Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris has hired a prominent socialist strategist to advise her 2024 campaign.
Vice President Harris is bringing in Deborah Mattinson, a top advisor to the U.K.’s ruling far-left Labour Party.
According to Politico, Mattinson will advise Harris and her campaign in the final weeks running up to Election Day.
Mattinson, a top adviser to recently elected U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is set to travel to Washington, D.C. next week.
She will hold meetings with strategists for the Harris-Walz campaign, according to Politico.
Mattinson will brief the strategists on how Starmer and the Labour Party secured the prime minister seat in July, the outlet reported.
Labour is a left-wing party affiliated with the Party of European Socialists.
The party is responsible for many of the socialist policies installed in the U.K. in the 1960s.
Those policies, many of which still linger today, are credited with severely weakening the once-dominant British pound over the years.
A former colleague who worked alongside Mattinson on Labour’s campaign told Politico that Mattinson wants to put the “‘hope and change stuff’ to one side” and keep Harris focused on appealing to undecided swing state voters.
Mattinson is not the only Starmer aide to meet with Harris’s team, Politico reported.
Some of the prime minister’s closest aides made a trip to the Democratic National Convention where they met with Harris’s team, according to the outlet.
Those aides include Starmer’s head of political strategy Morgan McSweeney and communications director Matthew Doyle.
As Harris reportedly looks to lean on the European socialists for advice, the vice president has yet to define her policy platform and participate in any unscripted moments.
More than a month into her presidential campaign, Harris’s campaign has yet to post a policy platform on its website.
By contrast, the Trump campaign features the Republican National Committee’s platform as its own.
On August 16, the vice president put forth one policy platform.
The platform included her widely mocked economic policy.
Harris also said she is for “no tax on tips,” a prominent campaign message first adopted by the Trump campaign.
Anonymous campaign aides have moved to reverse Harris’s previous stances on a series of issues.
During her failed 2019 run for the White House in the 2020 Democrat primary, Harris previously endorsed a ban on fracking, supported mandatory federal gun buybacks, and the abolition of private health insurance.
Since hitting the 2024 presidential campaign trail, her aides claim that Harris supports a ban on “assault weapons” without requiring owners to sell them to the federal government.
She apparently no longer wants to ban fracking and doesn’t want a single-payer health care system according to The New York Times.
However, Harris is unable to explain why her position changed, and even claims they remain the same.
The vice president skipped around questions on her aides flip-flopping during her first sit-down interview with CNN.
“Generally speaking, how should voters look at some of the changes that you’ve made that you explained some of here in your policy?” CNN’s Dana Bash asked.
“Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information?” she continued as she tried to lead Harris.
“Is it because you were running for president in a Democratic primary, and should they feel comfortable that what you’re saying now is going to be your policy moving forward?”
“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is that my values have not changed,” Harris began.
“You mentioned the Green New Deal.
“I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.
“We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act,” she continued.
“We have set goals for the United States of America, and by extension, the globe around when we should meet certain standards for reducing house gas emissions, as an example, that value has not changed.”
