Can Britain’s Labour Party teach Kamala Harris how to win?

LONDON — They are both tough former prosecutors who before entering politics made their names banging up criminals and taking on organized crime.
Once in office the similarities continued, as each was accused of tacking to the left and plotting to impose a woke, liberal agenda on a skeptical nation.
Now they appear to have much to learn from each other, as each battles to wrest back control of their own narrative from conservative foes who seek to derail them electorally.
On the surface, unexpected U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris and newly elected U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer may appear to have little in common.
He’s a buttoned-down technocrat, more famous for his caution and quiet ruthlessness than for his rhetorical skills. Harris, meanwhile, is becoming known for a energetic campaign style mixing high politics and celebrity.
In less than a month since replacing Joe Biden as the prospective Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency, Harris has earned a status as a burgeoning Gen Z icon, thanks to a groundswell of Charli XCX-inspired memes.
Starmer, in contrast, is far less down with the kids, even being forced to deny he was a “political robot” during the election campaign.
But given Starmer’s overwhelming success in the U.K.’s July 4 election, when his Labour Party thrashed the right-of-center Conservatives in a landslide, Democrats, who face a closely run fight to see off the threat from Donald Trump, are paying close attention.
Labour, the Democrats’ unofficial sister party, is glad to oblige — not least to curry favor with politicians likely to serve inside a future Harris White House.
Several of Starmer’s closest and most trusted Downing Street aides attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week to speak to members of the vice president’s campaign team.
Among them were Labour’s election mastermind, Morgan McSweeney, and Downing Street Director of Communications Matthew Doyle.
Also along for the ride were a host of Labour MPs, aides and strategists who met with Democratic Party aides to help them understand how they managed one of the largest landslides in British electoral history.
The collaboration is one strand in a growing transatlantic network of center-left think tanks and political operatives that is shaping policy and political messaging in Washington and London.
The items up for discussion have included policy areas that have proven challenging to both parties, such as immigration, housing and the challenge from the left on issues such as the Gaza crisis.
Matthew McGregor, the former Labour digital director who also worked as a campaign strategist for former U.S. President Barack Obama, said collaboration between Labour and the Democrats had traditionally been “one-way traffic.”
For the first time in almost 25 years, McGregor said, the Democrats now believe they actually have something to learn from Labour, after Starmer’s party returned to electoral winning ways not seen since the era when U.K. PM Tony Blair and U.S. President Bill Clinton bestrode the world stage as fellow advocates of a progressive center-left “third way.”
In particular there is interest Stateside in Labour’s journey since crashing to a heavy defeat in 2019 under previous leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is far left of center.
“Labour is one of the only Western parties that have recently won, or look likely to win, from the center left,” McGregor said.
“For Democrats following British politics, they have been intrigued by the speed [with] which Labour has gone from the Corbyn days to being in power now. It’s really got people’s attention.”
A current Democratic Party strategist and ex-White House aide, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO that “even though the U.K. circumstances are different, there’s a rough alignment and space for cross-pollination of ideas.”
Such as on border security.
One of Harris’ biggest perceived electoral weaknesses against Trump has been the issue of migration across America’s porous southern border.
On coming to office in 2021 President Biden charged Harris, his vice president, with tackling the causes of Central American migration, a poisoned chalice that the Republicans now seek to turn against her.
Seeking ways to see off the attack, some Democrats are now turning to their colleagues across the Atlantic for advice.
Border security has always been one of Trump’s signature issues, one that still consistently polls among the most pressing concerns for American voters — as it does for British voters.
Migration became a major U.K. election issue after a surge in small-boat arrivals from France under the Conservative government in the first half of 2024.
One Downing Street aide told POLITICO that Starmer “wanted to be able to take on the Tories on ground that they felt was their strength.
“But it was also about showing that we knew this was an area of genuine public concern and a serious matter of policy, not just some culture war thing.”
During the election campaign, then-Conservative PM Rishi Sunak did his best to portray Labour as being soft on the border. But the attacks largely failed to stick.
In response, the Labour leader said repeatedly he would “smash the gangs” running human smuggling operations through a beefed-up border force and greater cooperation with foreign governments.
Starmer tended to accompany this message with anecdotes from his past career as Britain’s director of public prosecutions and his experiences jailing terrorist cells operating in the U.K.
Harris has been hitting almost identical notes in her latest campaign ads in the face of claims from rival Trump that she was Biden’s “border czar” — an inaccurate label — and was at fault for the entire situation.
She, like Starmer, is now pledging to slow border crossings from Mexico by taking on transnational smuggling operations led by organized crime groups.
Her TV adverts say that “as a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border. 
“Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.”
Jonathan Ashworth, director of the Labour Together think tank, was one of Labour’s senior figures in Chicago this week for the DNC.
The former MP, who was also a key strategist in Labour’s successful campaign, said Democrat operatives were “interested in how we made the arguments [on border security], because they intend to make the same arguments as well.
“We kept reminding people that he was a hard guy who put people behind bars and foiled terrorist plots,” he told POLITICO.
“[Harris], like Keir, is relentlessly pushing this message that she’s a prosecutor who has put criminals behind bars.”
New Labour Dover and Deal MP Mike Tapp was also part of a delegation in Chicago organized by the Progressive Policy Institute this week to “pass on some of the knowledge we’ve picked up” in winning elections.
Tapp, whose seaside constituency has been on the frontline of the government’s fight against small-boat arrivals, said he had spoken to a number of Democrat strategists about how to convince voters of their border security plans.
“The message I am passing on to our American friends is — do not ignore those concerns about secure borders and immigration. Deal with it,” he said.
“You attack those exploiting the desperate people and go down the line of secure borders, which are essential to a nation state.”
With Harris’ campaign just weeks old, there is already another policy area which looks distinctly familiar.
Harris announced last week that the centerpiece of her new economic platform was a plan to slash red tape to speed up the construction of millions of new homes.
That policy will be instantly recognized by British political watchers — as it was unveiled by Starmer in October 2023 and is now a key plank in his government’s economic strategy.
Another area where Democrat and Labour strategists may be swapping notes is how to face down challenges to their parties from the left, especially the Gaza protests that have swept major cities in both countries and disrupted campuses.
McSweeney convinced Starmer that he needed to sacrifice party unity to demoralize the far-left faction and show the public that Labour had changed, according to Tom Baldwin’s biography of the prime minister.
The shift created problems when Starmer tried to hold the party together over Labour’s response to the conflict in Gaza, as the left wing of his party urged him to condemn Israel.
The Democratic Party has also tended to mollify the left for the sake of unity, granting the faction’s de facto leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a speaking slot during the DNC, despite the risk of opening up lines of attack for Trump and his Republicans.
Like Starmer, a pescatarian from well-heeled north London who was mocked by his Tory rivals for taking the knee during the Black Lives Matter protests, Harris is often portrayed by her rivals as overly “woke,” as a San Francisco liberal out of touch with middle America.
Republican figures have been quick to cite the example of her previous warm words on the 2020 “defund the police” movement in America. Starmer, however, managed to turn this perceived weakness into a strength by highlighting his work as Britain’s most senior public prosecutor before entering parliament in 2015.
Harris is now trying to do exactly the same, using her experience as California’s attorney general to tell voters she would be tough on illegal immigration and on the gangs helping fuel the explosion in U.S. border crossings since 2021.
The parallels between Labour and Democratic Party messaging appear neither coincidental — nor likely to end before the November U.S. election.