Believe me they'll unfortunately adapt.
From my perspective they have many more issues they need to sort out before this one to get themselves back together.
A team of dedicated startup employees who really believe in what they're working on vs. throwing money at consultants 9-to-5er programmers? Pardon me while I place a few long bets.
All the GOP has to do is establish a pot of money for political tech and be willing to take a risk on startups looking to service political campaigns.
Think of essentially the SpaceX competition but for political campaign tech for the GOP
The campaign may have relied mostly on volunteers, but it would be foolish to think they wouldn't hire a small team of engineers to do the same work if they had to. The benefits to fundraising alone are substantial enough to warrant the cost.
This would be a valid point if there were only enough competent engineers for one party's staff. That isn't the case, though.
I think the point is that Romney's campaign would be able to hire engineers at some cost. This cost may be significantly higher than the cost that Obama would have to pay but nevertheless passionate, dedicated engineers can be obtained to produce high quality infrastructure.
The argument i should have made in a less pejorative way is, Defense contractors are in the business of selling consulting services.
Fundamentally, government contractors economic incentives are more closely aligned with billable hours than shipping good software. When you sell the artifact itself, it has to be good. when you sell time, customers just have to feel good about how the time was spent.
The fact is it doesn't matter how good the engineers are, if they are mismanaged then you will not get good results. The main thing that Silicon Valley has really figured out is the necessity of letting engineers into the board room so to speak. You can't have a bunch of big-shot executives trying to dictate what to do from on high because the technical and operational challenges are just as significant as the political and strategic challenges. If the engineers are outsourced, or don't have autonomy, or aren't given a seat at the table for high-level decisions, then it will be impossible for them to deliver anything as groundbreaking as what the Obama campaign delivered.
What is conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley has been slow to make its way into the political sphere, but I think the cat's out of the bag now, and I'm sure you'll see a lot less hubris and a much more solid effort from the GOP in 2016.