Thursday’s UK election was a decisive victory for David Cameron’s Conservative party over Ed Miliband’s Labour. But it may also have resolved another political conundrum: who is the best Democratic operative in the US?  In preparation for Thursday’s election, both Labour and Conservatives hired top advisers to Barack Obama to help out with their campaigns. Prime minister Cameron hired Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, as a campaign strategy adviser while longtime Obama strategist David Axelrod signed on to guide Miliband’s campaign.  The Conservatives ended up winning a surprise victory while Labour suffered a humiliating defeat in which several top party leaders lost their seats. So does that make Messina a genius and Axelrod a goat?  Probably not, according to Stuart Stevens, a top Republican political consultant who has worked on races across the world. Stevens told the Guardian: “I think we have this American tendency to see everything through our own perspective. It’s crazy to say Labour lost because of Axelrod or the Conservatives won because of Messina.”  He pointed out that while both are “superb political operatives … who contributed and helped”, there were bigger forces at play. “David Cameron was clearly a superior candidate and the economy is good,” said Stevens.  Congratulations to my friend @Messina2012 on his role in the resounding Conservative victory in Britain.  In all my years as journalist & strategist, I've never seen as stark a failure of polling as in UK. Huge project ahead to unravel that.  Axelrod, who was in Chicago on election night, congratulated Messina on Twitter while griping about polling failures in the UK.  Axelrod told Politico Europe in an interview that he mostly been consulting about message over the phone and had made a half-dozen visits to the UK.  Related: Lynton Crosby: the man who really won the election for the Tories  In contrast, Messina was in the UK with fellow top Tory operative Lynton Crosby, an Australian, monitoring returns, and played a very active role throughout the campaign.  @LyntonKCrosby and I watching the early results. pic.twitter.com/deCnT3Efcd  Yet, as Stevens points out, the most important thing Messina may have done was just to sign on with Cameron.  “The secret to success in political consulting is work for people who are going to win anyway and just not screw it up,” he said.
Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager guided the Conservative incumbent to victory – but does Ed Miliband’s second-place finish apply to Axelrod as well?