Even Liberals and New Democrats readily concede that, in the past couple of elections, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were well ahead of them when it came to campaign organization and sophistication.

Mr. Harper’s party was quicker than the others to recognize that everything from changing media consumption habits to a decline in volunteerism had made it tougher to make contact with voters. More aggressive in collecting and analyzing data on the electorate, and more willing to experiment with new technologies and methods, they were better able to target potential supporters through both broad national messaging and local get-out-the-vote efforts. They were also the first party to figure out how to raise enough small personal donations to make up for the banning of corporate, union and large personal ones.

That sort of advantage is not easy to maintain. As parties spend an extended period in government, they can easily become set in their ways and less inclined to continue updating their campaign methods, while hungry opponents have ample incentive to try new things.

The Conservatives, who maintain a certain us-against-the-world mentality, are less prone to complacency than most incumbents approaching the decade mark. But there are still some causes for concern, from their perspective.

One of those is that, while the Liberals and NDP have been playing catch-up on voter data and experimenting with new methods of using it, the Conservatives spent about $8-million on the abandoned launch of a new database. In addition to the money, that wasted a lot of time between elections.

A more fundamental worry is that some of the strategies favoured by the Conservatives in 2008 and 2011 may offer diminishing returns. In response to the difficulty of finding enough skilled local campaign managers and volunteers, for instance, they largely centralized their voter contact efforts for target ridings. That involved a heavy reliance on reaching people by phone, which is increasingly difficult because of fewer home lines and the popularity of caller ID.

As they try to adjust to these and other challenges, they will be doing so without some of the most innovative members of their previous campaign teams – among them former campaign director Doug Finley, who died in 2013, and Patrick Muttart, the brains behind much of the Conservatives’ message targeting, who no longer has a role.

While current campaign director Jenni Byrne and others around her are recognized as sharp and disciplined managers, it’s unclear if they are as inclined as their predecessors to experiment with different strategies and tactics.

None of this is to say the Conservatives are about to lag behind the other parties on organization, since they built up advantages that would take longer than one election cycle to erode. Superior information-gathering during past campaigns and between them means they still have much more voter data than the Liberals and NDP. And although the Liberals have started catching up to them, their long-standing fundraising advantage has left them with by far the biggest war chest – particularly helpful in the months before the writ is dropped, when the others will have greater need to save up.

It is no longer a given, though, that they will be playing in another league when it comes to campaign readiness.