Barack Obama’s re-election provides six strategic and organisational lessons for Labour, argues Douglas Alexander

When Lyndon Johnson was once asked, ‘What do you do to win elections?’ he replied immediately, ‘You do everything!’ Decades on, and with the votes now counted in last month’s US presidential election, that maxim still seems relevant.

Of course, the economy – with its impact on inequality, living standards, and tax receipts – was central to the re-election of Barack Obama, and will underpin the next general election here in Britain.

But there are also some strategic and organisational lessons that, with the halfway point in this parliament now reached, it is worth Labour drawing from the president’s victory.

First, money matters. We have all marvelled at Obama’s ground game. David Plouffe’s field operations are still the gold standard for any campaign. And here we have all heard about community organising and understand the potential it has to breathe new life into how we work as a local party rooted in our communities.

Yet Obama’s re-election has shown us that money still matters, not least because it helps power the machine: both Obama and Mitt Romney spent over $1bn during the course of the campaign.

Thankfully, in the UK we do not have paid TV advertising and we have spending limits on our campaigns at local and national elections. But we should remember that Labour was outspent two-to-one during the last election, and by an even greater ratio if you look specifically at some of the most marginal seats where the battle was tightest. As general election coordinator in 2010, I had to cut the operational budget in each of the last three weeks of the campaign because the money simply did not come in.  As things stand, campaign finance reform is going nowhere and only the Tories benefit from this continuing stalemate. The president’s victory reminds us that to be electorally competitive we will need to be financially competitive in the coming campaign.

Second, message matters. Obama’s victory also reminds us that in politics your record and your policies matter, but in campaigns the strength and clarity of your message matters too.

During his first term, Obama was a good president in tough times. He fought off a depression with a $787bn stimulus which helped the economy start to grow. A total of 3.6 million new private sector jobs were created. ‘ObamaCare’ extended health insurance to 30 million Americans – a huge advance for social justice, providing near-universal access to medical care in a country where no such thing existed. And, on foreign policy, Obama advanced a clear-headed strategy at a time of rising global tensions, withdrawing troops from Iraq, and soon also from Afghanistan.

So, despite a tough economy, he began this campaign with an impressive and strong record of achievement from his first four years. However, this race was competitive not because Obama had not been a good president, but because – by his own admission – he struggled to tell a compelling story about his time in office and his plans for America’s future. So another lesson to learn is the importance of a clear message frame from which the party’s individual policies can be hung. That message frame is what changes your themes from standalone positions into a coherent argument about the country and its future.

Third, the centre matters. The US is an even more unequal society than the UK. Culturally, it is a society with deep divisions on social issues. And, as Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne demonstrated in his latest book Our Divided Political Heart, it is a country that disagrees deeply about its future in part because it cannot even agree about its past.

But even in a political society as polarised as America, this election reaffirmed that ‘the centre’ still matters and, indeed, proved decisive. Obama went into this election as a clear favourite. Romney – seeking the nomination of a Tea party-influenced Republican party – moved decisively to the right on economic, social, and security policy. However, in the latter stages of the campaign when Romney appeared to move towards the centre-ground on many issues – like foreign affairs and even tax – the race tightened and the Republican candidate came to be judged a real threat.

The president’s apparent struggle at the start of the race to secure the support of independent and moderate voters, many of them in the electorally critical midwest, meant the election remained competitive longer than many predicted. And yet, as the numbers on election night confirmed, Obama’s ultimate success in winning these voters proved crucial to his victory.

Fourth, inclusivity matters. One of the reasons that Obama won was that his campaign looked and sounded more like America’s future than America’s past.

The floor of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte was a sea of diversity. The floor of the Republican National Convention in Tampa was a sea of white faces.

Of course, the demographics and diversity are different in the UK, but we too can only win by representing the whole of the country and not just part of it. Democrats, like Labour, cannot rely on the New Deal coalition of the organised working class. So they are supplementing that coalition by embracing a broad coalition of the rising groups in society – notably Latinos who gave 71 per cent of their votes to the president this time, but also middle-income women who are the one group in the population, outside the elite, whose income has actually gone up in the last 30 years. It helped the Democrats that the Republicans were so aggressively wrong on issues of gay rights, women’s rights and minority rights – effectively marginalising huge swaths of the US electorate.Thankfully, cultural issues in Britain are much less divisive. To win power with a broad coalition of support, however, we have to find new ways to connect our politics with dynamic, diverse and upwardly mobile groups within society that extend beyond the confines of traditional support – framing our appeal not to four million voters, but to 40 million.

Fifth, the past matters. One politician whose name was not on the ballot paper but had a big influence on the result was George W Bush. Obama framed the election as a choice between going forward or back: reflecting his determination that the country not go back to the days and approach of his predecessor. And part of Romney’s failure in connecting with key independent voters lay in his failure to tell a convincing story about the last eight years of a Republican presidency.

Here in the UK, the Tories are already on record as saying they want to make the past a central theme of the coming election campaign. We should anticipate and address their claims, while scrutinising their own record, and setting out our own vision of the future that engages, convinces and reassures voters.

Finally, empathy matters. There is a further lesson which Labour must learn which is that, in today’s tough economic climate, empathy matters. Voters – on both sides of the Atlantic – are living through hard times, but the president still retained their trust and, when it came to casting their vote, the public seemed to be driven more by a sense that Obama was ‘on their side’ than by a definitive verdict on his economic agenda.

Indeed, a key driver of final vote share was the 81 per cent of people who believed Obama stood for ‘people like me’, compared to only 18 per cent that felt this was true of Romney. This alone is not sufficient to explain the president’s victory, but it does show that in elections empathy matters as well as economics.

The coalition government’s dismal economic record so far does not automatically guarantee it losing the next election: the next couple of years will not be a victory lap for Labour. But against the backdrop of a real squeeze on living standards, a Labour party that succeeds in mapping people’s aspirations into a distinctive and relevant political project will be rewarded by the public.

The public sentiment in Britain in the coming years will likely echo the anxiety and disenchantment evident in the recent presidential campaign. A winning message – on either side of the Atlantic – acknowledges that deep anxiety and is trusted to deliver a better future.

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