Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is enlisting the support of U.K. Labour Party strategists.
Deborah Mattinson, a pollster and one of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s top advisers, is set to travel to Washington, D.C., next week to brief the campaign on Labour’s successful strategy in the past election, Politico reported. The move is one of the first major interactions between the Harris campaign and a foreign political operation.
Mattinson’s strategy rested on winning back traditional Labour voters who had gone over to the Tories under then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, advocating a more publicly centrist campaign than the party’s left-wing roots. The strategy that she will relate to Harris was developed with the help of the Progressive Policy Institute, run by former Starmer policy director Claire Ainsley.
Mattinson’s advice to Harris will be to “put the ‘hope and change stuff’ to one side” and maintain a laser focus on appealing to swing-state voters, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Though the Democrats are eager to recreate the crushing success of Labour earlier this year, several aspects of the 2024 U.K. election and the 2024 U.S. election are starkly different.
For one, Labour faced a tremendously unpopular ruling party and a prime minister with record-low approval ratings. Further-right voters were also provided an outlet to vent their frustrations in the form of Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party, splitting the vote away from the Tories.
Former President Donald Trump, though still a polarizing figure, boasts an enthusiastic base and much more favorable public perception than when he left office in January 2021. He boasts the loyalty of the Right, with no further-right parties to siphon away votes.
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Even with every factor in its favor, Labour underperformed in the summer election, winning a much lower majority than was expected. Though it still lost a record number of seats, the expected annihilation of the Tories didn’t take place.
Labour was also plagued by a void of enthusiasm, in contrast to the fervor that brought former Prime Minister Tony Blair to the position in 1997.