Labour will face the same fury that drove the Democrats out of office and handed the White House to Donald Trump if they ignore the biggest worries of ordinary voters, senior party figures have warned.

They say Sir Keir Starmer and his team turn a blind eye to the lessons of the US election at their peril. Labour must tackle voters’ anxieties about key issues including the cost of living and immigration and not just “obscure causes”.

Former Labour cabinet Minister Liam Byrne said: “The scale of President Trump’s emphatic re-election is not just a shock; it’s a warning to Labour and the European Left.”

A US-wide survey of more than 120,000 Americans found around nine in 10 were concerned about the cost of groceries, with about eight in 10 worried about housing or petrol costs. There are fears Labour will be punished if it ignores the “money worries” of everyday Brits.

Mr Byrne said voters in the North and the Midlands felt their regions had been “left behind” as the South of England grew wealthier.

He said: “If we don’t address this, we too will face the kind of populist surge that brought Trump back into office.”

There is anxiety in Labour circles the party will take a hammering from Reform UK – led by veteran Brexiteer and Trump ally Nigel Farage – unless it addresses worries about high levels of immigration.

Former Labour foreign minister Kim Howells warned: “The idea that you shouldn’t be concerned with how many people you let in is madness.”

He cautioned that Labour ignores Reform at its “extreme peril”.

And a Labour MP in a former industrial heartland seat said: “Nigel Farage’s party is especially dangerous for us. People with strong memories of the miners’ strike and the most painful moments of the Thatcher era will always struggle to vote Conservative but Reform has none of that baggage.”

Urging Labour to focus on the cost of living, the MP said: “The Democrats are about to be cast out of power because they ignored the concerns of working people who struggled to pay the bills at the end of the month. If we ignore people’s money worries the wave that humiliated Kamala Harris could sweep Keir Starmer out of Downing Street.”

Reform deputy leader Richard Tice predicted that a similar democratic revolt to the one in the US will come to the UK.

He said: “For far too long establishment politicians have ignored and mocked working people on both sides of the pond for being worried about immigration and the cost of living.

“There has been a reckoning in America with Donald Trump’s victory and in 2029 we will see people in the United Kingdom send that same message by voting Reform in record numbers.

“Labour and the Tories, just like the Democrats, have ignored normal British people for far too long and have become too comfortable in their metropolitan bubble.”

Former Labour minister John Spellar said voters cared about issues such as the cost of living, crime and whether services provided by both the public and private sector worked properly.

He said: “The big lesson is that people want a government that works for them, respects them and doesn’t just focus on obscure causes.

“The public are fair-minded but they feel they need to be listened to, and if the system isn’t doing that then they will look for someone who at least gives the impression of listening.”

Rachael Maskell – a Labour MP who is a leading critic of the decision to restrict winter fuel payments to all but the poorest pensioners – said Labour must “heed the warning signs and ensure that the needs of left-behind communities are met now and in the future”.

She said the Government must “address immediate need” and close the “inequality gap” so people are lifted out of poverty. A priority for her is ending the two-child benefit cap.

The scale of Mr Trump’s victory over Ms Harris took many commentators by surprise because pollsters had suggested the election was on a knife-edge.

This has triggered memories of how “shy Tories” and “shy Brexiteers” are reluctant to tell people who they intend to support but turn out to vote in large numbers.

Pollster Andrew Hawkins, who founded ComRes and now leads Whitestone Insight, said: “We do not yet understand why and how the polls failed to see the scale of support for Donald Trump, but if politicians attack not only their opponents but call their supporters ‘deplorable’ or ‘garbage’, they should not be surprised that insulting their opponents’ supporters makes them reluctant to admit how they will vote.”

Warning against demonising rivals, he said: “The US election shows that if you call your opponent ‘Hitler’ and catastrophise about the impact of them winning, you make it impossible to have open, calm discourse about the merits of each party’s political offer.

“Play the man and not the ball and you play blind. Twice now Donald Trump has won against female candidates going hard against him on Left-obsessive issues like abortion and twice American voters have said that they want a president who will make them better off economically.”

Patrick Basham, founding director of the Democracy Institute, said the “shy Trump voter” is a “very real phenomena in American politics”.

He claimed US pollsters had missed out “older, working class men and women in rural America who simply will not be polled or when polled hesitate to provide candid answers”.