What Keir Starmer’s advisers told Democrats in Washington

When the British political strategist Deborah Mattinson heard Vice President Kamala Harris boast in the presidential debate about prosecuting transnational gangs, she thought the message was spot on — and that Harris needed to deliver it many, many, many more times.

The former head of strategy for Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who won a landslide election in July, Mattinson was in Washington the week of the debate to meet with Democrats, including advisers to the Harris campaign, and share lessons from the Labor Party’s smashing summer victory. She and Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former head of policy, urged Democrats to focus intently on winning back working-class voters who had drifted to the right in recent years — toward right-wing populists who seemed more in touch with their economic frustrations and cultural grievances.

Countering that, the two strategists said, required a driving, disciplined effort by Harris and other Democrats to prove that they had clear plans for easing the cost-of-living crisis and an authentic commitment to border security. In Britain, Starmer did that in part by pledging to “smash the gangs” of people smugglers violating the border — a message Harris has seemed to echo in recent weeks.

“For voters, cost of living and immigration are the two biggest issues,” Ainsley said. “And that’s where they need to focus their attention.”

POLITICO spoke with Mattinson and Ainsley as they were wrapping up their visit to Washington. Harris, they said, was on the right track. But with only weeks left until the election, there was still plenty of work for her to do to defeat former President Donald Trump.

Their advice was not just based on intuition or interpretation of the recent U.K. election. Ainsley is a leader of the Progressive Policy Institute, where she directs a transnational effort to revitalize center-left parties. As part of that effort, the think tank shuttled Labour politicians to Washington earlier this year and the Democratic convention in August, and conducted polling and focus groups in American swing states over the summer.

The results of that opinion research, Mattinson said, were striking.

“We just heard exactly the same anecdotes, exactly the same struggle, exactly the same sort of battles, particularly with the cost-of-living crisis, on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mattinson said. “It was an almost eerie similarity.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Based on your time in Washington, how much did you get the sense that Democrats followed your general election and came to your conversations with a perception of how you won? And how much did you feel like you were educating them from zero?

Mattinson: I think both, actually. I think the fact that we got to meet a lot of people — there was a lot of interest in meeting us — showed that there was obviously interest in the campaign and what we did. But obviously we’re able to give them the story from the inside, which wouldn’t always be apparent, however closely you’re following it from the outside.

Ainsley: The parallel we were able to draw between where the Harris campaign is at and how Labour won — that was reasonably fresh for this audience. So, they were interested, as Deborah said. They knew that Labour had won and had won big. But they didn’t necessarily know that the strategic challenge that the Democrats have been having, i.e. to reach non-college voters, if you like, was so central to the Labour victory, but also to the Labour strategy right the way through. Those conversations were fruitful and very applicable to the U.S. context.

Can you expand on that in terms of the parallels as to where Harris is right now versus where Starmer was at a comparable point?

Mattinson: Harris at this point is in a much better position than Labour was when Claire and I both started working for Labour. Three years ago, we were 12 points behind in the polls. But obviously, Harris does not have very much time. We had the luxury of several years to sort of sharpen and hone the message. She has — there’s a massive sense of urgency. So although she’s already made fantastic headway, and closed the gap and, in some cases, overtaken her opponent in those key states, there’s still some work to do to seal the deal and she hasn’t got very long to do it.

How close is the parallel, in terms of her challenge with working-class voters, voters without college degrees and the challenge that Labour faced?

Mattinson: This is one of the things where there was an almost eerie similarity. Some of the focus groups that we sat through here in the U.S., if you change the accent and some of the vocabulary, they were exactly what we had heard in the U.K. People talked about being the squeezed middle — they were the middle class who were struggling. Some of the stories that they told us: about the struggles that they were having making ends meet, having to calculate their family finances every week, every month; being worried that the dream of home ownership was out of reach in some instances for them; in other instances, they’d been able to choose their own home, but worried that their children never would.

We just heard exactly the same anecdotes, exactly the same struggle, exactly the same sort of battles, particularly with the cost-of-living crisis, on both sides of the Atlantic. It was an almost eerie similarity.

Ainsley: And those voters are voters in both countries, who historically would have identified with, respectively, the Democrats and the Labour Party. And both our parties have had this big strategic challenge of those voters feeling like our parties don’t represent them anymore.

What Starmer’s victory shows is that it is possible to realign those voters with their center-left party. But you can only do it if you put those voters absolutely at the center of everything you do. So, I think there are some positives that the Harris campaign can take from that story, and the center left more generally.

Mattinson: And that focus, obviously, matters even more when you have so little time.

That’s exactly what I was going to ask you next. Your campaign showed it’s possible to draw those voters back to the center-left with years of work. Harris has 50 or so days. So when you’re talking to Democrats this week, and you know that they’re under that kind of time pressure, where are you nudging them to go?

Mattinson: There needs to be even more discipline in the messaging. There needs to be a very clear, tangible offer — what we would call a retail offer, where you’ve got a small number of things that you repeat. There’s lots of good material. Vice President Harris mentioned a lot of these things in the debate the other evening. But they now need to put them front and center and on repeat. Some of the specifics that she mentioned would be very, very popular and attractive to these voters: the support for small businesses, for example, the support for first-time homeowners, the child tax credit, et cetera. But they need to be packaged up in a way that means that they definitely land. Because at the moment, people, I think, won’t know about them. They’re only going to get to know about them by hearing it on repeat.

I wonder how much the issue of immigration looms over this conversation. How big is the group of voters who would respond well to a small-business support plan or homeownership plan, but they’re not really going to buy what you’re selling more comprehensively unless they think you’re credible on border security?

Mattinson: It’s the second-most important issue for these voters. I actually think that the way the vice president handled this in the debate was very effective, where she said: I’m the only person on this stage who has actually prosecuted the criminal gangs that traffic human beings. I think that there needs to be more of that sort of talk.

Ainsley: And using the example of what U.K. Labour and Starmer did on immigration — for both our parties, this has not been a comfortable debate at times. But there is no way that center-left parties can somehow avoid this big issue. What Starmer did was, he went on the front foot and launched a new policy on it, on a Border Security Command, and said he would scrap the Tory government’s Rwanda scheme. And that was not easy — to go on the front foot in that way. But our message here is that that is absolutely what the Democrats have to do. They have to recognize that for voters, cost of living and immigration are the two biggest issues. And that’s where they need to focus their attention.

You worked extensively with Starmer on his personal story and on introducing himself, biographically, to the public. This campaign is the first time most voters have heard about Harris’ family story. Her focus now on introducing herself as a child of the middle class — that’s really a new thing for her. There’s no Kamala Harris equivalent of “my father was a tool maker,” right? Like, the one thing that everybody knows about Keir Starmer’s upbringing and —

Mattinson: I wish everybody knew it.

They don’t?

Mattinson: I wish everybody knew it, but they don’t all know it.

How much is that a disadvantage for Harris? You were introducing somebody w

ho was more of a blank slate, whereas there’s a half-a-decade of perception for Kamala Harris and people don’t know those kinds of biographical facts about her.

Mattinson: I think you’re right, there’s a challenge there. I would say, in the focus groups that we did, some people did know that about her. So, it is landing. And she is working very hard to get that out there. It obviously matters to her to tell that story. She mentioned it several times the other night and I’m sure it’s going to be a big feature of the campaign. And I think it really matters, because it really changes people’s perceptions of her. If they know this, they look at her in a slightly different light, and they believe they’re more likely to believe that she’ll fight for them.

Ainsley: Remember that for most of the years where Starmer was leader, as Deborah says, we were so far behind the Tories, we didn’t really look like an imminent prospect for government. People just weren’t paying attention to us in that way. So yeah, of course it’s not ideal [for Harris] to have this short space of time. But the advantage the Harris campaign has got is that the slots they are getting to put forward their case are box-office slots. It makes it even more important that you get your message right the first time. We’re really encouraged by what she is saying. We just think it could be even crisper in terms of giving this offer to voters that really speaks to their priorities on cost of living and immigration.

You mentioned Harris’s immigration message about taking on transnational gangs. How much do you hear that as a deliberate echo of the “smash the gangs” message that Starmer delivered?

Mattinson: I don’t think it’s a deliberate echo. I very much doubt they’ve looked at what we’ve done and thought, “Hey, that’s a good idea.” But there is another slightly uncanny parallel, which is that she and Keir Starmer have very similar backgrounds, in that they have both been prosecuting lawyers. They’ve got a sort of a track record that they can talk about effectively. And, it seemed to me, she was doing that very clearly on Tuesday evening.

Something that Starmer did over the course of several years was very visibly take on the left and show the country that their perceptions of Labour as a left-wing nut job party were not reflected in this leadership. I wonder whether you think there’d be a value to Harris is she picked any fights with the left.

Mattinson: I think the Democrats looking united in the way that they do is very, is very important, and probably matters more. I think that there’s no parallel there. We were in a very different position. We had just endured our worst defeat since the 1930s. When the voters reject you on that scale, you have to ask yourself what you’re doing wrong and what you need to change.

Ainsley: I think it was important to the Labour story that Starmer moved the party to the center ground from where we had been, which was being perceived as on the left. And, as important, voters perceived that we didn’t have their interests at heart. Starmer actually took the party to the center, which was the right longer-term choice. And obviously, in the short term, that meant there were some moments of disunity.

From where Harris is now, there seems to be no real gain for her in defining herself in that way. She wants to galvanize the party behind her. If she does win the presidency, there is a longer-term question of making sure that the Democrats stay on the center ground, because that is where those voters want you to be. These voters are so fed up with politics in general. The biggest challenge will be, how do you deliver for those voters? Not: how do you try and keep different bits of your own party on board?