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      Western leaders’ silence about Israel’s atrocities gives free rein to Netanyahu | Letters

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      Owen Jones speaks for many of us (What atrocity would Israel have to commit for our leaders to break their silence?, 3 October). Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and other western leaders have responded to Israel’s actions by repeatedly stating that they stand with Israel and its right to defend itself. They have been quick to vociferously condemn those who threaten or attack Israel, but silent on the atrocities Israel inflicts on tens of thousands of innocent civilians in neighbouring countries. Benjamin Netanyahu has interpreted this silence as permission to pursue his strategy without effective censure or sanction.Therefore the question remains of whether these political leaders are complicit in the killing of thousands of innocent civilians, the creation of millions of refugees and the destruction of towns and cities. Like many others, I yearn to see brave political leadership willing to speak out and challenge Israel’s right to act without adherence to fundamental humanitarian rights and principles of international law. Without such a voice being heard, there will be no end to this humanitarian tragedy.Peter RiddleWirksworth, Derbyshire More

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      Kris Kristofferson’s brave anti-war song | Brief letters

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      One important song appears to have been overlooked in the eulogies for Kris Kristofferson (Obituary, 30 September). Don’t Let the Bastards (Get You Down) is a brave song for a country singer with a military background in the Reagan era. It remains very relevant today: the opening line is “They’re killing babies in the name of freedom.”Peter TaylorTynemouth, Tyne and Wear Steve Vanstone’s nomination of Bob Dylan as a great songwriter but a bad singer (Letters, 3 October) brings to mind another candidate for the greatest songwriter: Franz Schubert. Maria Wagner, who often heard Schubert sing in her family’s home in Vienna, said she had heard all the famous Schubert singers, “but no one sang as Schubert did, and that without a voice”.Susan TomesEdinburgh My family would just like to reassure Bob Dylan that, contrary to Steve Vanstone’s claim, they have heard us both and Bob is definitely not the worst singer of all time.Andrew KeanRainham, London Is the greatest songwriter debate a boys’ club? Joni Mitchell has not only written wonderful lyrics, her melodies are better and her arrangements more imaginative. And as for her voice…Orlando GooddenWhatley, Somerset The seafaring Anglo-Saxons would not have given a hoot where in Europe the oak for their boats came from, so why should the reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo burial ship be made of English wood (‘They must be somewhere’: appeal for British oak to recreate Sutton Hoo ship, 4 October)?Bill Britnell Shrewsbury, Shropshire More

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      Whether it’s Trump or Harris in office, Starmer will need an incredible US ambassador. Here’s my vote | Martin Kettle

