On a chilly afternoon in central London, the battle for the US presidential election is being waged with no less fervour than if the campaigners were on the other side of the Atlantic.
Surrounded by posters for the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, volunteers at an office organised by Democrats Abroad have been hitting the phones, calling Americans living abroad, including wavering Republicans, to urge them to register to vote.
The event was just one that took place on a Day of Action at locations around the UK, estimated to be home to as many as 200,000 Americans.
By evening, the London activists had a surprise visit from Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the House of Representatives, who had originally been billed to join a zoom rally which was joined by other chapters based in locations ranging from Scotland to English university cities.
“Many of us have been living abroad for years, even decades, but we care deeply about what’s at stake back home and we also want it to be a place that we still recognise when we return, whether that’s a country where democracy has been preserved or even one that is still safe when it comes to the rights of women, our sisters and our daughters,” said Kristin Wolfe, Chair of Democrats Abroad UK and a resident in London since 2007.
The potential role of overseas Americans voters – who do not appear in national polls – should not be underestimated. In 2020 their votes made all the difference when it came to delivering the key swing states of Arizona and Georgia to Joe Biden.
With the race so tight and the stakes this high – Wolfe’s voice cracks as she insists that US democracy is imperilled in a way not seen since the American civil war – Harris supporters in the UK have raised their game.
At bus shelters in parts of London with higher concentrations of Americans you’ll find adverts placed strategically by the group. For the first time too, digital advertising aimed at the community is being deployed on Google.
There are also efforts to reach out and encourage voter registration face to face, such as at freshers’ fairs in Oxford. On other recent weekend afternoons, activists set up open-air tables in Hyde Park and at Marylebone Farmer’s Market in London to catch any passing Americans.
Among curious passersby who stopped at the market table was the British pop star, Harry Styles, although the singer is not known to have a US passport.
That said, Democrats in the UK have suddenly found a local celebrity of their own in the form of Matt Klaber, who was a student at the high school where Tim Walz once taught and who recently spoke in London at a “re-watch” of the vice-presidential debate.
Klaber – a London-based software engineer and Democratic activist – also played a role in Walz’s own political “origin story” when he took students to see a George W Bush campaign rally in 2004, only for some of them to be turned away by organisers who believed they were Democrats. The experience led Walz to seek public office.
One of those students was Klaber, who insists that Walz’s wholesome public persona is exactly true to the one he and others have long known in person.
“My earliest recollection of Tim is of being in the school library and seeing him rush out with his jacket and briefcase because he was being activated as a national guardsman who was going to help lead the response to some flooding,” he says.
“The whole campaign metaphor of being a coach might have been a bit foreign to me as I wasn’t necessarily into sports, but actually they’ve nailed it. He is everybody’s coach, whether it’s what he was doing when he was a teacher, what he did in 2004 when there was the incident at the rally, or what he’s doing now by stepping up.”
Efforts by Democrats Abroad UK to mobilise US voters in the UK and elsewhere are taking on a new urgency as registration deadlines loom for states including Wisconsin (16 October) and Pennsylvania (21 October).
So too are efforts to counter misinformation in the form of misleading claims by Donald Trump that Democrats were somehow preparing to “cheat” and that ballots were being sent overseas without proper checks.
“That’s just so blatantly false because the truth is that processes of the most rigorous kind are in place,” said Wolfe, who accuses Trump of seeking to intentionally confuse and mislead because he is concerned about the potential impact of overseas voters.
