Why President Obama's Data Could Be Too Much for Many Dem Candidates

If political races have become data wars, conventional wisdom has it, the Democrats clearly have the advantage in 2014 and 2016.

After all, the stockpiles of data from President Barack Obama's two campaigns have been deposited in the party's armory alongside the software to put it to good use.

But while the party as a whole navigates a newly treacherous political landscape -- none other than Nate Silver predicted the Democrats could actually lose control of the Senate -- individual campaigns across the country may struggle to use something as big and complex as President Obama's data trove, which was built for a nationwide campaign.

Despite the party's mission to provide unified, fresh data and underlying standardized technology platforms for all, there's a limited pool of practitioners who know how to put all this stuff to use for the more than 6,000 races in 2014. Over 1,000 state party staff and activists were trained to use the database platform by the Democratic National Congress in 2013, both in person and through webinars, learning how to do things like run queries using SQL, a database-management-programming language. But even if a small campaign has the money and wherewithal to hire a voter-file manager, most will have limited analytical resources.