The Democratic Party Is Launching A Tech Startup

This week, the Democratic National Committee is launching "Project Ivy" a program designed to bring to local races the tech tools that helped Barack Obama win the White House. As part of this multimillion dollar push, they're looking to hire a few good techies.

A fact sheet distributed by the DNC Tuesday identified the "four tools and strategies at the core of Project Ivy" - a "voter file and data warehouse," "analytics infrastructure," "field and marketing tools," and "training and fostering a culture that cultivates further technological innovations."

"The collective goal of these is simple - to take what we've learned and the tools built for the 2012 Obama Campaign and scale them so every Democratic campaign up and down the ballot can deliver our winning message to more voters, more effectively," the fact sheet said. "The DNC will invest millions of dollars in Project Ivy in 2014, and has dozens of full time staff dedicated to building, testing and implementing cutting edge technology to benefit campaigns across the country."

As part of the push behind the initiative, the DNC also posted nine job listings on the Project Ivy site. The positions they are hoping to fill include multiple engineers, data specialists, and a designer.

Project Ivy, which is named for its headquarters on D.C.'s Ivy Street, is part of an ongoing technological arms race between the two major political parties. Though Obama's high-tech, data-driven campaign operation has been lauded as a key element behind his back-to-back election victories, Project ORCA, the Romney team's app designed to aid voter turnout, infamously flopped in 2012.

The Democrats' fact sheet described Project Ivy as an attempt to build on their technological advantage. However, earlier this month, Republicans launched a tech startup of their own - Para Bellum Labs, a digital incubator where the motto is "data engineering to win elections" - and there are also ample opportunities for job seekers in D.C. and Silicon Valley.

Though Democrats acknowledged they are facing increasing competition from Republicans, they dismissed their conservative counterparts. The DNC's fact sheet on Project Ivy suggested the "culture" of the GOP would prevent technological solutions from being applied to both national campaigns and down-ballot races.

"Even if they were to create comparable technology to ours - that technology is nearly useless unless there is a culture that values inclusion, expanding participation and the ability to use technology to apply those values to all levels of campaigns," the fact sheet said. "Right now Republicans simply lack the technology and the culture to get the job done."

View the DNC's full fact sheet on Project Ivy below.