What Keir Starmer’s victory means for Kamala Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris has righted her party’s capsized ship, opening a small but consistent lead over Donald Trump in the national polls. Now comes the decisive test: charting a winning course in the Electoral College.

To win a majority of 270 votes or more, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), must hold at least three, and in some scenarios four, of the seven battleground states. It all seems like dead heats today.

They can count on a strong turnout from a renewed Democratic base, but that won’t be enough. You can’t win swing states without winning swing voters. The campaigns in these states cost enormous sums to convince roughly 3 million voters who tell pollsters they are undecided.

The fence sitters are generally moderate, independent and working class (non-university). New research on swing voters by my organization estimates that undecided voters without a college degree make up about 13 to 16 percent of the population in battleground states.

The problem is that non-college voters — who made up 63 percent of the electorate in the last two elections — still haven’t warmed to Harris. She trails Trump nationally by 17 points, compared to Biden’s deficit of just 4 points in 2020.

As Democrats work to narrow that gap, they should look to their counterparts in Britain for inspiration and tactical tips.

On July 4, Keir Starmer’s Labor Party won a resounding victory over the ruling Conservatives, ending a fourteen-year exile from government.

Starmer took over as leader of his party in 2020, following Labour’s crushing defeat under Jeremy Corbyn the year before. By 2019, Boris Johnson and the Tories had broken through Labour’s ‘Red Wall’, winning 28 traditional working-class constituencies in the post-industrial Midlands and the North of England.

In July, Labor captured 37 of the 38 Red Wall seats, while in Scotland it also won dozens more at the expense of the Scottish National Party. The key to the success was a 5-point increase in support among voters without a college degree.

Voters in Britain were irritated after 14 years of Tory rule, including the protracted row over Brexit, a sagging economy and factional strife that produced five ideologically different prime ministers. The British desperately wanted change, but they needed reassurance that Labor was ready to govern.

“Changing our party was the crucial proof” that Labor could change the country, said Deborah Mattinson, a key party strategist and pollster who recently researched US battleground states for the Progressive Policy Institute.

Harris has a more difficult hand to play. She is a fresh face and relatively young, but she is also a sitting president presiding over the worst wave of inflation in decades. How can she convince working-class voters who think the country is going in the wrong direction that she can bring about the change they want?

This is where Labour’s U-turn provides valuable lessons. Starmer set about purging Labor of Corbyn’s dogmatic socialism, which thrilled left-wing activists but was far removed from the daily concerns of economically stressed working families.

Then, with surgical precision, Team Starmer focused on what they called “hero voters” – older, working-class voters who had traditionally voted Labor but voted Conservative in 2019 out of a combination of economic uncertainty, pro-Brexit sentiment and the belief that Corbyn’s party had abandoned them.

Starmer listened to these voters and turned their concerns into Labour’s priorities. “On policy, Starmer moved the party to the center, promising economic stability, reformed public services and moderation on cultural issues,” says Mattinson.

To rebuild confidence in Labour’s economic competence, Starmer emphasized economic investment over social spending, pledging to make Britain a clean energy superpower while appointing the leaders of the private sector sector assured that Labor would be “pro-workers and pro-business”.

Rachel Reeves, now chancellor, promised fiscally responsible policies to promote investment and growth and avoid tax increases on working families.

Starmer used his working-class background to empathize with the hero voters’ strong patriotism, traditional family values ​​and the need for law and order and social stability. Starmer, a former prosecutor like Harris, took a tough stance on both crime and immigration, vowing to go after criminal gangs sending migrants across the English Channel.

Harris has also made patriotic comments, avoided the polarizing language of identity politics and pledged to reduce illegal immigration. She emphasized her own lower-middle-class story and focused on lowering the cost of living.

These departures from progressive orthodoxy are refreshing, but may not be enough to undermine the perception among working Americans that Democrats are more responsive to college students and cosmopolitan elites than to them. What is needed is a comprehensive reorientation of democratic political and government commitments around the needs of working families who fear they will fall out of America’s large middle class.

For example, Democrats should abandon the false promise of “college for all” and shift resources from student loan forgiveness to new investments in expanding high-quality alternatives to college. Specifically, they could argue for a dramatic increase in apprenticeships, allowing young people to earn and learn at the same time.

And instead of indulging in utopian fantasies like the Green New Deal, Democrats should propose a realistic pace for a clean energy transition that doesn’t threaten working families with the abrupt loss of good manufacturing jobs, energy scarcity and higher fuel bills.

Above all, they must emulate Starmer’s pragmatism and success in putting his party back at the service of ‘working people’.

That’s how Harris and Walz can send Democrats back to their home turf and win in November.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute.