In a remarkable political shift, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom achieved a sweeping victory in the elections this past July. Now, Kamala Harris is turning her gaze across the Atlantic, eager to glean insights from their success for her own campaign.
Deborah Mattinson, a key adviser to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is reportedly set to visit the United States. Her mission: to share the strategies that propelled Starmer and his party to triumph with Harris’s 2024 campaign team.
The Democratic Party in the U.S. and the UK’s Labour Party have long served as sources of mutual inspiration. Historically, the flow of ideas has tended to move from west to east.
This time, however, the roles are reversed. Following Starmer’s historic win over the Conservative Party, which had held power for 14 years, Mattinson is expected to journey to Washington, D.C., in the coming week.
With an extensive background in the Labour Party, Mattinson played a pivotal role as Starmer’s director of strategy for three years during his tenure as leader of the Opposition. However, she did not accompany him to Number 10 Downing Street following his victory.
Deborah Mattinson, one of Prime Minster Kier Starmer’s top advisers, will reportedly brief the Harris 2024 campaign on the Labour Party’s winning strategy
Instead, according to Politico, she will be focusing her efforts on imparting valuable lessons to political allies across the pond, aiming to bolster their strategies with the wisdom gleaned from Labour’s recent success.
A former colleague who worked with her on the campaign said she would urge the Harris campaign to ‘put the “hope and change stuff” to one side’ and maintain a laser focus on winning states.
Her expertise is in winning back disaffected former supporters.
She literally wrote the book on how Labour lost its working class northern heartlands—its Red Wall—to Boris Johnson in 2019. ‘Beyond the Red Wall’ was published in 2020.
And this time around she helped developed a strategy that focused on winning back ‘hero voters,’ the party’s former supporters who voted Brexit and switched to the Tories.
She arrives soon after other top Labour minds were in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention.
Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, is pictured with Labour MPs elected in a landslide victory on July 4. Now American politicians want a slice of his success
Mattinson’s message to Harris will be leave aside the feel-good vibes, in favor of remaining laser focused on winning back disaffected supporters in swing states
They included the party’s election mastermind Morgan McSweeney and Downing Street communications director Matthew Doyle, along with a cadre of newly-elected MPs, according to Politico.
They bucked a different trend across much of Europe, where hard right parties are on the rise, across Italy, Germany and France, and further afield.
Matthew McGregor, former Labour digital director who also for former U.S. President Barack Obama, said that meant the usual direction of travel, with U.S. consultants from both sides finding work in the U.K., had been reversed.
‘Labour is one of the only Western parties that have recently won, or look likely to win, from the center left,’ he told Politico recently.
