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WASHINGTON — It may be riling up Donald Trump’s supporters, but don’t expect the love-in between U.S. Democrats and the U.K. Labour Party to let up anytime soon.
Allies of the U.S. Republican presidential candidate are seizing on news that a delegation of 100 current and former Labour staffers plans to knock on doors for Democratic rival Kamala Harris ahead of the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election.
Former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka branded the help a “bloody outrage.” Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said the move was “another reason” to back the Republicans.
Pro-Trump tech billionaire Elon Musk even accused Labour of “illegal” election interference — a claim that looks shaky given federal election law explicitly permits foreign citizens to campaign in the U.S, provided they are unpaid.
The trips are being undertaken by Harris-supporting Labour volunteers in a personal capacity, rather than at the formal behest of the U.K’s governing party. Those taking part are expected to foot the bill for themselves and do it on their own time.
Yet the exchanges are the latest clear sign of close ties between center left strategists in America and their U.K. counterparts as the race for the White House hots up.
Campaigners for the Center for New Liberalism, a Democrat-linked group, knocked doors for Labour leader and now-Prime Minister Keir Starmer during the U.K. general election last summer. The group focused its efforts on pro-housebuilding candidates in and around London.
Meanwhile, some Labour figures have already been out to help the Democrats under their own steam. MP Ruth Cadbury took a trip to New Hampshire last month to help a friend who was campaigning for local Democrat candidates.
“We’re all left of center activists and when you travel abroad it’s good to show solidarity,” she said. “It showed the New Hampshire Democrats in a small way that people in the U.K. are thinking about their win as part of the bigger win for Harris and [vice presidential candidate Tim] Walz.”
Starmer alone?
The ties go far beyond door-knocking.
Think tanks and campaign groups linked to Harris have long swapped campaign tips with their British counterparts, who unseated the Conservatives this past summer after a 14-year run in office.
And some now see Starmer as a keeper of the center-left flame if Trump does win in November, amid a global swing to the populist right.
“If Harris does lose and Trump wins in November, the U.K. really has to step up in the West, within liberal democracies, and be the beacon for a lot of really important ideas,” said Colin Mortimer, director of the Center for New Liberalism, a center left campaign group with international chapters across the globe.
“So we’re really looking to Starmer not only for inspiration during the campaign, but he’s going to have to step up and be a real strong leader if America can’t be.”
Alongside the U.S, governments across Europe are facing threats from right-wing populists.
“A Trump victory in November would galvanize ultra-nationalist parties across Europe, putting at risk Germany’s shaky governing coalition in next year’s election and possibly leaving Starmer as the last major center-left leader standing on the continent,” said Will Marshall, founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) in Washington.
“The giant black hole spinning at the middle of this is Trump,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for the Third Way think tank. “If Trump wins, we live in a new world. It’ll be Starmer alone, and God knows what will happen to the other Western democracies after that.”
Center left hero
Starmer won a 411-seat landslide at the U.K. general election this summer, ending almost a decade and a half of Conservative rule in Britain. The Tories were left with 121 seats in the House of Commons, their worst ever defeat, after switching leaders four times in a decade.
But center left movements in the U.S. argue the triumph wasn’t as simple as Starmer kicking the ball into an open goal. Labour still had to make sure it won Conservative voters to its cause in a few crucial ares, while being careful not to alienate other parts of the electorate.
PPI, Third Way and the Center for New Liberalism (a ground campaign offshoot of PPI) were among the center left groups that began rebuilding links with Labour soon after Starmer became leader in 2020, taking over from a far-left predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. Like-minded groups in the U.K. such as Labour Together, the Tony Blair Institute and the Institute for Public Policy Research were also involved in the conversations.
In exchange sessions between campaigners ahead of the U.K. election, U.S. strategists urged Labour to focus on non-higher educated working class voters — a group Trump hoovered up when he won in 2016.
The Washington campaigners said Labour must be cautious not to insult Conservative voters, and instead convince them Starmer could make tangible changes to their lives.
The U.S. groups were pushing at an open door with team Starmer. The Labour boss had surrounded himself with people such as campaigns chief Morgan McSweeney and strategist Deborah Mattinson, who were determined to convert so-called “hero voters” — those with the potential to switch directly from the Conservatives to Labour — by mixing pragmatism with patriotism.
“There’s a recognition that the publics in both countries want to see both politics and government actually deliver what they need in their lives,” explained Josh Freed, a senior vice president at Third Way.
Claire Ainsley, a former policy chief to Starmer and now a U.K. director of another PPI offshoot in London, said: “The transatlantic dialogue between the U.S. Democrats and U.K. Labour is flourishing with a new generation of politicians, strategists and campaigners.”
Right back atcha
Now the center left groups in Washington are hoping the Democrats follow the Starmer playbook and replicate his win.
Labour officials including McSweeney and Mattinson attended the Democratic National Convention in August, where Mattinson and Ainsley addressed a session on lessons learned from the U.K. election. The D.C. groups have also been attending Labour’s annual conferences since Starmer took over.
The Center for New Liberalism produced research showing how Starmer managed to win over hero voters, which it presented to Democrat campaign chiefs and is confident has been noted. The messages are often the same as those transmitted to Labour ahead of its own campaign.
“The key lesson Democrats should draw from Keir Starmer’s success is to focus with surgical precision on voters without college degrees,” said Marshall, from the PPI. “Their economic and cultural frustrations are driving the working class revolt that produced Brexit and Trump and the rise of illiberal nationalism across the U.S. and Europe.”
Jon Ashworth, chief executive of Labour Together and a former frontbencher under Starmer — until he lost his seat to a pro-Palestinian candidate in the biggest shock of the election — was also at the DNC in Chicago in August. He urged the Harris campaign not to hide from issues voters care about that the left normally finds difficult to address, such as illegal immigration.
Starmer went into the U.K. election promising to tackle people smuggling gangs. It was a riposte to Conservative claims he had no plan to tackle a problem that’s been a long-standing campaign cause on the right.
“We wanted to go after the gangs, and, equally, they are saying they want to go after the gangs,” Ashworth said of the Harris administration. “I’m not remotely suggesting that’s because they heard us talk about it. But they have recognized, the same as we recognized, that you need to have a serious policy on dealing with illegal migration.”
Not being weird
The Third Way’s Bennett and Freed visited the U.K. in 2023 as Labour grappled with its sizable green subsidies plan, which was coming under heavy fire from the Tories.
The pair urged team Starmer not to get bogged down in details, after Hillary Clinton, who had 300 policies in 2016 on topics ranging from Alzheimer’s to Zika, lost to Trump, who had seven broad positions.
In the end, Labour watered its green plans down and its big offer to the electorate was five more vague “missions” — plus a central message of “change.”
Labour also sought to neutralize talking points the right could weaponize. Ashworth warned his U.S. comrades to develop solid responses on transgender issues, after Labour colleagues faced repeated media questions about whether women can have penises.
“One of the things I was raising in Chicago was how that would become an issue if they weren’t careful,” Ashworth said.
A crucial Labour objective ahead of the U.K. election was also to shed the far-left stigma of the Corbyn era, which saw the party sink to its worst result in modern history.
Assessing the challenge Starmer faced in his battle with the Labour left, Democrat-aligned groups in Washington saw echoes of the fight with their own base.
The center left wanted to temper uncompromising activist positions on inclusion and climate that they believed were repelling voters — while also tackling a festering antisemitism in their ranks.
“The thing that both Starmer and Harris, to her enormous credit, have done, is run as not out of touch weirdos,” Bennett said. “If she wins, that’ll be the reason.”
