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The United Kingdom’s Labour Party swept to a landslide election victory in July and now Kamala Harris is looking to see what lessons her campaign can learn from the other side of the Atlantic.
Deborah Mattinson, one of Prime Minster Keir Starmer ‘s top advisers, will reportedly travel to the U.S. to brief the 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 direction of travel has usual been from west to east. But this time, with Starmer ousting the Conservative Party for the first time in 14 year, Mattinson is expected to travel to Washington, D.C., next week.
She was a long history in the Labour Party, and was Starmer’s director of strategy for three years while he was the leader of the Opposition, but did not join him in Number 10 Downing Street. Instead, Politico revealed that she will be passing on lessons to political allies in the U.S.
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. 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.
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