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The UK Labour Party won a landslide election victory in July and now Kamala Harris is looking to see what lessons her campaign can learn from across the Atlantic.
Deborah Mattinson, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is reportedly travelling to the US to brief Harris’ 2024 campaign on the party’s winning strategy.
The Labour Party and the Democratic Party have long looked to each other for inspiration, but the usual direction of travel has been from west to east. But this time, with Starmer unseating the Conservative Party for the first time in 14 years, Mattinson is expected to travel to Washington, DC, next week.
She had a long career in the Labour Party and was Starmer’s strategy director for three years while he was leader of the opposition, but did not join him at 10 Downing Street. Instead, Politico revealed she will pass on lessons to her political allies in the US.
A former colleague who worked with her on the campaign said she would urge Harris’s campaign to “leave aside the ‘hope and change’ thing and keep the focus on winning states. Her specialty is winning back disaffected former supporters.
He literally wrote the book on how Labour lost its northern working-class strongholds (its Red Wall) to Boris Johnson in 2019. Beyond the Red Wall was published in 2020. And this time he helped develop a strategy that focused on winning back the “hero voters” – former supporters of the party who voted for Brexit and defected to the Tories.
According to Politico, it comes shortly after other leading Labour minds were in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, including the party’s electoral mastermind Morgan McSweeney and Downing Street communications director Matthew Doyle, along with a group of newly elected MPs.
They bucked a different trend across much of Europe, where far-right parties are on the rise: in Italy, Germany, France and beyond.
Matthew McGregor, a former digital director for the Labour Party who also worked for former US President Barack Obama, said that means the usual direction of travel has been reversed, with American consultants from both parties finding work in the UK. “The Labour Party is one of the few Western parties that has recently won, or looks likely to win, from the centre-left,” he recently told Politico.
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