I was at a talk by Rayid Ghani, the chief scientist for the Obama campaign. He said that they shut down everything after the campaign simply because they can't afford to keep on all the staff full-time for the 4 years, but they don't throw away the code.
With the billions of dollars pumped into election campaigns, it's odd that a political party wouldn't keep at least a small team on the code to continually test, update, refactor, and generally improve the quality.
The problem is that political parties are fueled by donations, and it's hard to get people to donate for something like that. Not to mention you'd be competing with local/state/House/Senate elections with actual candidates for that fundraising money. I've donated politically in the past and even having only given small amounts, I still get emails daily and calls monthly asking me to donate to about half a dozen groups (many of which I've never donated to). Heck, wounded firefighters and cancer-striken kids have a low conversion rate for their fundraising - "money for technical systems to help a candidate to be named later" is even worse.
