Top Republican officials say the Democratic National Committee failed to give their candidates the tools they needed to win in 2016.
The Republican National Committee took time on Monday to detail the measures it took in the four years since 2012 to ensure that the party would not be outgunned by the Democrats' digital operation as it had been during the previous two presidential elections.
"I think the Democrats took their eye off the ball following the 2012 election and did not deliver tools to their candidates that we did," RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh said during a Monday press briefing on their digital operation.
Walsh said that the DNC's failure was rooted in its attempt to build off an operation that was made to elect President Obama, while the RNC made substantial investments to built an operation from the ground up that could be used by all its candidates.
"President Obama built a very successful operation for President Obama," Walsh said. "Hillary Clinton tried to build off that. I think what we saw is that you can't translate a machine built for another candidate to try and sell a different candidate and have success."
"What the Democrats tried to do over and over again, at least the last three cycles, is build a structure for one specific candidate," she said. "That did not translate for them at the top of the ticket or down ballot."
The RNC outlined how it created a national voter score program that assigned predictions to every single voter in all 50 states in order to build turnout models. This data was used by the RNC's political operation to directly target voters in states that were previously believed to be out of reach.
The effort began immediately following the 2012 election and was tested during the 2014 midterm elections, according to Bill Skelly, who headed up the RNC's digital operation.
Skelly said polls continually showed that Republicans were losing the North Carolina Senate race in 2014 even as internal models predicted that they would win. Once the vote turned out to resemble the models, the RNC was given the confidence to make the investment needed to ensure that candidates would be able to have these models at their disposal in 2016.
"We predicted almost every single Republican pickup in 2014 and had accuracy with our turnout predictions as well," Skelly said. "Coming out of 2014, our goal was to provide that baseline in all fifty states regardless of who came out of the nomination process and who was running for Senate or down ballot."
"We have invested over $175 million over four years to make sure that our candidates—from a ground game, digital, and data perspective—had every tool available to them," Walsh said. "We took a lot of heat over the past four years about why we weren't stashing up our cash and spending it on television and we knew that it would give our candidates the tools they needed to win."
The DNC came under fire throughout the 2016 election.
Former chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign ahead of the party's convention in July, and current interim chairwoman Donna Brazile has taken heat since it was revealed through WikiLeaks that she leaked debate questions to the Clinton campaign during the primary.
A DNC staffer exploded at Brazile during an all-office meeting this week for backing "a flawed candidate."
"Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?" said the staffer. "You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself."
"You and your friends will die of old age and I'm going to die from climate change," he said. "You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy."
It remains unclear who will take over as party chair in the wake of the election. Among the names being circulated are Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.) and former DNC chairman Howard Dean.