Jim Messina is a political consultant who was the White House deputy chief of staff under President Obama from 2009 to 2011 and served as campaign manager for Obama's successful 2012 re-election campaign.

One of the savviest political observers I’ve come across is Mick Jagger. I was invited to a dinner that included the legendary rocker in London before the British election (I took about 9,000 selfies), when I discovered that Mick has been a bit of a political junkie his whole life. While he’s on tour he has a lot of down time, which he spends reading, he explained to me, and I learned that he’s become a master observer not only of UK politics but of the American political scene as well (although he's not an activist and doesn't take sides). “You’re going to win,” Mick told me at dinner, despite some polls showing that my client, Prime Minister David Cameron, was still trailing in the race. “Why do you think so?” I asked. Mick replied that while he wasn't supporting any candidate himself, “the average guy thinks Cameron makes tough decisions and things are getting a bit better. They won’t change from that." The opposition, Jagger explained, was percieved as a retreat to the past.

Mick was right, of course. No matter where you go, successful election campaigns are always about the future, not the past. Ed Miliband was an old-style Labour leader, unlike Tony Blair, and he paid dearly for that on Election Day. Mick’s advice, in fact, reminds of something another rather savvy political observer, Bill Clinton, told me in 2011, as we were preparing President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign: "All national elections are always a referendum on the future, and the candidate that can grasp that mantle wins." In all major elections after the Great Recession, the candidate who provided the clearest economic vision looking ahead prevailed. President Obama won two elections on that exact premise.


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.

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.

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So how did a Democratic consultant in the United States come to be working for the Conservative party in Britain? I first got to know Prime Minister Cameron when I was White House Deputy Chief of Staff in 2010, and he had just won the 2010 election. After President Obama’s re-election in 2012 both the Conservatives and the Labour Party sent teams to Washington and Chicago to do research on lessons-learned, and I spent time with the Cameron team. I also had a long talk with Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister.

Messina with Mick Jagger. | Courtesy of Jim Messina

Then, after I finished winding down President Obama’s re-election campaign, the Prime Minister called to ask if I could come to see him in London. My wife and I had dinner with him and his wife and we had a long talk about the issues, when I realized how close in thinking we were. That really struck a chord for me. I spent a lot of time studying both Miliband and Cameron. In the end I thought Cameron was the better leader, as well as being a proven, strong ally for the United States.

The British people, clearly, agreed. Cameron’s ability to secure an outright majority in Parliament is an historic achievement. Indeed, when we began advising the prime minister, he trailed Miliband by seven percent, 38-31, with the Liberal Democrats at about 10 percent. Future rising star parties United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Scottish National Party (SNP) had not yet begun taking serious votes off of both parties, which would later reshape the race and politics in Britain.

In Europe and the United States, the strongest leaders have faced an incredibly difficult combination of rising debt and stubborn unemployment that mandated a number of unenviable choices since 2008. Nine major European countries dumped their leaders, including those in France, Italy, and Spain. The difference between the leaders who were re-elected and those who were defeated had much to do with their ability to not just explain their difficult past choices but to articulate a future that expands opportunity. In Cameron’s case it was an emphasis on concrete, believable next steps to continue the path of economic growth like eliminating taxes on most workers at or near the minimum wage, expanded apprenticeships, and dramatically expanded childcare for working parents.

Under the direction of Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ chief strategist, the campaign focused relentlessly on those themes, even in the context of new issues like the rise of the Scottish National Party, which we used to highlight the potential economic chaos of a Labour government that is empowering a party that actually wants to literally break up the country. While the press and the opposition were obsessed with the number of debates or how many pints Nigel Farage knocked back, our campaign woke up and went to sleep talking about the economic future. Even in the dark days of the campaign, Cameron led Miliband on the question of which do you prefer as prime minister, and we knew if we drove that economic contrast, this indictor would lead to votes. On Election Day, it did.

As President Obama’s small business czar, Karen Mills said, “Cameron and the Conservatives have made small business and entrepreneurs a priority in ways that have worked.” This is not unlike what both President Clinton and President Obama did in winning two elections each by demonstrating that the Democratic Party had moved beyond an old agenda and toward a platform of nurturing a vibrant global economy and making the United States the dominant player in it. Similarly, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supported Obama twice, endorsed Cameron arguing, “Cameron’s gutsy decisions and strong leadership have helped the U.K. economy emerge from the global recession in far better shape than the rest of Europe.”

The result was striking data: Cameron – who had made a series of unpopular but necessary decisions to right the British economy – led on the question of economic competence often by nearly 20 points. And – even with the disadvantage of incumbency – Cameron and his team were viewed as having a more optimistic view of the future by 10 points over Miliband and had a 25-point lead over Miliband on the question of substance over style.

Those margins were exacerbated by an opposition whose message often appeared to be based exclusively–and explicitly–on a return to past economic policies. By the end of the campaign, Miliband was viewed as a throwback to “Old Labour”–before the modernizing and moderating impact of Blair and his government. Miliband and his campaign team’s lack of vision for the future ended up defining him in the past and, like Mitt Romney in 2012, the challenger shed the reformer mantle.

This was no small task: The Tories have struggled in the past to demonstrate that they are focused on economic opportunity for all and certainly had an uphill battle claiming the mantle of the future. The Tories’ advantage on both issues is a credit to Cameron, who has been fighting to modernize and revitalize the Tories for his entire adult life.

Much of that advantage was never picked up by the media, as almost every public poll had the race tied. We knew internally for quite some time that the Tories were ahead of our main competition in most of the marginal seats only because of constantly-tested and adapted analytics that looked at the campaign exclusively on a seat-by-seat basis. The problems with public polling in Britain are vast, including a lack of polling company access to voter files, dramatically too small sample sizes in a campaign that is decided by individual seats instead of the national mood, not actually asking local candidates’ names, and clearly a bias towards releasing results that match crowd expectations. Until polling companies overhaul their methods, the British public–and particularly the media that currently reports the results without question–needs to add healthy skepticism to national polling.

In this campaign, of course, the Tories also benefited from extraordinary digital, data and grassroots operations that we had worked years on building. The day before the election EMR Research, an independent social media firm, said “the Tories are on track to win 2015 ‘digital election’,” the first time in anyone’s memory the party led in digital media.

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And that’s another fundamental lesson I took away for 2016: tactics are changing dramatically. 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.

We have different rules in the U.S., and a vast amount of money will be spent on TV and radio advertising over the next 18 months. But the lessons of using social media still hold for the younger generation of voters, who spend the majority of their time on the Internet (when they’re not watching DVR’ed TV shows and avoiding advertising altogether). Among that generation, trust in for-profit media is way down. For 2016, that means not only an emphasis on social media but an emphasis on enlisting known friends and trusted influencers to share the campaign’s message–restoring some believability to political messaging for low-information voters.

But superior tactics will only take you so far. In the end the superior strategic vision wins. And fundamentally the UK race was won because of David Cameron’s understanding that elections are about the future. In 2016 and beyond, politicians who forget that are bound to be left in the past.