A Labour strategist has confirmed that while the party did give the US democrats some advice, she is “not sure they listened” – and so missed a key opportunity.
The Democrats’ nominee, vice-president Kamala Harris, was heavily defeated by former president Donald Trump in last week’s elections.
The Republican Party won both the electoral college vote and the popular vote on Wednesday, and look set to take control of both the US senate and House of Representatives in the coming days.
This staggering loss for the incumbent administration came after reports that UK Labour tried to share its winning strategies with their US sister party.
However, according to Keir Starmer’s former pollster, Deborah Mattinson, they may not have been paying attention, and did not pay enough attention to some crucial members of the electorate.
She told Times Radio on Saturday: “We did speak to some of their strategists and gave them advice. I’m not sure they listened.
“I was trying to translate across some of the learnings from our successful campaign here in the UK.”
She said Labour had identified a group called “hero voters” who were crucial to their party’s win – and who were very similar to the groups the Democrats had to win over.
Mattinson said: “They were working class. They were less likely to be college graduates here in the UK.
“They were more likely to have voted Brexit, for example.
“And there were people who had been traditionally Labour voters who had moved away from Labour in 2019.
“When the Red Wall went crashing down, it was those voters.”
She said she “put them at the heart of our policy development and our campaigning” – and “it worked”.
Mattinson claimed the Democrats did not focus their campaign on the US version of these voters, but instead “spent a lot of the campaign talking to themselves.”
“Now, there’s obviously always a need to get your own vote out, but there’s no suggestion that that was their problem. Their problem was they needed to win over these people that had moved away from them,” she added.
She also told Times Radio that she did not “buy” the analysis that the States were not ready to elect a Black woman to the White House, after a focus group in Michigan told her: “Imagine if Michelle Obama had run. We’d have gone for her.”
