But attracting even that many has proved elusive, even as Democratic groups have developed a deep talent bench. Catalist, a liberal data and analytics cooperative founded in 2006 — and the acknowledged model for Data Trust — has a thousand clients and a core staff of about 50. The Democratic National Committee and Democratic state parties already have a standardized system for sharing voter information, while a generation of liberal and Democratic activists has come up through the ranks using a single data platform.

The Republican National Committee effort is also playing catch-up among allies on the right. The political and philanthropic network overseen by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialists, has financed a separate voter data initiative, known as Themis, which has been up and running for more than four years, and, with its sister company i360, employs about 50 people.

Yet the biggest gap may be cultural. Mr. Obama’s campaigns were known in the tech world for giving data and analytics staff a prominent place in the campaign hierarchy. It didn’t hurt that he enjoyed the personal support of some of Silicon Valley’s most admired executives: No less a tech luminary than Eric E. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, helped Mr. Obama’s campaign recruit technical talent.

Mr. Barkett must draw talent to work on behalf of the party broadly, rather than for a single candidate. And the best engineers, he said, don’t see the Republican Party as the most modern place to work. “The G.O.P. has no culture of technical skill or excellence,” he said. But, he pitches recruits this way: “Who has a more interesting and meaningful big data problem right now? You can change the culture. You can change who the president is.” Mr. Barkett himself gave up stock options worth several million dollars at Facebook to join the Republican National Committee effort because he saw an opportunity to effect change.

Finding talent has been harder than finding money. The party has provided about $17 million, a substantial amount, to spend from October 2013 through November 2014, and Data Trust, which is privately held, has a comparable budget. (Themis had about $10 million in revenue in 2012, according to its tax returns; Catalist takes in subscriber fees of $5 million to $9 million a year, it says, and devotes more than $6 million to new research and development.) But Mr. Barkett says he has hired only about 14 people for the Republican National Committee and 12 at Data Trust, half the number he hopes to have by spring.

Underscoring the urgency of the party’s task, the Republican National Committee last week unveiled an initiative, Para Bellum Labs, intended to supercharge recruitment and innovation efforts. Para Bellum — Latin for “prepare for war” — is modeled on in-house incubators set up by some tech companies, including Facebook, to preserve a startup-style culture as they grow larger and less nimble. At the committee’s headquarters, the effort puts the party’s entire Beltway-based technology staff, from voter file programmers to digital-advertising specialists, under one roof. Mr. Barkett will report to Para Bellum.

“We are not taking people who have worked in politics and trying to turn them into data analysts,” said Chuck DeFeo, the Republican committee’s deputy chief of staff and chief digital officer. “We are taking people with very specific skills sets.”