President Barack Obama is exploiting his early lead in campaign fundraising to bankroll a vast grass roots organization and information technology apparatus in critical general election battlegrounds. He is doing so even as the Republican candidates conserve cash and jockey for position in what could become a drawn-out nominating battle.

Since the beginning of the year, Obama and the Democratic National Committee, for which the president is helping raise money to finance his party’s grass roots efforts, have spent close to $87 million in operating costs, according to a New York Times analysis of campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. That amount is about as much as all the current Republican candidates together have raised so far in this campaign.

In recent months, that money has helped open campaign offices in at least 15 states around the country. In contrast, the best-financed Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, have physical presences in just a handful of early primary states like New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida.

In just the last three months, according to the filings, the Obama campaign has spent more on payroll, over $4 million, than several of the Republican candidates have raised. Obama already is paying staff in at least 38 states, including Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico and North Carolina. His Chicago campaign headquarters hums with more than 200 paid aides.

And Obama has spent millions of dollars investing in social media and information technology, applying both savvy and brute technological force to raising small-dollar donations, firing up volunteers and building a technical infrastructure to sustain his re-election campaign for the next year.

The gap in spending underscores facts easily lost amid the president’s low approval ratings, his challenges in winning over independent voters and the gridlock he faces in Washington: Obama brings unmatched financial resources to the campaign trail, and a team with a well-honed sense of where and how to deploy money, people and technology.

“In the past three months, we’ve grown our organizing staff by 50 percent and opened up three new field offices every week,” Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, wrote in an email to supporters Thursday. “Thousands of volunteers and organizers made 3 million phone calls and in-person visits to voters.”

Obama’s advantages are partly circumstantial: With no primary opponent, Obama, like other incumbent presidents before him, can begin preparing for a general election contest that is still more than a year away.

He can also raise large contributions for the Democratic National Committee — topping out at $30,800 per donor rather than the $5,000 limit on contributions to candidates — that are helping finance the party’s broader efforts to help Democrats up and down the ballot. During the last three months, the DNC has already transferred funds totaling more than $1.3 million to Democratic organizations in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the party’s filings.

Though the Republican National Committee has enjoyed strong fundraising in recent months, it also is still paying down large debts incurred during the 2008 cycle. At the end of September, the committee was still $14.5 million in debt, according to campaign reports.

That gap explains, in part, why Republican-oriented independent groups like American Crossroads and Americans for Prosperity are devising plans to spend millions of dollars this year on social media and voter-identification efforts, with a major focus on helping the eventual Republican candidate win the White House.