The Democratic pollster and political consultant Stan Greenberg has decided to advise Britain’s Liberal Democrats ahead of the next general election.
The veteran strategist had previously worked for Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997 after having advised the likes of Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela. He now says that the Lib Dems, rather than his old party, are now the “only route to progressive Britain”.
He was originally hired by the Clinton campaign in 1992 as a result of his work on “Reagan Democrats” in Michigan – those who would ordinarily consider themselves part of the political left but were attracted to the politics of optimism, aspiration, market economics and a strong national defence. He argued that if the New Democrats were going to win back the White House, they’d have to win back these voters and appeal beyond their party’s natural constituencies and voter base. He wrote that these Reagan Democrats hadn’t quite crossed the Rubicon and that they would check in year after year to see if the Democrats “get it yet”.
This British Labour Party in the 1990s was in a similar position – having lost every national election since 1979 because “middle England” didn’t trust them on the economy, taxes, crime or defence policy. Greenberg has claimed that Kinnock’s defeat in 1992 was a result of the feeling that Labour “couldn’t be trusted with serious things”, and that it was with the help of his wise men of strategists and consultants (such as himself) that Blair realised, like Clinton, that “you could run for the middle ground without sacrificing the base”.
Political scientists often use the phrase “median voter theorem” to describe election strategy: most voters in most seats have already made up their mind on which candidate or party to vote for and that swing voters, those in the middle, decide the fate of elections. This is the kind of insight that a veteran like Stan Greenberg brings to the table. It’s the use of data, statistics and focus groups that resulted in an immensely successful career – an insight for which multinationals will pay millions.
But is that view now out of touch? It is not obvious that the median voter theorem which assumes a single axis where voters can be lined from the bottom to the top as a representation of a left-right socio-economic divide works anymore. While once voters on a political spectrum formed a bell curve where small amounts of voters were on either extreme with the mass of voters in the centre, now they form more of a U shape, where the opposite is true, with voters forced to the extremes. There’s only so much triangulation one can hope to achieve.
Academics (Greenberg’s previous profession before becoming a pollster) have also assumed that as the two major candidates work this out, party competition will become a matter of salience. In other words, rather than focusing on why a given candidate’s policies is better than the other, they will be electorally successful by making the issues where they have an advantage the decisive issue. It goes a long way to explain why David Cameron, in the 2015 General Election, diverted every question on NHS funding (where Labour are seen as more trustworthy) to a answer on why having a long term economic plan (where the Conservatives are more trusted) is important in being able to fund public services like the NHS.
There isn’t much debate on what the salient issue is of our time is – it’s Brexit here and it’s Trump across the pond. The first-past-the-post electoral system means it’s possible to come out on top with a relatively small share of the vote so there’s little incentive to reach across the divide or “run for the middle ground” and every reason to double down on the base vote while seeking to divide the opponents.
The irony of Stan Greenberg’s recruitment to the Lib Dem cause is that he is signing up just as the Lib Dems rightly abandon everything that made Greenberg so esteemed in the first place. It’s irrelevant if Leave voters, the Reagan Democrats of today and the majority of the electorate in 2016, feel as if the Lib Dems don’t “get it” and spend their time shouting “bollocks to Brexit”. In the same way, the “for the many, not the few” economic populism of the Corbynites would be treated as too divisive in the old Third Way era, yet it could be perfect for making sure the 30% plus of the vote Labour needs to turn out on election day in a first-past-the-post system with a four way split.
Perhaps the Liberal Democrats will be able to exploit their niche and find electoral success – but the outdated, centrist strategy of Greenberg and his acolytes probably isn’t the way to go.
