WASHINGTON (Diya TV) — Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is turning to the U.K. for some lessons learned, hiring a top strategist from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party as part of an effort to shore up her standing ahead of the 2024 U.S. race. Deborah Mattinson, a veteran pollster and former director of strategy for Starmer’s Labour Party, will be traveling to Washington D.C. next week where she will brief the Harris-Walz team on Labour’s recent election strategy, first reported by Politico.
Mattinson was integral in Labour’s attempt and eventual success in July, booting the Conservative Party out of power through a campaign based on regaining lost Labour voters who are now into the Tories since Johnson became prime minister. Her work in the UK election has attracted interest from US Democrats trying to bring similar tactics to their campaign.
It is symbolic of a deepening relationship between the center-left political movements in the U.K. and the U.S., and more particularly between the teams of Harris and Starmer. A number of Starmer’s close advisers, including Labour’s election strategist Morgan McSweeney and Downing Street communications director Matthew Doyle, have recently traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to meet Harris’s campaign team, Politico said.
Diya TV’s own correspondents interacted with members of the Labour Party at the DNC, where we were told more than dozen Labour Party officials were in attendance, including John Lehal, who is of Indian Punjabi descent and serves as Labour’s Chief Operating Officer.
Matthew McGregor, a former Labour digital director who earlier worked as a campaign strategist for President Obama, explained, the exchange of ideas between Labour and the Democrats is no longer “one-way traffic.” The Democrats-for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century-believe they have much to learn from Labour’s recent success, he told Politico.
Mattinson’s plan, crafted in concert with the D.C.-based Progressive Policy Institute, is expected to focus on Harris’s strengths in key swing states. The strategy is said to emphasize dialing back the “hope and change” patter in favor of maintaining a disciplined focus on issues that resonate with undecided voters.
“There is much interest in how Labour has bounced back from defeat under former leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 to winning power under Starmer,” McGregor said. “For Democrats following British politics, the speed of Labour’s transformation has been remarkable.”
The trajectory Labour has been on since 2019 has been followed particularly closely by US political operatives, given the party’s pivot from a full-on Corbyn-era hard left position to the more centrist, pragmatic approach of Starmer — one eerily paralleling the internal Democratic Party debate about where the party should sit politically.
Both the Labour Party and the Democratic Party are having a hard time trying to contain pressure from more progressive elements in their parties, while public anxieties over immigration, housing and national security are still potent. The Harris campaign is particularly interested in how Labour framed its arguments on border security – which proved effective in appealing to a skeptical electorate, said Jonathan Ashworth, the director of the Labour Together think tank and a key strategist in Labour’s summer campaign.
But sharp contrasts persist between the political landscapes of the U.K. and that of the U.S. For one, Labour was up against a deeply unpopular ruling party saddled with all-time-low approval ratings, while the existence of Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. served as an outlet for the far-right vote, further splintering the Conservative vote. Former President Donald Trump, though polarizing, retains intense loyalty among his base and has no substantial third-party challengers siphoning off his supporters.
With favorable conditions, Labour still underperformed expectations, returning a smaller majority than expected. As the Harris team borrows from Labour’s play in British politics and plants these ideas onto American soil, yet to be seen will be how these kind of approaches might go over with American voters in a far more polarized political environment.
The Harris campaign hopes to craft a message that can unify the Democratic base by tapping into the expertise of seasoned Labour strategists while taking on board the critical swing-state voters who might turn 2024 one way or another.
