LONDON — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s team channeled Donald Trump to secure his landslide election victory this year — and now believe the strategy can help U.S. Democrats regain the White House.
Starmer’s Labour Party focused relentlessly on a core group of patriotic, working-class voters with similar characteristics to the demographic which swung the U.S. election for Trump two weeks ago.
At one crucial turning point, Starmer’s chief of staff even said the Labour leader needed to show his party had a plan “to make Britain great again,” echoing Trump’s famous “MAGA” slogan.
Now, in the aftermath of Trump’s second presidential election victory, some of Starmer’s election-winning team believe Kamala Harris’s defeated Democrats can learn from Labour’s success.
“The lessons are: Identify who you want to speak to, identify what they care about and don’t talk about anything else,” said Deborah Mattinson, Starmer’s director of strategy in the run up to the U.K. election in July. “There’s going to need to be quite a big reset for the Democrats.”
When Starmer took over the Labour leadership in 2020, his party was deeply demoralized. It had just suffered its worst result for more than 80 years at the hands of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the election of December 2019. A succession of poor local and parliamentary by-election results pushed Starmer himself to the point of quitting in 2021.
It was around this time that his top aide, Morgan McSweeney, drew up a plan to win back the trust of Brexit-supporting working-class voters who had dumped Labour in favor of Johnson’s Tories, according to a new book, “Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election.”
McSweeney, who is now the PM’s chief of staff, wrote a memo called “Labour for the country” in which he set out how Starmer should respond to the heavy defeats the party had suffered in the 2021 local elections, according to the book. In the memo, McSweeney said Labour would not persuade swing voters until Starmer “shows he has heard them and their clear and repeated verdict” on his party.
‘We are patriots’
Labour should emphasize its past “patriotic” successes under former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, McSweeney wrote, and Starmer must show that “Labour is the party with a plan to make Britain great again.”
Starmer adopted McSweeney’s blueprint and put it into action in the weeks and months that followed.
In a crucial speech to Labour’s party conference in September that year, he highlighted the importance of national pride, telling his audience, “Here in this conference hall, we are patriots.” He praised the “great British men and women” who serve in the armed forces, and used phrases such as “great Britons,” “makes this country great” and “greater as Britain.”
In the summer of 2024, Starmer’s Labour Party stormed to a landslide election victory, after 14 years in the wilderness.
While the politics of Trump and Starmer could hardly be further apart, both the Republicans and the Labour Party recognized that their route to power ran through former industrial heartlands and patriotic, disillusioned working-class voters who felt left behind by the political elites.
That, according to Mattinson, Starmer’s former strategy chief, is where the U.S. Democrats need to pay attention now. She undertook some work with the Democratic Party before the election and conducted focus groups in the U.S. to identify swing voters’ views, finding that many felt abandoned by Joe Biden’s party.
“This was a change election and whoever could be the change that people wanted was going to win,” Mattinson said of the U.S. presidential race. “One of the things we did was hone in very tightly on the voters Harris needed to win, just as we did with Labour. They were working-class voters, wherever they happened to be, and they cared about two things: the cost of living and immigration.”
“There just was not enough done to really nail that message,” she said of the Harris campaign. “They could have had more message discipline. They didn’t have bad policy but they didn’t really feature the policy they had that would have hit the spot for these voters.”
Authentic Trump
By contrast, Mattinson said, nobody could be in any doubt about Trump’s message. Swing voters believed he would “make America great again,” as he continually promised to do, she added: “He talked about the things they wanted to hear about. He talked about immigration and he talked about the cost of living.” Trump was seen as “strong”, “positive,” “authentic” and patriotic.
That analysis is broadly shared by another former Starmer adviser — Claire Ainsley, director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. She said Trump’s victory “reflects the strategic challenge of the center-left globally, which is that their traditional base has felt in recent years that they don’t reflect their values and interests any more.”
“The U.K. Labour Party is one of the few examples of a modern center-left party that has managed to win an election — including winning back sizable chunks of that working-class vote, along with the more liberal middle-class, which has been pulling towards center-left parties anyway,” Ainsley said. “The victory for Trump clearly means that that challenge is as pressing now as it was when it first arose many years ago. And Labour do offer some of the ingredients of what center-left parties need to do.”
But the defeat for the Democrats also contained a warning for Labour, she added. “If you don’t get the politics of that right in government, then voters won’t come back and elect you for a second term.”
“Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election”, by Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth, is published by Biteback on November 21.
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