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      The widening of the Middle East war has a multiplicity of woeful causes and grim consequences. Many have the potential to become even more intractable in the weeks to come. Fresh human suffering in Israel, Lebanon and beyond is only the start of it. Donald Trump is wrong to claim we are on the brink of a third world war. But these events have global implications. Remember what happened after 9/11.The latest bombings and missile attacks mark a historic failure for politics and diplomacy. This is not the first such failure in the Middle East. But wishing that diplomacy could prevail will not make it happen, and even fragile ceasefires are a long way off right now. As angry populations rally behind the respective combatants the prospects for desperately needed political solutions are almost negligible. You can’t stop a war if those on all sides are determined to fight.On the global scale, the implications for Britain and for Keir Starmer’s government come a long way down the list of the escalation’s most important consequences. In domestic terms, however, they still matter very much indeed. The Gaza war has already made a powerful impact on British politics. Israel’s latest conflict with Iran and its proxies is likely to do the same. The shadow of the Iraq war is a lasting one, more than 20 years on.Yet Britain is not some touchline observer of events in the Middle East. British listening stations in Cyprus monitor the Middle East 24/7. British jets, based in Cyprus, fly over Syria and Iraq almost daily. Those same British jets flew missions to help protect Israel in April, and did so again this week in response to Iran’s missile attacks. Like it or not, Britain also has a history in the region.All of which underscores the high seriousness of the strategic choices that Starmer faces in foreign policy. Like all European nations, Britain now exists in an unstable world shaped by Chinese power, the threat from Russia, US political uncertainty and climate change. It has expelled itself from the European Union. Starmer was in Brussels today to try to make the best of these volatile realities.No one should kid themselves that this is not a difficult hand to play. The difficulty lies behind the escapist and trivialising foreign policy solutions in which Boris Johnson and Liz Truss took refuge, in office and afterwards. Starmer’s seriousness offers a quite different response to theirs but it brings another sort of danger. It puts him at risk of not challenging some inherited orthodoxies of British foreign policy at a newly unstable time for which they are no longer adequate. Dean Acheson’s 1962 comment that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role still echoes.Starmer himself has little background in foreign policy. He gets day-to-day advice from his national security adviser, Tim Barrow, and his foreign policy adviser, Ailsa Terry. It is hard to say from the outside if they are the ideal team for the biggest foreign policy call he faces as prime minister. That call is not, though, over the Middle East war, or the defence of Ukraine. It is not even over the relationship with the EU. It is over the relationship with the US.British foreign policy always seeks to hug America close. But a month from now, the US reaches a fork in the road. Trump and Kamala Harris offer radically different approaches to the country’s global role. These differences will shape Washington’s approach to every important global issue – including Ukraine, the Middle East, China, climate, and digital regulation – for the coming four years. They will be reflected, too, in the way the US operates towards international bodies including the United Nations, Nato, the International Monetary Fund and the international criminal court.The outcome will shape British foreign policy too. A Harris victory would permit something like business as usual. But a Trump win would not. Trying to hug Trump close risks being unsuccessful, dangerous and damaging. Even trying to influence him would require a very special skill set, notably the ability to catch Trump’s attention on Fox News. And Harris would be operating in a more volatile world, too, in which constrained US power might not give priority to British and European interests.That is why, for Starmer, there is an umbilical link between the pressures of a massive event such as the Middle East war and an otherwise relatively niche decision, like who should be the next UK ambassador to the US. Seen through the global lens, the imminent appointment of Karen Pierce’s successor in Washington is relatively minor. Seen through the UK lens, however, it is one of the hinges on which the success or failure of Starmer’s government will depend.Unsurprisingly, No 10 has said the Washington job – the special relationship’s most special post – will only be allocated after the US election. But it will be a defining moment all the same. Politicians including David Miliband, Catherine Ashton and Peter Mandelson have been mentioned. So have current ambassadors, including Menna Rawlings (now in Paris) and Barbara Woodward (now at the UN). Whitehall veterans such as Tom Scholar (former head of the Treasury) and Vijay Rangarajan (now head of the Electoral Commission) may be in the frame too.It’s a job that Labour, nowadays full of West Wing wannabes, has always taken especially seriously. Peter Jay, who died last month, was appointed to the ambassador’s luxurious Massachusetts Avenue residence by his Labour prime ministerial father-in-law, James Callaghan, in 1977. “We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there,” were the instructions from New Labour in 1997, when the late Christopher Meyer was despatched to be Tony Blair’s man in Washington.The appointment rests very personally with Starmer. He has surely now learned that the global agenda will also determine Labour’s future, whether Trump or Harris wins. The appointee therefore needs to be someone with the ear of the president but with the ear of the prime minister as well. That’s why, in the end, my prediction is that the job will go to a man who, untypically, did not reply to my inquiries on the subject this week.A generation ago, as Blair’s chief of staff, it was he who gave Meyer those robust instructions. It was also he who played a key role in the hard-won peace process in Northern Ireland. At a time when another peace process is again so urgent, it is hard to think of a stronger candidate than Jonathan Powell.

      Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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      Elon Musk’s Twitter coup has harmed the right. They are now simply ‘too online’ | Paolo Gerbaudo

