When the Republican Party crowns a presidential nominee one year from now, he (or she) will be handed a campaign organization that is fully staffed and operational in every electoral battleground.

That might be the most important component of the top-to-bottom overhaul of the Republican National Committee's voter turnout program undertaken since the 2012 presidential election, as detailed in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

Four years ago, GOP nominee Mitt Romney was outgunned and outclassed by President Obama in the trenches of door-to-door combat for votes in swing states. Obama's advantage was multifold — better data, better manipulation of that data, a better candidate. But the RNC concluded that Obama's advantage stemmed, as well, from fielding a more competent organization that never packed up and went home after he won the presidency in 2008.

The president's campaign stayed in the field and prepared for his 2012 re-election almost from the minute his first race ended, deepening ties to the community. Romney, meanwhile, secured the nomination after a protracted primary fight, and was forced to rush a team with varying experience into the competitive states with barely months to go before voting started — as had every non-incumbent GOP nominee before him.

The party determined not to get caught flat-footed again. So, the RNC took a page from Obama for America's playbook and decided to build an operation that would be permanently deployed and available for the Republican presidential nominee to lease every four years.

"In 2007-08, we're laughing about this community organizing model, saying: 'You're going into presidential politics and you're going to bring community organizing into it?' Of course, they had the last laugh," said Chris Carr, the RNC's political director and its senior field strategist.

Soon after Obama's re-election, the RNC commissioned an autopsy report on its antiquated voter turnout program. Chairman Reince Priebus and party leaders concluded that wholesale reforms were required for the party to be competitive. The RNC invested more than $100 million in 2013 and 2014 to improve the collection and quality of voter data and the methods and technology used to target and push voters to the polls.

The party saw measurable results in the midterm elections with its new digital and data analytics program and ground game strategy that focused on targeting low-propensity voters who were highly likely to support Republicans if only they would pull the lever. But there have been complaints about the technology the RNC created to work with its improved voter file, and committee officials said coming digital products will change that.

The deficiencies the party suffered four years ago weren't just in data and technology. Nor was Obama's more prepared campaign the Republicans' only problem in the states. How the party organized its ground forces, and how it deployed them, was outdated. After studying how Obama for America structured its field team and volunteer army, Carr threw out the RNC's decades-old flow chart and redesigned the party's command and control.

"We started a very in-depth look at what OFA had been doing the last eight years," said Carr, a Louisiana native who spent several years as a GOP operative in Nevada before joining the RNC in February. "This is going to be a big change."

That change began by jettisoning the voting precinct and the precinct captain.

For decades, the RNC had organized teams of volunteer door-knockers who pounded the pavement hustling votes for the GOP presidential nominee based on precincts, the geographical regions for collecting and counting votes drawn by state and local governments. Precinct captains managed those teams. But under the RNC's new system, states are divided into "turfs" of 8,000-10,000 people that the party's voter file classifies as swing voters, persuadable voters and low-propensity Republican voters.

Each turf is led by a "field organizer" who oversees a group of "neighborhood team leaders," who in turn run organized teams of volunteers.

The new approach lets the party maximize outreach to voters who matter in competitive races, and avoids wasting resources in areas with little to gain — either because they're overwhelmingly Democratic or because support for Republicans is reliable. During next July's Cleveland convention, the Republican who accepts the presidential nomination will take possession of a campaign that has roughly 2,000 trained staff and volunteers working in about 1,500 turfs in about a dozen battleground states.

The RNC this year opened the Republican Leadership Institute to train the volunteers who will man the turfs. More than 2,000 applied for the program since June. The six-week training, held in cities across the country, was modeled on an Obama for America fellowship to learn how to become an effective community organizer. Incidentally, when the RNC compared how its 2016 "turfs" compared with the locations of Obama's 2012 campaign offices, they discovered remarkable symmetry.

The RNC aims to return to what worked for the party so well during President George W. Bush's 2004 re-election and what Obama emulated and improved on: the value of personal contact. Three years ago, Republicans were perplexed by the proliferation of Obama's empty campaign offices, compared to their fewer but larger regional headquarters that were teaming with people manning phone banks. The Obama folks were out talking to voters one-on-one.

Republicans rediscovered this simple secret belatedly, and at its core, this approach is the driver of its "new" 2016 strategy.

"We want to hire more people from within these states who actually know these communities," Carr said. "We want our field organizers to reflect that particular community that they're working in."