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      US ‘hero voters’ key to Harris win, say top ex-aides who plotted Labour UK victory

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      Keir Starmer’s former pollster, Deborah Mattinson, is to meet Kamala Harris’s campaign team in Washington this week to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”.The visit comes ahead of a separate trip by Starmer to Washington on Friday to meet US president Joe Biden, his second since becoming prime minister. It will also be his first since Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee.With the race for the White House on a knife-edge, Mattinson, who stepped down from Starmer’s office after the election, and the prime minister’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley, who will also attend the briefings, believe the same strategy that delivered for Labour could play an important role in Harris defeating Donald Trump on 5 November.Writing in the Observer, Mattinson and Ainsley say many of the concerns of crucial undecided voters will be similar on both of sides of the Atlantic.“These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.“For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning.“They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.”Mattinson coined the phrase “hero voters” to describe a group who were more often than not pro-Brexit and persuadable by political leaders if they felt they would address their fundamental core concerns.The collaboration, they believe, could help tilt the balance by delivering voters in key US battlegrounds.“Before November’s presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows clearly, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.“The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of the most crucial battleground states.”Mattinson and Ainsley were invited by the Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), with which Ainsley has been working since leaving Starmer’s team in late 2022.Recently, they have been polling among US voters and conducting focus groups to try to understand what will win them over and which groups matter most.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny,” they write. “This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class, as the same group might in the UK – is struggling.“Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, out of reach for people like them, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.”Among those that the two former Starmer aides are likely to meet are Megan Jones, the senior political adviser to vice-president Harris, and Will Marshall, founder of the PPI, who had dealings with top New Labour figures, including Tony Blair, when the party was trying to learn from the electoral success of Bill Clinton’s Democrats in the early to mid-1990s, before the 1997 general election.View image in fullscreenMattinson and Ainsley say they had far more time to plan their strategy in detail than have members of the Harris campaign. But they suggest that fine-tuning the Democratic strategy could help sustain recent momentum and give the party a better chance of crossing the finishing line victorious.“From the point where we defined our hero-voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.” More

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      How the lessons of the UK election could help Kamala Harris defeat Donald Trump

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      On 4 July, against all odds, Labour overturned the most shattering defeat in decades to win a stunning landslide. A talented and energetic party team deserves huge credit for this victory: effective communications, innovative digital output, creative policy culminating in the five missions, organisationally brilliant events and a super-efficient ground force – all under the leadership of campaign director Morgan McSweeney and political leads Pat McFadden and Ellie Reeves.It was a cohesive campaign united by its sharp, disciplined focus on our very tightly defined “hero voters”. Could a similar single-mindedness help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump on 5 November?Just three years before, Labour had suffered the devastating setback of the Hartlepool byelection. While Keir Starmer had made significant strides towards returning Labour to the service of working people in his first year as leader, the party still struggled to embrace a disparate coalition of voters stretching from its base to a wider group of progressive voters and including the “red wall” that had so dramatically abandoned Labour in 2019.It was an impossible task. As the party picked itself up, Starmer’s brief was to really understand the voters who were crucial to that Tory win. He redoubled his resolve to take the party to them. These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning. They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.Starmer was the personification of this segment of the UK electorate. As someone who had grown up in a pebbledash semi, with hard-working parents who were so strapped for cash that at one point the family’s phone was cut off, he identified with these voters and understood them. This became our focus over the next three years. The discipline paid off, enabling the electoral efficiency that won 411 seats, even on a vote share of less than 35%.Before November’s US presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of most crucial battleground states.Working with Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute, we have attempted to do just that, applying lessons from the UK election, conducting polling and focus groups to really understand the voters that matter most.The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny. This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class as the same group might in the UK – is struggling. Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.As one Michigan swing voter told us last week: “There’s less of a ‘legit’ middle class these days. People are just working, working, working – and I think that’s really unfair.” Another voter in Pennsylvania said: “The middle class is being eroded. You used to be able to work one job and buy a house, but those things are out of reach for people like us nowadays.”Unsurprisingly, these voters want change – change that redresses the balance. But they are also deeply insecure and want that change within a framework of stability.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris can use this balancing act to her advantage, offering a combination of stability and the change voters crave. By addressing concerns such as inflation and homeownership while promising steady progress, she can present a vision that contrasts with Trump’s record, appealing directly to the middle class’s desire for practical, lasting change.Like Starmer, Harris has an edge: she comes from the same background as these voters. Her middle-class upbringing and understanding of economic struggle give her a unique connection to working-class Americans. She can own this narrative – something that Trump’s rhetoric, despite his populist appeal, can’t match.There are takeaways for the new Labour government from our research too. US voters want tangible evidence of policies from the Democrats that have helped them and their country. In these early days of the new Labour government, the party will want to plan now what those markers of success will be to their hero voters, well before the next general election.In our project, we have explored how the lessons from Labour’s successful campaign may translate across, reflecting the mood of hero voters, creating clear dividing lines on party brand, and leader reputation and, ultimately, developing a compelling offer.From the point where we defined our hero voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But, looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley will spend this week in Washington DC with the Progressive Policy Institute, briefing leading Democrats on their project More