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      In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shock victory in 2016, one common explanation for why the Democrats had not seen it coming was that they had succumbed to the social media echo chamber. The fact that many digital platforms, such as Twitter (now X), tended to be dominated by liberals had lured Democrats into a false sense of security. This, so the explanation went, made them complacent, leading to inconsiderate gestures that alienated sections of the electorate: Hillary Clinton’s infamous jab at Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” was often cited as a prime example.With the internet ever more captive to the caprices of timeline algorithms, the risk of echo chambers is even greater in this election cycle. However, it is now Trump and the broader political right that is – to use the internet lingo – “too online”.The rightwing surge seen in many countries’ recent elections, especially in Europe, has been paralleled (and supported) by a significant rise of the right’s influence online. As documented by much academic research on social media and politics, the leading influencers on platforms such as YouTube, X and the instant messaging platform Telegram are rightwing. On many of these platforms, the conversation has increasingly shifted towards rightwing themes and positions, with rightwing messages tending to circulate more widely.This social media hegemony, which has been in the making for many years and was cemented by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, has now created a right that harbours a similar sense of delusion and complacency to the one that, in the past, has proved so detrimental for progressives.Consider the way vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has brazenly doubled down on his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies”; or widely ridiculed – and dangerous – online hoaxes about cats and dogs being eaten by Haitian immigrants, which appear to have travelled from Facebook to the mouth of the Republican candidate in a matter of days; or Musk’s creepy rebuke concerning Taylor Swift after the pop singer endorsed Kamala Harris, offering to “give her a child”. Such extreme messaging does cater to the Maga (Make America great again) crowd of true believers – but it comes at the electoral cost of potentially alienating large swaths of the moderate voting-age population.As political scientists have long observed, a party’s rank and file is more ideologically extreme than its electorate. If leaders get trapped in the militant core, they can end up developing an unrealistic appraisal of the opinion of their target voters. This is precisely what 24/7 immersion in social media, with their plebiscitary pseudo-democracy of instant reactions and echo chambers, is all too likely to produce.Obsession with social media and its popularity contest can also lead to unwise choice of political personnel. JD Vance was appointed as running mate by Trump on the back of vocal support from Silicon Valley and the fervour of his social media followers. Yet, Vance is viewed favourably by a miserly 36% of the electorate, compared with 48% support for his opponent Tim Walz, according to a recent USA Today poll. Trump himself has been criticised by allies because of his closeness to internet personality Laura Loomer, a self-described “white advocate” who has built a successful career by catering to far-right digital cesspits.A key factor in this radicalisation spiral has been Musk’s transformation of broadly liberal Twitter into the reactionary X. Spending $44bn on the purchase certainly made no economic sense, but it seemed to make much political sense. Taking the reins of a platform widely recognised as a sort of “social media of record”, or official debating chamber of the internet, capable of shaping the news agenda and public perception, offered the opportunity to fiddle with the formation of public opinion – and this is precisely what Musk did in three waysFirst, he has shamelessly granted himself enormous algorithmic privileges, which reportedly boost his messages by a factor of 1,000. He has used this colossal power of amplification by conversing with, and therefore boosting, hard-right extremist accounts, spreading fake news and publishing AI-manufactured images, such as one showing Kamala Harris in communist attire.Second, by reactivating tens of thousands of accounts – including those of Nazis and antisemites – who had been suspended or banned for violating community guidelines, Musk has goaded liberal and left users to leave the platform out of disgust, therefore effectively shifting the balance of the conversation to the right.Third, there have been the effects of his “blue check” scheme, which has fundamentally transformed the dynamics of participation on the platform. Now, in any conversation, the top replies are from people with blue checks, who appear to be overwhelmingly right-leaning, largely because of the way more progressive users have boycotted the service out of their animosity towards Musk.Musk’s “Twitter coup” has offered a new home to those who had retreated to Maga platforms such as Truth Social and Parler. But in so doing it has also led to the creation of a macroscopic reactionary echo chamber, which feeds into the right’s confirmation bias and self-complacency.Ultimately, the reason why rightwing politicians and their billionaire allies invest so much energy and resources into social media is that these platforms can influence people’s opinions in a more organic way than traditional forms of political communication. The irony here is that in attempting to use its money and power to shift the discursive dial, the right might have inadvertently undermined its own prospects.

      Paolo Gerbaudo is a sociologist and the author of The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic More

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      Alarm in UK and US over possible Iran-Russia nuclear deal

