ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS


DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, the Republican party in the United States no longer bears any resemblance to the British Conservatives, that’s according to Jim Messina, the US strategist who was at the heart of the Conservatives election campaign last May.  He was also President Obama’s campaign manager back in 2012 and is now co-chair of the Hillary Clinton Super Pack, as it’s called.  Now I spoke to him as the US presidential race gears up for its first electoral test in Iowa this week and I started by asking Mr Messina his take on the state of the Democratic party.  

JIM MESSINA: Look, I think it’s clear that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for President.  There’s lots of kerfuffle right now about the early primaries but she will be the Democratic nominee and I believe she will be the next President of the United States.  

DM: Okay, what about the Republicans, who do you think she’ll be taking on in your prediction to win the Presidency?

JIM MESSINA: Boy, we’re in uncharted territory here with the Republicans.  Every single day they seem to make my day by saying crazier and crazier things and the analysts thought that Trump would have been gone by now and that Cruz had no chance and six months ago the whole world thought that Jeb Bush would be the nominee and now he’s sitting in single digits so we are literally hours away from the Iowa Caucuses and I think it is very unclear.  Here’s what I know: the two biggest frontrunners right now are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and neither one of them has any chance of winning a general election with the voters of America.  I think what you are seeing is a Republican party who have gone off the rails a bit, much like Labour has in the UK, and are seemingly set on nominating people that can’t win the general election.

DM: Okay, you talk about that appeal ultimately to the mass of American voters, why is that so in your estimation?  Has Obama changed America and the American people?

JIM MESSINA: Look, I think two things have really happened, right.  The modern Republican party who is dominated by the Tea Party and the Tea Party started in Washington as an anti-Obama movement but it really took flight in the States and now it’s become dominant.  They control the state parties in almost every single Republican primary state and now the wise men of the modern Republican party in Washington can’t control it.  You are seeing that in the candidacy of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Dr Carson.  The other thing that really happened here, and major parties go through this, my Democratic party in the US went to the extremes for a while until Bill Clinton brought us back. You saw David Cameron bring the Conservatives back to a winning majority, you are seeing right now Jeremy Corbyn take Labour away from that.  Parties do this and I think what the Republican party is seeing is they are letting an ideological base decide their voters and people forget that the Iowa Caucus will only be attended by about 120,000 Republicans, it is really a national primary but a very small amount of people voting in it and it seems like they are intent on nominating a Conservative candidate who can’t win the general election, which from a Democratic perspective is great for us and great for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy but I think long term maybe not the best thing for the country.

DM: Could an independent like Michael Bloomberg change your thinking on that?    

JIM MESSINA: I think it’s doubtful and here’s why.  I think that Bloomberg is obviously a very successful governor, excuse me, mayor but the problem in America is we decide the presidency by electoral votes and to get electoral votes you have to win states and Ross Perot was the last major third party candidate in 1992 and 1996 and he took 19% of the national vote but didn’t win one electoral vote.  Similar to Nigel Farage in the last election took a big percentage with UKIP nationally but only won one seat in the House of Commons and so it is really, really hard for an independent to win the electoral college and that’s why I think it is very unlikely that you’ll see a candidacy from Mayor Bloomberg.

DM: An interesting comparison that, the Farage/Bloomberg one.  Here’s another one for you and it’s about the polling after working at the heart of the Conservative campaign in 2015 here.  Aren’t you a bit scarred by the experience of looking at those polls and the picture it was giving, do you believe what you are seeing in the United States?

JIM MESSINA: Absolutely not.  Look I think public polling is broken around the world, you saw it in 2015 as you just said in the UK, we saw it in 2012 where most of the polls even the day before the election had President Obama losing and we won a landslide electoral victory and I think public polling is broken.  I think a recent study in the UK on how to fix it fell pretty far short and I would dismiss most of what you see in American public polling right now and I think the good people of Iowa New Hampshire have got to have a real election with real voters who will make real decisions and I think that’s a much more healthy process so I literally threaten to fire my staff if they look at public polls and I think they’re all garbage.

DM: Okay, those are the public polls but what steers the campaigns from the inside, for the Conservatives here in 2015, the Democrats there in 2016, you must have some pretty detailed information?

JIM MESSINA: Well look, what steered the 2015 Cameron campaign was David Cameron and his vision and people too often get too excited about campaigns and operatives like me – not that we’re not great but you know, operatives are just operatives. This was about a vision that David Cameron had, it’s about a vision that Hillary Clinton has and these candidates.  That’s the struggle that the Republicans are having and you build campaigns around those visions and that’s what we did for Barack Obama and for David Cameron and that’s what Hillary Clinton is doing and sadly for the Republicans – I’ll give Trump credit, I think Trump’s doing that but the problem is that every he opens up his mouth about his vision he offends voters and I just saw a statistic that 47% of Americans are very opposed to Donald Trump’s candidacy.  That is not a winning recipe in a general election and it is going to be a real problem for him.

DM: A personal question, as a lifelong Democrat you have to kind of buy in to the policies of the people you work for, Obama, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron here.  Do you see similarities politically between those three?

JIM MESSINA: Yes, I really do.  I think if you look at all three of those people, Cameron, Obama and Hillary, and they all are very strong leaders who understand where they want to take their country, who are willing to take on their own parties and the opposition when they belief what they think they have to do to get their countries in a better place.  I think you’re seeing Prime Minister Cameron did that, Obama obviously is doing that and it’s a winning recipe and it is someone that I wanted to work for and it will be one of the proudest things that I’ve ever done in my career to work for David Cameron and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.  

DM: But that means then that those traditional links that one imagines between the Conservatives and the Republicans and the Democrats and the Labour party, they’ve all gone now have they, they’ve been broken up?  

JIM MESSINA: I think they really have and you look at the modern Republican candidates, there was a discussion in the House of Commons about uninviting Donald Trump to the United Kingdom and he is not representative of the values of the modern UK Conservative party and I think any modern Conservative would tell you that.  I think in fairness the modern Republican party has gone off the rails and you have a mainstream party of Conservatives in the UK that wins elections, that governs very well and that unites the country and that’s what David Cameron’s modern party is doing.  Unfortunately that’s not the modern Republican party that Ronald Reagan built 30 years ago.  

DM: Jim Messina there with his thoughts on American and British politics.  ,