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      Here it is, the new right playbook: wreck and impoverish the country, enjoy the high life yourself | Owen Jones

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      Rightwing dogma has cost Britons dearly, but remains the ultimate meal ticket for the guilty men and women. While Tory rule saw workers face the most protracted squeeze in wages since the defeat of Napoleon, the politicians to blame have shamelessly monetised this failure of historic proportions.Boris Johnson – turfed out of No 10 in disgrace after little more than three years in charge – leads the pack, unsurprisingly. Within six months, he had raked in more than £5m thanks to speaker fees, hospitality and donations. A million of that was generously donated by Christopher Harborne, a tech entrepreneur based in Thailand who had mostly donated vast sums of money to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. That means Johnson certainly had the means to settle the legal bill for his defence in Partygate: alas, you and I coughed up that £265,000, with the National Audit Office condemning the government’s decision to use public money.The Rwanda scheme to deport asylum seekers was not just cruel, it was costly: about £700m of taxpayers’ dosh was frittered on needlessly catering to the basest prejudices of the British electorate. Yet its most vociferous champion, the former home secretary Suella Braverman, clearly believes she has expertise deserving of a hefty price tag.She has already made nearly £60,000 on the global speaking circuit, more than any other sitting MP, with another £14,000 from the Telegraph for articles such as one titled “Islamists are in charge of Britain now”. Then there was the all-expenses “solidarity” trip to Israel worth £27,800, paid for by the National Jewish Assembly, who clearly believed it was an investment: its chairman declared that it had paid up because Braverman “has been very influential in politics and we hope that she will again be influential in the future”.Sure, Liz Truss may have crashed the economy with unhinged rightwing policies, sending mortgages and rents soaring, contributing to 320,000 British adults being driven below the poverty line. And yes, granted, in July she was booted out of her Norfolk seat – where she had won 69% of the vote in 2019 – with the biggest swing from Tory to Labour in any UK election ever. But her bank account balance is as healthy as her shame is absent: by last September, she had made £250,000 in speaker fees since leaving office.And while Farage was never a Tory minister, few politicians have done so much to reshape the Conservative party, or deliver a Brexit which, according to the polls, just 13% of Britons believe is a success. He’s the highest earning MP, making £1.2m a year from GB News, alongside lucrative trips to the US funded by wealthy friends.That 14 years of rightwing leadership gave us a Britain with wages lower than in 2008 in two-thirds of British local authorities, stagnant growth, crumbling public services, and chronic divisions and tensions is clearly no barrier to success. All of these figures champion capitalism as a system that rewards success and punishes failure, and yet all thrive precisely because they were architects of Britain’s most calamitous era of the peacetime democratic era.What is termed “rightwing populism” is, in short, an endless money spinner. Truss is a particularly instructive case. In her youth, she was a Liberal Democrat devotee, passionately denouncing the British monarchy. Despite swerving to the right in adulthood, she campaigned for remain in 2016. Since her premiership had its fatal appointment with reality, Truss has either shifted further right or felt liberated to be her true self, or both. A cheerleader for Donald Trump, she spoke at a far-right conference in the US alongside Farage to decry “the deep state” for taking her down, and said nothing while appearing in an interview where Steve Bannon hailed Tommy Robinson as a “hero”.Other attenders at this Conservative Political Action Conference included a US senator who has refused to condemn white nationalists, and allies of the authoritarian Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán. While in the US, Truss accepted another trip worth £20,000 from a murky group called the Green Dragon Coalition, which says it is committed to “break down climate change policy” and “expose the woke mob”.What is going on here? Back in the 1970s, well funded thinktanks helped reshape the western right to embrace privatisation and regulation, slashing taxes on the rich and smashing trade unions. Today’s right is metamorphosing again, epitomised by the authoritarian demagoguery of Trump. Where there was once a cordon sanitaire between what was loosely described as the “centre right” and what lies beyond, that has long broken down.All this money is helping to reshape the international right, bringing together its leading lights to forge common bonds and a shared mission. Yes, it is nauseating to watch politicians make others pay for their failures while they are rewarded with endless pay cheques. But this is not a political project driven by results – and powerful tycoons with bottomless pockets are determined that these walking, talking disasters act as trailblazers for what comes next.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      The joke’s on Truss for backing Trump | Brief letters

