In the late summer of 2023, a small group of American and British political strategists sat down for dinner at a restaurant in London’s Marylebone neighborhood.
On the menu: French cuisine and political anxiety.
The gathering included several key Labour Party officials and two outspoken American centrists, Matt Bennett and Josh Freed, both leaders of the think tank Third Way. Conversation quickly turned to Labour’s political messaging, which remained fuzzy even as the ruling Conservatives flailed in the polls.
As good as things looked for Labour, there had been some unsettling political misses — most notably, a by-election for Boris Johnson’s west London seat that Labour lost in an upset, largely because of backlash against local policies discouraging the use of cars.
Was it time, some party officials wondered, to itemize a more precise governing agenda, to make it harder for the Tories to brand them with a radical caricature?
Freed and Bennett responded with one voice: Don’t do it.
It would not solve any of Labour’s problems to churn out reams of well-intentioned white papers, they said; on the contrary, presenting that kind of policy library would just offer the Conservatives countless tiny targets to shoot at. Not long after the dinner, Bennett recalled citing the 2016 U.S. election as a proof point.
“I pointed out that Hillary’s campaign had 290 or so policy ideas on their website; Trump had seven,” Bennett said, perhaps exaggerating, but not by much.
For an overall message, the Americans advised Labour: Keep it simple, keep it safe — just as Joe Biden did in 2020.
It was soothing advice for members of Labour’s brain trust, most of whom were already inclined to campaign in welcoming generalities rather than crisp plans. Their chief aim was to return the party to the political mainstream and remind voters every day that the Conservatives had been in charge for ages and the country was a wreck.
That is precisely what Labour has done, and nine months later the party appears poised for a smashing victory in a July 4 snap election called by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Labour has articulated a broadly aspirational agenda, grounded in themes of economic opportunity, national renewal and seething public contempt for the depleted Tories. According to the polls, the main question is not whether Labour will win, but whether the Conservatives will be annihilated or merely thrashed.
Even if Biden-style politics carries the day on July 4, Labour should be careful about putting too much stock in that American playbook.
In fact, they should probably discard it on July 5.
The feeble state of Biden’s reelection campaign is a testament to the limits of his political methods, and an object lesson in why Labour should not follow his example past Election Day. What worked for Biden in 2020 — offering himself to a wide community of voters as a safe harbor amid the gales of Trumpism — has failed him badly as president. His party is taking a staggering risk by putting its faith in that approach again.
The reasons why Bidenism isn’t working must be as apparent to British political professionals as they are to American voters. Having amassed a large electoral majority of people opposed to Donald Trump, Biden never fully cemented them into an affirmatively pro-Biden coalition. He campaigned on confident promises to take on the great crises of our time — the Covid pandemic, climate change, racial injustice — but has never put much effort, during the election or since, into telling voters what that might actually mean for their lives. Few voters credit the Biden administration with the colossal policy victories it has achieved.
And after winning the presidency as a calming and grandfatherly figure, Biden quickly shrank into a less appealing persona: the remote old man.
That last problem is one that Labour does not need to worry about. The likely next prime minister, Keir Starmer, is belittled in Britain as a scripted and wooden speaker. Next to Biden, the 61-year-old Starmer looks like John F. Kennedy or Tony Blair.
Yet Labour faces an even more perilous challenge than the one Democrats have confronted in closing the gap between vaulting campaign rhetoric and the implementation and salesmanship of policy. The condition of the U.K. — its government finances, health care system, public infrastructure and global competitiveness — is by any measure far grimmer than that of Joe Biden’s America.
The next government there will not be jousting over whether to spend $1 trillion or $6 trillion on a transformational economic agenda, as Biden’s Democrats did in 2021 and 2022. It will be trying to figure out whether there is any spare change in the treasury to pay for any of the social improvements the electorate is desperate to see.
In that context, Biden’s political predicament right now looks even more piteous. He has an imposing record to campaign on, one that no Labour prime minister can realistically expect to amass in the coming years. But most Americans experience Biden as a spectral presence. They do not hear him speaking to their immediate concerns — the cost of living, most of all — if they hear him speaking at all.
The president and his aides point back endlessly to the dark days of his 2020 campaign, accusing the media of writing Biden off now as it did when Bernie Sanders was steamrolling over him in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, before the Democratic campaign turned upside down in South Carolina.
I don’t know any journalist, actually, who thinks that Biden can’t win in November. He is running against one of the most reviled people in American political history. A low-risk, low-energy campaign worked once for Biden. It might work again, especially if Donald Trump is a felon by the fall.
But it is difficult, looking at the American campaign today, to see the Biden approach as a model for any country’s next generation. Labour’s likely victory on those terms looks less like a vision of the political future than an image from a faraway place that has traveled across galactic distances to arrive, light years later, in an America where our version of the same political moment is long over. It is a mirage.
At the Third Way-Labour Party dinner in Marylebone last year, Biden was not the only American mentioned as a political model.
When I spoke to Bennett and Freed last year about the gathering, I asked if they had mentioned anyone else as a useful American template for 21st-century center-left politics — someone, perhaps, like Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the former intelligence operative-turned-moderate lawmaker who is now running for governor of Virginia.
The two men laughed at the question. They had pointed Labour to one person besides Biden as an American model, and it was Spanberger.
She has been, at times, a tart critic of Bidenism, declaring after Democrats’ defeats in the 2021 off-year elections that the president was trying to govern as Franklin Roosevelt when no one elected him to remake the country. Bennett held her up as a forceful communicator for Democratic values.
“We did point to her as somebody who has been particularly effective at communicating in poetry,” Bennett said, “but in ways that don’t feel like she’s evading the question.”
Labour has campaigned not quite in poetry but at least in vivid themes. Britain’s electorate looks ready to reward them for it.
We will find out soon if the party is better prepared than Biden to answer the hard questions that come with power.
Amanda Smith is a dedicated U.S. correspondent with a passion for uncovering the stories that shape the nation. With a background in political science, she provides in-depth analysis and insightful commentary on domestic affairs, ensuring readers are well-informed about the latest developments across the United States.
