Veterans of Labour’s Big Win Flock Across Atlantic to Aid Harris

Ellen Milligan
·5-min read

(Bloomberg) -- Just days after securing his party’s first election victory in almost two decades, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer got on a plane to Washington.

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In the weeks since, a procession of his most senior advisers has followed in those footsteps, rushing to impart their winning strategy to the Democrats. Starmer’s team believes Kamala Harris’s campaign can learn from how Labour drew a line under divisive, culture-war issues to win back voters who’d overlooked them before.

“We succeeded in reaching across to the working class voters that we lost in the past,” Mike Tapp, a newly elected Member of Parliament who’s one of those to have crossed the pond, said in an interview. “Clearly the Democrats are looking to do the same, so being able to show them what worked for us can be really helpful.”

Starmer has repeatedly said he’ll work with whoever wins November’s presidential vote. But the visits by Labour officials betray that a Harris victory would be better at advancing the interests of the UK’s governing party than a return to the White House of an unpredictable Donald Trump.

Tapp — who helped forge Labour’s policy on immigration, an issue that also looms large over the US vote — met with strategists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month. Other British Labour luminaries in attendance included fellow MP Lucy Rigby, Starmer’s Head of Political Strategy Morgan McSweeney, and Jonathan Ashworth, head of the influential Labour Together think tank.

“Over the last 30 years, there’s been cross-pollination between progressive strategists in the US and the Labour party,” Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who advised Labour former Chancellor and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, told Bloomberg. “They’re a natural fit together.”

Harris’s officials haven’t actively sought advice from Labour, but as a longstanding sister party, the Democrats have listened to what their allies across the Atlantic have to say.

Although they’re ideological bedfellows, the two left-of-center parties find themselves at a very different electoral juncture. While the Democrats are faring better in polls since Joe Biden’s decision to step aside, the US race remains tight. Starmer, on the other hand, fought his July 4 victory as the clear favorite against a scandal-ridden incumbent. His Conservative opponents trailed him in the polls over two years out, which in the UK’s winner-takes-all electoral system meant his victory — at least to pollsters — was a foregone conclusion.

Yet there are clear similarities between the Labour and Democratic campaigns. Starmer, like Harris, came to prominence as a prosecutor and was forced to navigate an election in which his opponents sought to focus on divisive issues like trans rights and immigration.

Just as Harris is trying to shore up her vote in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, Starmer had to bid — successfully, as it turned out — to win back the so-called Red Wall towns in northern England that had traditionally voted Labour but switched to the Conservatives in 2019.

Shrum added that Harris’s messaging on the economy takes inspiration from Tony Blair’s campaign in 2001, which he helped with.

“There are a lot of parallels — people there saw their lives hollowed out, in Britain, in the last 14 years,” he said. “It goes back further than that in the US, and in 2016 that’s why Donald Trump won those three blue wall states.”

British and American voters share concerns on immigration, housing, and the cost of living. Shrum said Harris’s focus on building more homes and helping first-time buyers echoes Labour’s housing plans. He said the Democrats may not win back all the working-class voters they’ve lost, but they can cut the margins enough to win the key states needed.

Their methods are also comparable. In its campaign, Labour adopted what the British media dubbed a “ming vase” strategy of trying to preserve its polling lead by avoiding controversial policy commitments that could turn off undecided voters. That chimes with the vibes-based campaign adopted by Harris’s team, giving little away as they seek to maintain a small but steady lead in pivotal swing states.

The US operation appears to have mirrored Starmer’s campaign on immigration, according to Tapp, who pointed to Democrat advertisements focused on Harris’s prosecutorial background and her efforts as vice president to target people-smuggling gangs responsible for the transport of asylum seekers to the US.

In an appearance on the Political Currency podcast, Labour Together’s Ashworth pointed to the history of influential US political strategists joining UK election campaigns. That includes Shrum, and also Stan Greenberg — who both helped Labour when Blair was prime minister. Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, went on to work for the Conservative Party in the 2015 general election.

While Harris’s campaign is self-sufficient and clear on what it wants to do, the visits from Labour aren’t stopping.

Next week, it’s the turn of Deborah Mattinson, who was the Starmer campaign’s director of strategy, as well as the former boss of his policy team, Claire Ainsley. They plan to meet strategists with the Harris campaign in Washington to present findings from the Progressive Policy Institute, which Ainsley now runs, on how Labour won over what they call “hero” voters: working class Brits who switched from the Conservatives.

And at the end of the week, Starmer is set to make a return trip to Washington himself.

“The ties are very deep,” Ashworth told Political Currency. “We’re always learning from one another.”

--With assistance from Jennifer Epstein and Ailbhe Rea.

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