Earlier this month, Deborah Mattinson, the former head of strategy for Keir Starmer, met senior Democratic strategists, consultants and pollsters in Washington DC. She had something to offer: a plan for Kamala Harris to win the 2024 US presidential election.
Back in 2021, Mattinson used polling to identify the voters Labour needed in order to win key marginal constituencies. Over the next three years, these voters – mostly Brexiteers who didn’t have much money and voted Tory for the first time in 2019 – became the party’s obsession. A grinding three-year courtship followed. Labour’s branding, Starmer’s speeches, and the party’s attacks on the Conservatives were designed to fulfil these voters’ needs.
Mattinson quit Starmer’s team after his victory in July and now wants to help the Democrats win. She has conducted polling alongside Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former director of policy, who works for the Progressive Policy Institute, an American think tank that brought together Blairites and Clinton Democrats in the 1990s. Their research identified a demographic that could give the presidency to Harris: non-college educated parents with an average age of 42. These voters work full-time and don’t follow politics closely. Instead, they get their news from Facebook and Instagram. Money is tight, and they feel betrayed by the political class. They don’t find Donald Trump repellent; they think he gets things done. They want, in the words of one Pennsylvanian woman in a focus group, “change and stability”. Winning over even a fraction of this group would, Mattinson believes, decide the election.
When we met for lunch recently in Washington, Mattinson told me Harris needed more retail policies. Her plans to increase housebuilding, cut taxes for small businesses and “secure the border” is the right approach. But they need to be repeated ad nauseam and condensed into a short, sharp list akin to Labour’s “five first steps for change”. The Democrats, according to the research, must convince voters that Trump will make them poorer and bring back chaos.
There are already similarities between the Labour and Democratic campaigns. Compare Starmer’s “country first, party second” with Harris’s “you can always trust me to put country above party”. Starmer said: “We said we will turn the page.” And Harris has said: “It’s time to turn the page.” Both are coming to terms with anger over immigration and living standards; both have made a quieter politics central to their pitch.
Yet the parallels between Labour and the Democrats can only go so far. Glaringly, as Joe Biden’s vice-president, Harris is in effect the incumbent and sits at the centre of an unpopular administration. Mattinson found that seven out of ten undecideds say America is going in the wrong direction; 6 per cent think it is on the right path. Harris has overcome the polling deficit that opened up when Biden’s decline became obvious, but she remains level with Trump in national polls. Labour had four years to implement its strategy; Harris had six weeks.
The US election is dominated by personality in a way the British election wasn’t. Harris and Trump are opposites, the San Franciscan liberal vs the New York oligarch. Norman Mailer once said that vice-presidents are like movie stars: famous but powerless. Harris is campaigning like one, trying to unify the country through glib optimism and ambiguous promises. And if Harris delivers the tropes of the movie star, Trump embodies the ostentatious rage of reality television.
The Democratic Party remains unsettled after nearly allowing Biden to gift the presidency to Trump. Harris is, for the party, absolution. Hence the elation at the convention in August, where attendees cried tears of joy during speech after speech. According to the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, such emotion was only possible because Harris had made progressivism less emotionally draining by dropping identity politics and reducing her pitch to a handful of talking points. This “progressive minimalism” has unified the party, but will it win the election?
Those voters Mattinson identified could easily be won over by Trump: he is trusted more on immigration and the economy. Harris has pledged to prosecute the gangs funnelling people across the southern US border. Starmer also promised to “smash the gangs”. But Harris has no answer as to why an average of 2 million people per year crossed into the US illegally under Biden’s administration. On the economy, she is caught between defending Biden’s record and accommodating widespread anger about the rampant cost of living.
Pollsters advise candidates on how to win elections, not govern a country. Starmer’s initial weeks in office were dominated by anti-immigrant riots. His favourability ratings have diminished. In the same vein, a “minimalist” approach might unite the Democratic Party and deflect accusations that Harris is, in the words of Trump’s attack ads, “dangerously liberal”. But it risks doing nothing for those voters attracted to Trump’s promises.
Kamala Harris’s central promise is that she is not Donald Trump. She is calm, not chaotic. She respects the constitution; he does not. She unites; he divides. But that pitch will do little to quell the anger which Trump has come to represent. For those undecided voters who don’t think Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy, and who are considering voting for him, the vice-president’s promise to revert to a polite politics which Trump tore down might not be enough.
[See also: The Harris campaign is stalling]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?