What Keir Starmer’s victory means for Kamala Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris has righted her party’s capsized ship and opened a small but consistent lead over Donald Trump in national polls. Now comes the decisive test: Charting a winning course in the Electoral College.  

To attain a majority of 270 votes or more, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), must carry at least three, and in some scenarios four of the seven battleground states. All look like dead heats today.  

They can count on a strong turnout by a reenergized Democratic base, but that won’t be enough. You can’t win swing states without winning swing voters. The campaigns are spending prodigiously in these states to sway roughly 3 million voters who tell pollsters they’ve yet to make up their minds.  

The fence-sitters tend to be moderate, independent and working-class (non-college). New research on swing voters by my organization estimates that undecided voters without college degrees range from about 13 to 16 percent of the population in the battleground states.  

The rub is that non-college voters — who made up 63 percent of the electorate in the last two elections — have yet to warm to Harris. She’s trailing Trump by 17 points nationally among them, compared to Biden’s mere 4-point deficit in 2020.  

As Democrats work to narrow that gap, they should look to their counterparts in Great Britain for inspiration and tactical tips.

On July 4, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a resounding victory over the governing Conservatives, ending a 14-year exile from government.  

Starmer took over as his party's leader in 2020, following Labour’s crushing defeat under Jeremy Corbyn the year before. In 2019, Boris Johnson and the Tories had breached Labour’s “Red Wall,” winning 28 traditional working-class constituencies across England’s post-industrial Midlands and north.

In July, Labour swept 37 of 38 Red Wall seats while also gaining dozens more in Scotland at the expense of the Scottish National Party. Key to its success was a 5-point increase in support among non-degree voters.  

The United Kingdom’s voters were exasperated after 14 years of Tory rule, including the long-running imbroglio over Brexit, a flagging economy and factional battles that produced five ideologically dissimilar prime ministers. Britons wanted change badly, but they needed reassurance that Labour was ready to govern. 

“Changing our party was the vital proof point” that Labour could change the country, says Deborah Mattinson, a key party strategist and pollster who recently surveyed U.S. battleground states for the Progressive Policy Institute.  

Harris has a trickier hand to play. She’s a fresh face and comparatively young, but she’s also an incumbent presiding over the worst bout of inflation in decades. How can she convince working-class voters, who think the country is heading in the wrong direction, that she can bring the change they want? 

Here’s where Labour’s turnaround yields valuable lessons. Starmer began by purging Labour of Corbyn’s dogmatic socialism, which thrilled left-wing activists but was far removed from the everyday worries of economically stressed working families.

Next, Team Starmer focused with surgical precision on what they dubbed “hero voters” — older, working-class voters who traditionally had voted Labour but voted Conservative in 2019 out of a combination of economic insecurity, pro-Brexit sentiment and the belief that Corbyn’s party had abandoned them.

Starmer listened to these voters and made their concerns Labour’s priorities. “On policy, Starmer moved the party to the center-ground, promising economic stability, reformed public services and moderation on cultural issues,” says Mattinson.  

To rebuild trust in Labour’s economic competence, Starmer stressed economic investment over social spending, vowing to make Britain a clean energy superpower, while assuring private sector leaders that Labour would be “pro-worker and pro-business.”  

Rachel Reeves, now chancellor, promised fiscally responsible policies to promote investment and growth and avoid raising taxes on working families.  

Starmer used his working-class background to empathize with hero voters’ strong patriotism, traditional family values and need for public order and social stability. A former prosecutor like Harris, Starmer took a tough line on crime as well as immigration, pledging to go after criminal gangs sending migrants across the English Channel. 

Harris has also struck patriotic notes, steered clear of the polarizing language of identity politics and promised to reduce illegal immigration. She’s stressed her own lower-middle-class story and focused on driving down the cost of living.

These departures from progressive orthodoxy are refreshing but may not be enough to dent working Americans’ perception that Democrats are more responsive to college grads and cosmopolitan elites than to them. What’s needed is a comprehensive reorientation of Democratic political and governing commitments around the needs of working families who fear they are falling out of the great American middle class.  

For example, Democrats should junk the false promise of “college for all” and shift resources from student loan forgiveness to new investments in expanding high-quality alternatives to college. Specifically, they could call for a dramatic ramp-up of apprenticeships that allow young people to earn and learn at the same time.  

And instead of indulging utopian fantasies like the Green New Deal, Democrats should propose a realistically paced clean energy transition that doesn’t threaten working families with the abrupt loss of good production jobs, energy scarcity and higher fuel bills.  

Above all, they need to emulate Starmer’s pragmatism and success in putting his party back in “service to working people.” 

That’s how Harris and Walz can steer Democrats back to home port and win in November.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute.