Jim Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and went on to work as a consultant for the UK Conservative party in the recent election, cites the political wisdom of Mick Jagger and has some other interesting observations– especially this:
In the United Kingdom’s general election, Prime Minister Cameron won on a vision of a dynamic, competitive Britain as a land of future opportunity for working families. Miliband was promising them only a return to the past: 1970s-style rent control, re-nationalization of some services, and energy price controls were, bizarrely, the main policy initiatives highlighted by Labour.
The same thing will be true of future presidential contests in the United States. There are huge political differences between the UK and U.S., but there are some important common lessons. Especially when you’ve been losing in recent elections, you’ve got to be able to redefine and rebrand your party for the future. Tony Blair did that for Labour in the UK. Ronald Reagan did it for the Republicans in 1980. Bill Clinton did it for us in 1992. So far, during the 2016 cycle, Republican presidential candidates seem dedicated to defending old policies across the spectrum from going back to pre-crisis rules for Wall Street to attacking the science of climate change to constantly focusing on restricting women’s health care decisions.
If the message the GOP takes away from Cameron’s win is mainly about the renewed power of right, they will fail in 2016, I believe. The truth is that British politics is skewed much further left than ours. Cameron personally led the fight to legalize gay marriage, made addressing climate change a top priority, and defended generous British humanitarian aid worldwide even as he was attacked for it. During the campaign, his manifesto called for a dramatic expansion of child care for working families, new apprenticeships for young people and eliminating taxes on workers at the minimum wage. Much of his agenda aligns very well with the modern Democratic Party platform.
Of course most Republican candidates for president and other offices would recoil in horror from adopting any of those positions for fear of offending “the base.” Forget about eliminating taxes on workers at the minimum wage; Republicans like Marco Rubio don’t even want a minimum wage.
The message of that election for us in the United States is less that Hillary Clinton needs to stay in the center than it is that Republicans need to move beyond their base. One reason Miliband failed is because, in British parliamentary politics, the perception is you only need to win over that base and little more. Miliband’s people were privately saying he only needed to get to 35 percent. But in American politics you need the center—and a majority.
Messina also makes some observations about the value of social media in UK politics, especially with campaign spending limits.
Social media is the tool of the future. One of our mandates was to get the Tories on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. In the UK, you can’t legally buy TV or radio advertising for campaigns, and that forces us to really hone our social-media skills to a fine point. Of all the ways of communicating to voters, using Facebook and other social media, was the most effective because it was often a message shared by their friends or others they trusted versus politicians and the media that they don’t trust. We found that the undecided voters were moving our way as a result.
We also spent over a year helping the Tories build on their capacity to do modeling of prospective voters—who most likely waverers were—and we used that to great effect on social media in targeting individual voters, whereas Labour was sometimes mailing every single person in the battleground districts. With a 30 million-pound cap on campaign spending in Britain, you simply can’t afford to do that. There’s just not enough money.
Meanwhile, for utter cluelessness, you can’t beat this piece in The Socialist Worker:
“We are still in the early stages of building a left challenge to Labour. To increase the vote for TUSC among a big swing to the right is a real achievement.”
In some areas the results were more disappointing—particularly where the share of the left vote fell.
Other left candidates also suffered setbacks. Bradford West Respect MP George Galloway lost his seat to Labour. He had won it from Labour in a landslide by-election victory in a 2012 .
But TUSC activists used the campaigns to build the fight against austerity after the election.
Jenny told Socialist Worker, “The point was to build a network of activists on the ground—that’s exactly what we’ve done in Tottenham.
“Even though our support wasn’t reflected in the vote we were very successful in getting out the message that austerity is a con in the interests of the rich.”
In other words: We were very successful, aside from the fact that almost no one voted for us.
(Hat tip: Tendance Coatsey)
