MESSINA URGES LIBERALS TO GO SOCIAL NEXT YEAR
Campaigning online isn’t the future — it’s already here, Obama strategist says
For a convention being held on the eve of the most closely watched U.S. election in a generation, the B.C. Liberals lined up star power in the presence of American political strategist and social media guru Jim Messina.
His keynote address Saturday was the hit of the convention, a presentation that was as informative as it was entertaining. Delegates were still buzzing about it as proceedings wrapped up at midday Sunday.
The speech drew heavily on Messina’s success in managing U.S. President Barack Obama to a second term in 2012, an outcome that only seems like a foregone conclusion in light of the current discouraging matchup south of the border.
Messina managed an uphill fight to overcome the negatives of a still-struggling economy, a lavishly funded opponent and the fading charms of an incumbent who could no longer frame himself as the standard-bearer of hope and change.
The path to victory was paved with a mastery of social media, a mountain of data on the electorate and some two million volunteers doing double duty as campaign workers and Internet acolytes.
In the course of his speech in Vancouver, Messina didn’t pretend to have any inside knowledge about Canadian politics, other than to relay a laugh line from Obama: “I remember when the press used to love me as much as they now love Justin.”
But as evidence that his methods could translate to other jurisdictions, Messina pointed to his role as a senior adviser to U.K. prime minister David Cameron in his successful bid for re-election in 2015.
Messina supports Hillary Clinton and gave her an 84.7 per cent chance of winning this election. But he also recognized Donald Trump for making unprecedented use of social media — especially Twitter — to bypass traditional news outlets and connect directly with and mobilize supporters.
Messina respects the digital realm and the younger voters who are its masters. He says social media is becoming more important than TV to anyone under 60, and for those under 30, it is Snapchat, which didn’t even exist in the 2012 campaign.
Far from fretting about alienation, Messina sees the combination of hand-held devices and social media as vehicles for engagement — connecting to friends, associates and people you’ve learned to trust. Hence his view that the campaigns of the future will need volunteers more than ever to connect with potential supporters and deliver the messages that might bring them around to voting for the candidate.
Gone are the reliance on bigpicture polls as a way of sampling public opinion and on big advertising, particularly on television, to try to swing whole swaths of the electorate.
The Messina method is to use social media and other services to compile some 700 data points on voters, drill down to identify potential supporters of a given position, then use the digital realm to deliver a tailor-made message to that particular customer.
As to how that might translate to the next B.C. Liberal campaign, I would note a couple of possible limitations.
Messina himself acknowledged there are greater restrictions on access to personal data on this side of the border, so the Liberals probably won’t be able to match the Obama campaign data point for data point.
Nor have the B.C. Liberals had a lot of success over the years at attracting volunteers. As has been said before, when the Liberal party asks supporters for help, they pull out their chequebooks. When the New Democratic Party makes the same plea, its supporters roll up their sleeves and ask to be put to work.
Lacking the NDP’s platoons of volunteers, the Liberals have had to rely on paid telephone banks. They are already staffed with paid organizers in many parts of the province. With millions of dollars banked for the next campaign, the Liberals can readily afford to hire what the party needs for organizational purposes.
But unless the Liberals can engage and inspire volunteers in a way they’ve failed to do in the past, they’ll struggle to duplicate Obama’s feat of revolutionizing online campaigning through social media.
One other point that stood out for me in the Messina presentation was a line from Mr. Hillary Clinton, former president Bill, that “every election is ultimately decided on one thing: the future.”
That captures what happened in B.C. in 2013, when Premier Christy Clark and her ubiquitous hard hat positioned the Liberals as the party of jobs and economic growth over Adrian Dix and the New Democrats.
Today, with the province leading the country in growth and job creation, the Liberals must be tempted to run for re-election on what worked so well last time. But Messina identified that pitfall via an anecdote from when Obama first recruited him to run the 2012 campaign. He had one condition: “Promise you won’t run the same campaign you ran last time because if you do, you will lose.”
The B.C. Liberals say much the same: they cannot be complacent heading into 2017. They need to offer voters something fresh. But for all the talk along those lines on the weekend, I didn’t see much sign of it being more than talk, though the election is only six months away.
Messina respects the digital realm and the younger voters who are its masters.