Harris receives strategic advice from UK employment advisers

British Labour Party strategists have advised Kamala Harris on how to win back disaffected voters and run a successful centre-left campaign.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer did not meet Harris when he visited the White House on Friday. But two of his former top advisers were in Washington this week to brief Democratic strategists and Harris’ campaign pollsters. Last month, a Labour Party delegation traveled to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention.

Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has expanded the pool of people supporting her campaign, bringing in experienced hires from the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Britain’s political gurus say they were not recruited by the Harris operation and are not paid. But after Starmer led a revived Labour Party to a landslide election victory in July, British strategists say they have relevant insights to share.

Harris’ campaign already bears a striking resemblance to Starmer’s. Like him, she is a former prosecutor who frequently draws on that experience to portray herself as tough on crime and border security.

The two campaigns have had strikingly similar messages. “End the chaos, turn the page, start rebuilding” was Labour’s slogan as it made its case against the Conservative Party’s 14-year rule. “We are not going back. It’s time to turn the page … and end the chaos,” Harris said, as she sought to position herself as the candidate for change in her debate with former President Donald Trump.

It is crucial that the swing voters that Labour tried to win and that the Democrats are now trying to reach are people who are primarily concerned about the economy.

British pollster Deborah Mattinson, a former top adviser to Starmer, and Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former policy director, jointly briefed Harris campaign staff last week on a target group they call “hero voters.”

In Britain, Ainsley told The Washington Post, these were generally voters who traditionally supported Labour but who had also supported the 2016 Brexit referendum and Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party’s “Get Brexit Done” 2019 election campaign. They were struggling with the costs of everyday life and wanted change.

“They felt like the hope for a better life was slipping out of reach,” said Ainsley, who now works at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) think tank in Washington.

Labour under Starmer managed to win them back – partly by capitalising on strong anti-incumbency sentiment, but also by emphasising economic issues such as affordable housing and job security.

Christabel Cooper, a polling expert at Labour Together, a think tank with ties to the Labour Party, said the “ruthless targeting” of specific swing voters helped deliver an “incredibly efficient” vote, with Labour winning 63 percent of seats in parliament on just 34 percent of the vote.

Who might Harris’ hero voters be? Ainsley and Mattison conducted polls and focus groups that led them to a similar category of voters across the United States who were concerned about the erosion of the middle class, frustrated with the cost of groceries and generally dissatisfied with the status quo.

“They don’t like Trump, but they believe he offers change,” Ainsley said. At the same time, “they’re open to Harris, but they want to see more of what she could offer them.”

To convince them, Ainsley said, Harris would have to lay out specific policies on core issues “over and over again,” such as the tax breaks for young families and small businesses that she raised in the presidential debate.

Harris, like Starmer, has emphasized her middle-class upbringing. While Starmer wants to facilitate “wealth creation,” Harris is said to want to build an “opportunity economy.”

But the message should not just be about the economy, said Mike Tapp, a Labor lawmaker who was part of the Democratic convention delegation.

Other members of the group included Morgan McSweeney, the brains behind Labour’s election campaign; David Evans, the general secretary of the Labour Party; Jon Ashworth, who leads Labour Together; and Lucy Rigby, another Labour lawmaker.

Tapp told The Post about a speech at an event to appeal to working-class voters. His advice? “Don’t ignore concerns about immigration and borders.” He noted that Harris talked about tackling transnational criminal organizations, just as Labour has pledged to “destroy the gangs” that smuggle people into Britain illegally.

Starmer has repeatedly said he is prepared to work with either Harris or Trump, offering the diplomatic courtesies one would expect from a foreign leader.

But Jon Tonge, a political expert at the University of Liverpool, said there was no doubt about Labour’s preferences in the US presidential election. Labour and the Democrats may not be ideological soul mates, but they are similar in many ways. “Starmer is hoping and praying for a Harris win,” he said.

There have long been close ties between the two political parties – though the advice has often gone the other way. Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg has worked for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband; consultant Bob Shrum has worked with Blair; pollsters Joel Benenson and Pete Brodnitz have advised Brown; and Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod has worked with Miliband.

Labour insiders interviewed for this article said that when Starmer became party leader in 2020 and Labour was trailing in the polls, Labour strategists spoke to Democrats in the United States, as well as centre-left parties in Australia, Germany and Norway.

Tonge agreed that emphasising economic issues in key states was sensible, but stressed that Labour’s path to victory was complex. While the party actively won back some undecided voters, it also benefited from a population that wanted to throw out incumbents and from a fragmentation of the vote on the right.

There are, of course, numerous differences between the British general election and the American presidential election. One of them: a British party that fields candidates in every constituency can spend just over £34 million ($44.6 million); Harris raised $47 million in the 24 hours after Tuesday’s debate.

“We have a very different system,” said Benenson, the US pollster who worked for Obama and Labour’s Brown. “My advice to the Harris campaign, respectfully, would be to ignore advice and do what you do. You win.”

(c) Washington Post