Tech tally: What campaigns learned in 2014

The 2014 midterms are shaping up to be a great political tech equalizer. Both parties head into the final hours of the 2014 campaign bragging about their enhanced ability to keep tabs on who has requested and returned absentee ballots. Democrats and Republicans have the data and are spending millions of dollars targeting last-minute TV and online advertising toward niche audiences like baseball fans and even Gilligan's Island insomniacs. They can also track what’s trending on Twitter from Little Rock to Denver, honing their campaign message to deal with the unexpected.

Typically, great political tech innovations debut during a White House campaign when there’s plenty of money and manpower to spare. But while little truly groundbreaking has been deployed on the election front in 2014, campaign strategists from both sides of the aisle have ripped from President Barack Obama’s old campaign playbooks and pushed out their own scaled-down digital tools in this year’s key House, Senate and gubernatorial races.