Strategy Memo: How Republicans can learn from the Tories

1. I know how you feel. In 1997, in the early hours of the morning, I waited with a small group of shell-shocked advisers for my Prime Minister, John Major, to return to party headquarters. We had suffered a shattering defeat. Worse, there was a mood of national jubilation and we all felt left out. In 2001, I watched as another leader I advised, William Hague, announced his resignation in the morning after defeat. So I know how you feel, even if I may not strike you as the first person to turn to for advice.

2. I don't really believe that defeat is an opportunity. But as you've been defeated anyway you may as well treat it as such.

3. First, use it to draw a line under the past. For heaven's sake, don't try and repeat arguments that you lost in the run-up to election day. The outcome of some disputes may seem most unfair but that's life. If you repeat the DVD of last night's results programmes again and again the results will come out the same. So concede and move on.

4. Second, you need to change. If you didn't, you wouldn't have lost. How much change? Well, you might think some moderate adjustment is necessary. But while it may be a mistake to project the British experience on to yours, we found that we needed huge change, much more than we anticipated. It took Tories years to cotton on.

5. Then there is the question of the direction of change. Remember that you lost to the Democrats, not to a party running to your right. Beware of turnout-based explanations, the idea that you just need to get out more of your vote. Most of these are developed by people reluctant to accept that they have to compromise or change in any way.

6. And you will have to compromise. The only question is how much losing you have to do before you realise this.

Comments

[Derrick Hill]

Mr Finkelstein, I think a line or two has fallen off the end of your piece. Those would be the lines in which you remind us what it is exactly that the Tory Party has actually won as a result of its exciting new strategy of scrambling onto New Labour's ground.
I'm sure the Republicans would be pleased to get a memo such as yours the day after Dave walked into 10 Downing Street -- something that, at the moment, falls rather short of seeming a racing certainty.
Before then, it might strike some Republicans (and some Tories, come to that) as a little premature.

[John Thacker]

Remember that you lost to the Democrats, not to a party running to your right.

Ah, but the Democrats polled higher than the Republicans on even "what party do you believe is more likely to reduce spending?" And quite a few of the Democratic gains were by Democrats running to the right of local Republicans-- or at least positioning themselves as the candidates of fiscal conservatism (while also being socially conservative as well).

There are, of course, many ways to define "right."

[William Norton]

Perhaps you might have added:

"7. Try to cut down on the corrupt links with lobbyists.

8. Think about deselecting candidates who send inappropriate text messages to interns.

9. Don't look for misleading and irrelevant foreign analogies"

?

[Tim Montgomerie]

Although Tuesday's defeats for the GOP were significant I also do not believe, Danny, that their scale compares to our 1997/ 2001 defeats.

[section9]

Uh, Dan, we lost Congressmen in the Border States, the Mountain West, and the Old Confederacy who ran as conservatives. These Blue Dog Democrats would make David Cameron look like a member of Militant Tendency.

Thanks, but what we were practicing was the kind of Me-Tooism that today's Tories are practicing against New Labour. Spend, spend, Drift, drift, especially on Iraq.

"Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost, and laughed"-Patton. Bush, in breaking from Reagan on domestic spending and borrowing and offering only drift in Iraq, led us to this defeat.

You want us to become Democrats-lite? No thanks, we've been there. It was called the Bush I Administration. You're about to see the same thing happen when Gordon Brown tosses Little David under the Bus in the next General Election.

After all, why should voters vote New Labour-Lite when they can vote for the Real Thing. Conservatives in America know this in their bones.

[William Norton]

Further thoughts: actually, it's Cameron who could learn from the Democrats (not vice versa). Gingrich won in 1994 positioning the Republicans as anti-Washington system populists who would come in to sweep out a corrupt process. For all the policy-lite approach, Pelosi has adopted similar stances and benefited from the same attitude now. What are the chances of the Tories adopting a smash-the-system anti-establishment rhetoric? Ummmmm.....