Labour wants to help Harris but could hurt her

A month ago Donald Trump held a private dinner with Keir Starmer. On Tuesday Trump’s campaign filed a legal complaint alleging electoral interference by a few dozen volunteers from Starmer’s party.

So what? Labour wants to help Kamala Harris win. This won’t. Her campaign is well funded, well organised and on the right side of history, truth, human rights, probity, democracy, the rule of law and macroeconomics. Even so, it’s struggling – not just against a candidacy that stands for none of these things but against the plate tectonics of US social change (on which more below).

All that can be said of British involvement on the margins of the Harris campaign is that

• Trump will mine it for headlines;
• it could backfire in his favour as a result; and
• Britain must work with Trump if he wins.

What British involvement? The Trump claim is based on a now-deleted LinkedIn post by Labour’s head of operations, Sofia Patel, who wrote that “nearly 100” current and former party staff were travelling to North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia to help elect Harris. She urged others who were interested to email a “Labour for Kamala” address, adding: “[We] will sort out your housing.”

Trump’s campaign says (wrongly) this amounts to contributions from foreign actors, in violation of US campaign finance laws. Labour figures including Starmer say

• the staffers are volunteers travelling in their own time;
• there is precedent for such activities across the political spectrum; and
• it’s a dead cat strategy to distract from other news.

It is, but the US race is on a knife-edge. As Emily Thornberry, the senior Labour MP, noted: “I actually don’t think that British politicians going over to America and telling the Americans the way they should vote really helps.” As one Labour source told Tortoise: “It is an unbelievable fuck-up.”

The knife-edge. The excitement and momentum that propelled Harris into contention when she replaced Biden as the nominee seem to be fading. Her senior adviser, David Plouffe, told CNN it’s a “distinct possibility” the seven battleground states will come down to a point or less.

Warning signs. With such slim margins, hasty conclusions can be drawn from minor poll swings. But indications that Harris may fall short include

• a national poll lead that has dropped to 1.8 points, according to the FiveThirtyEight tracker, in an electoral college that in the last two cycles have favoured Republicans;
• swing state poll averages that now show Harris level in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada, and behind in North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona; along with
• memory of the 2016 and 2020 races when Donald Trump beat his poll numbers.

Political gravity. Harris must also surmount structural challenges and fix her messaging in Pennsylvania.

• Blue collar drift. The US middle class has shrunk in the past half-century. 61 per cent of households were on middle incomes in 1971 compared with 51 per cent last year. On Trump’s watch towards the end of this period the Republicans replaced the Democrats as the party of the white working class.
• Wrong track blues. A record share of registered voters (three quarters) say the next generation won’t be better off. Barely a quarter think the country’s headed in the right direction. College graduate earnings have grown by 95 per cent in real terms since 1989; non-college earnings have stayed broadly flat, and non-college graduates dominate overwhelmingly in red states.
• Blue wall squall. Harris’s messaging may not be working in must-win Pennsylvania. Her campaign ads focus on Trump as a threat to democracy, which came “dead last” among messages tested recently on the state’s voters by the Center for Working Class Politics, behind messages on jobs and the economy.

Veep stakes. 45 per cent of registered voters say the Biden presidency hurt them or their family compared with 25 per cent who say it helped, according to an NBC poll earlier this month. Trump’s numbers were essentially the reverse: 44 per cent say he helped, 31 per cent say he hurt. Harris is Biden’s VP.

Cheer up, though. She polls far better than Trump with women and on abortion rights, which according to the NBC poll is the single most powerful motivating issue in this election.