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      So Liz Truss thinks the lettuce joke is “puerile” but supports Donald Trump, whose unhinged rants largely comprise pitifully childish schoolyard insults (Liz Truss leaves stage over ‘I crashed the economy’ lettuce banner, 14 August). Trump and Truss are united not just in their politics but also in their absolute lack of self-awareness, sense of humour, and belief in demonstrable fact.Hilary KnightVictoria, British Columbia, Canada Banksy’s rhino is described as an “artwork”, a “mural” and an “installation” (Banksy rhino artwork in London defaced with graffiti tag, 13 August), yet the individual who added their own composition to the image is a “mindless vandal”. Double standards perhaps?Stuart HarringtonBurnham-on-Sea, Somerset Letters on accents (Letters, 15 August) reminded me of my educational ambitions in 1960s Liverpool. My Toxteth teacher learned of my aspirations for further education and counselled: “You’ll have to lose your Liverpool accent. But don’t worry, the catarrh will disappear when you move away.”Dr Ken BrayBath A while ago, I was surprised that a delicious delicacy was signed on one of the market stalls as asparagu’s, thus becoming, perhaps, a medieval mid‑European warlord (Letters, 16 August). I taught English in town for years.Ian RunnaclesBury St Edmunds, Suffolk Re “How to rein in the malign influence of Elon Musk” (Letters, 15 August). Hands up all those who own a Tesla.John PeacheyWoking, Surrey More

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      in UK Politics

      Post-Brexit border controls slammed as ‘chaotic’ as system charges customers for checks that never took place

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      Support trulyindependent journalismFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorA post-Brexit border control system has caused a string of errors with businesses mistakenly charged for goods checks that never took place, customs agents say.The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has come under fire after angry businesses experienced errors with the “chaotic” customs system.During an online meeting on Tuesday, government officials were told a consignment was not unloaded at a government-run border inspection facility at Sevington in Kent because of a design flaw in the inspection bay. But the shipment owner was still charged for the inspection despite never happening, a customs agent complained. Lorries at the Sevington Inland Border Facility in Ashford as the National Audit Office warns over uncertainty for a post-Brexit border controls system More

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      Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone | Dan Brooks

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      Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked: “Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies … Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.” How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead. Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye – a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.It’s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades’ fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa’s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.The other week, Twitter user @ZeroSuitCamus posted a passage from an essay JG Ballard wrote for Vogue in the 1970s (incorrectly attributed to his 1975 novel High-Rise) about a future in which our daily activities are all recorded on video, and every evening “we sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters …” Here is the Instagram experience and its strange effects, complete with filter, algorithm and night-time scrolling, delivered to us decades before it became reality. David Foster Wallace predicted the filter, too, around page 111 of Infinite Jest, in which internet-enabled video calling makes everyone so insecure about their faces that they briefly adopt electronic face-improving technology, before it develops such a stigma that they all go back to voice-only telephony. Wallace’s 1996 novel about a form of entertainment so fascinating that it amuses its viewers to death raises some uncomfortable questions for any reader who gets screen time updates on their phones.All these texts – DeLillo, Ballard and Wallace for sure, and The Simpsons, too, in my opinion – fall under the category of “postmodernism”. The contours of the genre are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.I also submit that it’s kind of weird that we have identified our own time as “postmodern” for three generations running. In the same way that the term “modernism” tells you something about how people thought of themselves in the years after the first world war, the fact that we regard ourselves as “post-” suggests a certain mindset. In many ways, our culture thinks of itself as existing after the important part of history – increasingly, after the good part. Latter-days thinking prevails, particularly on social media and in the arts, which seems resigned to rearranging the material already provided to us.I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. At the same time, we aren’t kicking against it – at least not much. There is that postmodern sense that the systems governing our world are too big and complex to do anything about them. We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go.The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story. What happens next is not written, even in outline form.The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade. The end of the postmodern era will come not when the last Simpsons joke comes true, but when we realise the world imagined by the previous century is not enough for us – entertaining and fun to talk about, sure, but fundamentally less interesting than what we can come up with. Sooner or later, we must become authors again.

      Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana More

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      World leaders react to Biden’s decision to exit presidential race

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      Leaders from around the world have begun to react to Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not seek re-election this year, endorsing vice-president Kamala Harris in the most unorthodox US presidential campaign in generations.US allies largely offered tributes to Biden’s work over decades of government service, discussing his work as a partner in international security, without addressing the tense political debate still unfolding in the US.The US election campaign comes at a pivotal moment with major conflicts ongoing in Ukraine and in Gaza, both parties warning of a growing great-power rivalry with China, and European allies unsettled about a revanchist Russia and potential America First policy under Donald Trump that could see Washington turn its back on the continent.“Dear President @JoeBiden,” wrote Polish prime minister Donald Tusk on X, “you’ve taken many difficult decisions thanks to which Poland, America and the world are safer, and democracy stronger. I know you were driven by the same motivations when announcing your final decision. Probably the most difficult one in your life.”UK prime minister Keir Starmer said that he “respected” Biden’s decision and called his career “remarkable”.“I respect President Biden’s decision and I look forward to us working together during the remainder of his presidency,” Starmer said in a statement. “I know that, as he has done throughout his remarkable career, he will have made his decision based on what he believes is best for the American people.”Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett called Biden a “true friend” of Israel.“President Biden is a true friend of Israel who stood by us in our most difficult moments,” he wrote on X. “During my tenure as Prime Minister, I witnessed his unwavering support of the State of Israel. Thank you for everything.”US adversaries criticised Biden’s record and accused him of standing behind growing tensions around the world.“Biden has caused problems all over the world and in his own country, the United States. Since he sees that he will not be elected, he is withdrawing without waiting for the election,” Russian state Duma leader Vyacheslav Volodin, an ally of Vladimir Putin’s, told reporters on Sunday.Biden “should be held accountable for the war unleashed in Ukraine, for destroying the economies of European countries, and for the sanctions policy against Russia and other countries,” Volodin said.“The issue has not been Biden for a long time,” said Russia’s Federation Council deputy speaker Konstantin Kosyachov. “The Americans are divided in their positions in favour of or against Trump. I believe that whoever leads the Democrats’ campaign after Biden’s withdrawal, this divide will remain in place. And everything will depend on how the Republicans will now organise and complete this campaign.” More

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      Starmer praises Biden’s ‘remarkable’ career after US election withdrawal

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      Sir Keir Starmer says he respects Joe Biden’s decision to pull out of the US presidential election, describing the 81-year-old’s political career as “remarkable”.The UK prime minister said: “I respect President Biden’s decision and I look forward to us working together during the remainder of his presidency.“I know that, as he has done throughout his remarkable career, President Biden will have made his decision based on what he believes is in the best interests of the American people.”Starmer was among a number of British politicians who responded to Biden’s announcement on Sunday evening, which came after weeks of pressure to quit due to concerns about his mental acuity and ability to beat Republican nominee Donald Trump.Rishi Sunak praised Biden’s “love for America and dedication to service”.Writing on X, Sunak, who served as prime minister until the UK general election earlier this month, said: “Working with Joe Biden, I saw first-hand his love for America and dedication to service.“Our partnership has led to significant achievements, including [military pact] Aukus, steadfast support for Israel and joint efforts in defending our people from Houthi threats. I wish him all the best.”Boris Johnson, who was prime minister when Biden won the 2020 US election, paid tribute to the president’s “bravery”.He wrote on X: “I salute Joe Biden for the bravery of his decision and also for all he has done as president.“He has been a staunch Atlanticist and friend to Britain throughout his career and it was a privilege to work with him.”Scotland’s first minister John Swinney commended Biden for his “selfless” decision.In a post on X, he wrote that Biden had “served the people of the USA with devotion and total commitment”.“Now, in a typically selfless act, he steps aside to do what he thinks is right for his people.“He came to Scotland for Cop26 and made a powerful contribution. He has our best wishes for the future.”Green party co-leader Carla Denyer said Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race was “a true sign of leadership”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe said: “We wish President Biden well and thank him for his many years of public service.“This cannot have been an easy decision for him. But to take a decision that is personally difficult, but that is in the public interest, is a true sign of leadership.”She added: “The foundations of our democracy are under threat and this presidential election is a pivotal moment. All elected representatives must be able to undertake their democratic duties without facing the threats of violence.“Equally, showing respect for democratic results is perhaps the most fundamental cornerstone of our democratic foundations. All leaders must now not just abide by our democratic principles but cherish and protect them at every turn.“It is abundantly clear that President Trump has no interest in this grave responsibility. My hope is that the Democratic party can find a suitable candidate that can take on this responsibility.“It’s not hyperbole to say that the future of democracy relies on it.”Former foreign secretary James Cleverly thanked Biden for being “a great friend to the UK”.In a post on X, he said: “It was a pleasure meeting President Biden as foreign secretary on his visits to the UK, especially at the signing of the book of condolence for Her Late Majesty.“Thank you for being a great friend to the UK as our two governments defended freedom and democracy around the world.” More