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      Britain and the US have raised fears that Russia has shared nuclear secrets with Iran in return for Tehran supplying Moscow with ballistic missiles to bomb Ukraine.During their summit in Washington DC on Friday, Keir Starmer and US president Joe Biden acknowledged that the two countries were tightening military cooperation at a time when Iran is in the process of enriching enough uranium to complete its long-held goal to build a nuclear bomb.British sources indicated that concerns were aired about Iran’s trade for nuclear technology, part of a deepening alliance between Tehran and Moscow.On Tuesday last week, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, made a similar warning on a visit to London for a summit with his British counterpart, David Lammy, though it received little attention, as the focus then was the US announcement of Iran’s missile supply to Moscow.“For its part, Russia is sharing technology that Iran seeks – this is a two-way street – including on nuclear issues as well as some space information,” Blinken said, accusing the two countries of engaging in destabilising activities that sow “even greater insecurity” around the world.Britain, France and Germany jointly warned last week that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium had “continued to grow significantly, without any credible civilian justification” and that it had accumulated four “significant quantities” that each could be used to make a nuclear bomb.But it is not clear how much technical knowhow Tehran has to build a nuclear weapon at this stage, or how quickly it could do so. Working with experienced Russian specialists or using Russian knowledge would help speed up the manufacturing process, however – though Iran denies that it is trying to make a nuclear bomb.Iran had struck a deal in 2015 to halt making nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief with the US and other western nations – only for the agreement to be abandoned in 2018 by then US president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump.Iran responded by breaching agreed limits on the quantity of enriched uranium it could hold.Western concern that Iran is close to being able to make a nuclear weapon has been circulating for months, contributing to tensions in the Middle East, already at a high pitch because of Israel’s continuing assault on Hamas and Gaza.Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, are supporters of Hamas – and Tehran’s nuclear development is therefore viewed as a direct threat by Jerusalem.Soon after Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Iran began supplying Shahed delta winged drones to Moscow and helped Russia build a factory to make more to bomb targets across Ukraine. In April this year, Iran launched a Russian-style missile and drone attack aimed at Israel, though it was essentially prevented and stopped with the help of the US and UK.Russia and Iran, though not historically allies, have become increasingly united in their opposition to the west, part of a wider “axis of upheaval” that also includes to varying degrees China and North Korea, reflecting a return to an era of state competition reminiscent of the cold war.Last week in London, Blinken said that US intelligence had concluded that the first batch of high-speed Iranian Fath-360 ballistic missiles, with a range of up to 75 miles (120km), had been delivered to Russia.Able to strike already bombarded frontline Ukrainian cities, the missiles prompted a dramatic reassessment in western thinking as well as fresh economic sanctions.Starmer flew to Washington late on Thursday to hold a special foreign policy summit with Biden at the White House on Friday, beginning with a short one on one in the outgoing president’s Oval Office followed by a 70-minute-long meeting with both sides’ top foreign policy teams in the residence’s Blue Room.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThe leaders and their aides discussed the war in Ukraine, the crisis in the Middle East, Iran and the emerging competition with China.Starmer brought along with him Lammy, Downing Street’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, and the UK’s national security adviser, Tim Barrow, , while Biden was accompanied by Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, among others.Prior to the meeting, UK sources indicated that the two countries had agreed in principle to allow Ukraine to fire long-range Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles into Russia for the first time. But Biden appeared to suggest the topic was one of the reasons for the face-to-face, saying to reporters: “We’re going to discuss that now,” as the meeting began.There was no update after the meeting, partly to keep the Kremlin guessing. Any use of the missiles is expected to be part of a wider war plan on the part of Ukraine aimed at using them to target airbases, missile launch sites and other locations used by Russia to bomb Ukraine.Britain needs the White House’s permission to allow Ukraine to use the missiles in Russia because they use components manufactured in the US.Protocol dictated that Biden and Starmer – the only two present without printed-out name cards – did most of the talking, while the other politicians and officials present only spoke when introduced by the president or the prime minister.Lammy was asked by Starmer to update those present on his and Blinken’s trip to Kyiv on Thursday to meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.Shortly after the meeting, Starmer said the two sides had had “a wide ranging discussion about strategy”. More

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      A little about Robert Jenrick actually reveals a lot | Brief letters

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      Robert Jenrick’s website modestly sets out his unimpeachable credentials for leadership of party and country. The “About” section begins thus: “Robert has spent most of his life in the Midlands and comes from small town Britain. Born in 1980s Wolverhampton, his father, Bill, was a small businessman from Manchester and his mother, Jenny, was a secretary from Liverpool. They set up their own business fitting fireplaces around their kitchen table.” So Bob’s dad, a little chap just Bob’s age, came from two places and liked to keep the table warm?Stephen BakerTregynon, Powys Aditya Chakrabortty ends his article on the Tory leadership race (Opinion, 12 September) speculating on who’ll be in the final bout to lead Her Majesty’s opposition. I think he needs to keep up with the news.Michael RobinsonBerkhamsted, Herfordshire When I worked for the Blood Transfusion Service in Ireland in the 1970s, Guinness was always available for donors (Letters, 10 September). The most reliable donors were employees of the brewery who, as a perk of their job, got a daily ration of two pint bottles.Catherine O’ReillyLondon I took the ironing on (Letters, 10 September) when my girlfriend – now my wife – did an MA in chemistry when she was 23. She’s now 63 and still appears reluctant to take the task back.Ian Charlton Northallerton, North Yorkshire Donald Trump refers to Kamala Harris as a Marxist (Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate, 11 September). Perhaps he needs a dictionary?Derek McMillanDurrington, West Sussex More

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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