master the science of winning elections. But technology isn't everything. And if Republicans take the wrong lessons from this defeat, they could find themselves in an even bigger hole four years from now.

Recruit the Best and the Brightest, From Everywhere

The most pressing and alarming deficit Republican campaigns face is in human capital, not technology. From recruiting Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in 2008, to Threadless CTO Harper Reed in 2012, Democrats have imported the geek culture of Silicon Valley's top engineers into their campaigns. This has paid significant dividends for two election cycles running.

We can partially predict what the mature technologies of 2016 will be by looking at what the new ones were this year.

Technology is ideologically neutral and can be built or appropriated by either party. A campaign workforce well versed in the skills needed to win the modern campaign is much harder to replicate than a program. Creative thinking is a necessity.