Here’s an early reality check for Republican White House hopefuls: The party doesn’t have enough tech experts to staff up a wide-open primary campaign.

What the aspiring GOP candidates will need to mount a modern-day tech race are campaign veterans with a wide range of seasoned digital skill sets — for fighting TV admen over budgets, writing fundraising email copy that doesn’t go straight to the trash bin and in using data the right way to find potential donors and voters.

But that kind of tech savvy doesn’t just get made in a Harvard dorm room. It comes from live-fire experience in the latest election cycles.

(POLITICO's 2014 race ratings)

So while Democrats contemplate a small field where much of President Barack Obama’s vaunted campaign tech capacity transfers to Hillary Clinton, the GOP is facing a different dilemma. The tech experts it does have are likely to be scattered into a dozen or more campaigns.

“There is a massive talent gap,” said Wesley Donehue, a South Carolina-based GOP digital strategist. “Half those campaigns will have digital staff that don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’ll end up with some dude who plays on Facebook all day, which somehow makes him a digital expert.”

Added another well-placed Republican digital campaign operative: “I’d say there’s only 10 people who are capable of overseeing a team and fighting with all the other departments for budget.”

(Full 2014 election results)

Republicans know their White House contenders need to staff up early on the tech front. That’s one of the many lessons learned after studying what worked for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and what didn’t work for the GOP in those same cycles.

Needed at the outset are aides who can help construct secure data and fundraising infrastructure, for messaging with reporters and on social media and in the online video and email announcements that have become the trademark to a campaign’s official launch.

POLITICO interviewed more than two dozen GOP tech types who are weighing job options for the 2016 race. Several said they are already in talks with potential candidates and their top advisers — weighing the decision to work long hours for little pay because of the résumé boost and to have a role in deciding the future direction of the party.

(POLITICO's polling center)

“It’s jostling behind the scenes,” said Guy Harrison, former executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who works for a GOP consulting firm with ties to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. “Most of us are in a place where we’re building something in case they decide with the idea they are going to do it, and the knowledge that they may not.”

“They are very preliminary conversations until [after] Nov. 4,” added another GOP digital expert who said he’d already fielded calls from three potential 2016 campaign leaders to discuss “what they are doing and who they are thinking about working with.”

But there are also strong reservations about dedicating the next stage of so many young careers absent a guarantee that Republicans are really serious about using technology for all its political potential.

(Also on POLITICO: A Facebook scoreboard for the midterms)

“If you have all this talent, but if you pour them into a leaky bucket, it’s still an ineffective process,” Garrett Johnson, a former Jeb Bush legislative aide and founder of the Silicon Valley startup Sendhub, said earlier this summer on the sidelines of a libertarian tech conference he helped organize in San Francisco.