The chasm is widest in technology, an area where Democrats have innovated aggressively while Republican tactics ossified. But the data and digital divide, while getting most of the attention, is only a symptom of a larger problem that cuts fundamentally to how the Republican Party operates—not just at a tactical level but also a philosophical one. The well-worn pathways of the party's operatives, in which every low-level staffer commits his or her career to becoming a well-paid TV specialist, must change. The party's best and brightest need to emulate the career arc of their Democratic counterparts, who devote themselves to data and fieldwork, areas where races are increasingly won or lost.

A party that celebrates individual achievement must learn to better share information and work together to form a new way of politicking—a practice Democrats have emphasized for years. For conservatives, that will smack of a collectivist mind-set they detest as a matter of public policy. But a top-to-bottom change in how the GOP's political leadership thinks is exactly what many of its own strategists argue is necessary to catch up to Democrats.

"If you think [the] reason you lost to Obama is because you didn't have a database, that's just a fundamental misunderstanding," said Patrick Ruffini, one of the party's foremost digital consultants. "The problem lies not so much in not having those specific things. The problem lies in a culture."

Tech-savvy consultants use the word "culture" a lot as they try to convince party leaders that closing the gap isn't about finding the next technological widget. It's about transforming how the party conducts its campaigns, from operations that rely heavily on TV and conventional wisdom to data-driven efforts that reach across all media. Most important, it requires that staffers on those campaigns, from campaign manager to rank-and-file workers, overhaul not just what they do but how they think.

And changing that culture will take more than a single election cycle, or even two. That worries some Republicans, who gaze at the 2014 landscape and see a year in which the party could easily capture the Senate majority while extending its grip on the House. The GOP will win those races because of Obamacare's unpopularity or a sagging economy, but that won't mean the party has suddenly figured out a better way to run its campaigns.

Republicans like Ruffini say short-term success could cost the GOP in the long run. "Say we do win in 2014; say we do win in 2016. I still think without a systematic review or systematic uprooting of how we operate, we're going to be swimming against the tide of history," he said. "Did Democrats have a better campaign infrastructure in 2010? Yes, they did. They still lost. As a result of that campaign, we took wrong lessons out of that."