The recruitment of Jim Messina, the US Democratic party campaign strategist, to work for the Conservatives has been reported as a medium-sized earthquake in Westminster. Only in mid-summer do backroom appointments (and in this case part-time, remote-working-from-Washington appointments) register so high on the journalistic seismograph. No doubt that is why the story came out when it did.
I would hazard a guess that a very senior Tory with intimate knowledge of his party’s election plans handed the Messina scoop to Newsnight, deliberately piping out some campaign mood-music to give the impression that the Tories are on the march. Just as important, it provokes chatter about the comparative un-readiness of Labour’s own election campaign team. Ed Miliband has yet to name the person who will coordinate his party’s 2015 bid for power. Plenty of Labour people would have loved to be able to boast of hiring someone of the calibre of Messina – someone with a record of delivering big victories and, better still, with the imprimatur of Barack Obama. The US President remains the object of fawning fandom among many British politicos.
It is far too early to say whether Messina can help steer the Tories to a parliamentary majority. Campaign officials can only ever be as good as the candidates they help promote. The fundamentals of the 2015 race haven’t really changed. One thing I do find interesting, however, is what the cult of the A-List strategist says about the nature of political competition. An essential part of Messina’s craft – the skill set around which his reputation is built – is the exploitation of masses of data. One crucial way he helped Obama was by finding and logging as many people as possible with any kind of Democratic inclination and making sure they were contacted, cultivated and steered towards a ballot paper.
Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ other big money campaign appointment, may not rely so heavily on technology but his underlying strategic technique is similar. It is all about expanding and energising the pool of predisposed believers. Crosby’s approach is to make absolutely sure that people who vaguely agree with the Tories on core issues – the economy, crime, immigration – are afraid enough of Labour to act on polling day.
There is nothing new about making sure a party’s base is locked in before going after swing voters. But it seems that, with richer data sets showing where sympathetic prejudices might be found, the balance of effort shifts towards mobilisation by fear; away from conviction. Parties seem more interested in mining every last drop of their existing support than in reaching out to voters on the other side.
Up to a point that might be a rational use of resources. It is easier to provoke a prejudice than it is to change a mind. People will select facts that match their opinions rather than allow new facts to alter their view. The spread of social media has probably amplified this problem, as people eagerly reinforce each other’s beliefs in tribal enclaves. It sometimes feels as if Twitter and Facebook are vast experiments in what behavioural psychologists call confirmation bias.
It is also notable how few front line politicians in Britain have a record of really changing minds. The standard route to the upper echelons of a party is to secure a safe seat with the help of a grand patron. Leadership elections are competitive but the need to prove credentials to the party faithful is not always a great preparation for winning the hearts of non-aligned voters. More often it is an impediment. David Cameron and Ed Miliband both spend more energy managing the question of their respective Tory and Labour authenticity than they do picking up new converts.
It is almost impossible to now imagine a shift in allegiance by 2015 equivalent in scale to those achieved by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Inevitably there will be a swing, but there won’t be anything that feels like a mass conversion. The current obsession with data-crunchers, digital gurus and hired strategic guns feels like a surrender of imagination and ambition. It is as if the object of the exercise is now fishing around behind the sofa for misplaced voters with friendly biases because leaving the house and inspiring a whole new set of voters, reversing hostile biases, is just too hard. I suspect we will hear a lot in the next 18 months about the new science of winning campaigns while seeing ever less of the old-fashioned art of persuasion.
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