In 2024, the Labour Party won an enormous majority in the House of Commons. In a climate in which liberal parties are losing ground to populist, right-wing parties, the result has been viewed as a road map for left-of-center parties to return to electoral success.

One of the chief architects of this campaign was Deborah Mattinson, who had argued that Labour needed to win back its traditional base of voters in the old industrial parts of England who had abandoned the party in favor of the Conservative Party in 2019.

This shift in voting behavior mirrors a realignment occurring in the United States, in which white working-class voters in the industrial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin who once voted for Democrats have left the Democratic Party in droves and are now reliably voting for Republicans.

Mattinson is set to brief the Harris campaign next week, according to Politico, as the Democratic ticket seeks to strengthen its path to 270 electoral votes and the White House. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan are all must-win states for the Democratic ticket. But the Labour playbook that led the party to victory in July is hardly replicable in the U.S. Not to mention, the U.K. party failed to win back those same voters it had sought to regain.

For the Democratic Party, the result of the 2024 U.K. general election is more of a cautionary tale than a model to emulate. In 2017, Labour received 40% of the national vote and won 262 seats, enough to deny the Conservative Party a full majority but not enough to form a governing coalition. Two years later, the party’s share of the vote collapsed to 32% for a total of 10.2 million votes and 202 seats as the Conservatives won a landslide majority.

In 2024, the party won 411 seats, suggesting that the party drastically increased its support among the public. But the number of seats hardly tells the whole story. Labour only secured a 33.7% share of the national vote, a marginal increase from its landslide loss five years prior. In fact, that marginally higher vote share actually came with fewer votes than in 2019. Effectively, the Labour Party doubled the number of seats it had held by getting 500,000 fewer votes than it did in the previous election. In short, the story of the election was the collapse in support for the Conservative Party, not an increase in support for Labour.

On top of all that, Labour failed to regain the support of working-class voters, many of whom turned to the upstart Reform U.K. party, led by populist firebrand Nigel Farage.

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For Harris, this model is hardly one worth emulating. For one, the Republican Party does not suffer the liabilities with its own base that the Conservative Party had this year. There are no indications that the Republican Party’s vote share is going to decline at all from 2020, while the Democratic ticket is extremely unlikely to equal President Joe Biden’s 81 million vote total. Additionally, former President Donald Trump is polling better today than he has in any election prior, including the one he won in 2016.

The working-class voters of the Rust Belt are already gone from the Democratic Party. The only question that remains is how many of them will show up for Trump on Election Day. Turning Labour’s accidental victory in the United Kingdom into a playbook for the Harris campaign will do little to change that.