Why, you may ask, would Rye News, a super-local newspaper, choose to run a story on the 2024 US presidential election? Why might Rye readers care? Good questions. One answer. There are by my reckoning (using 2021 US census figures and 2020 US voting patterns as templates) 200,000 US citizens living in the UK, a handful of that number living in and around Rye. You may be one of them.
154,000 of those 200,000 are eligible to vote. Only 77,000 likely will. Their votes — given 2020 tallies — will likely be split 60% “blue”, 40% “red”.
Based on a 2024 survey, US ex-pats (college-educated, higher earners, wider worldviews) lean Democrat. Say 45,000 votes for Harris then. Just 0.03% of all US registered voters. Not a cohort. Not even a sliver. A mere dot.
Why then would an 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi (US Senator for California, Speaker Emerita of the US House of Representatives, and knee-capper of Joe Biden’s bid for re-election) make an eleven-hour flight from her west-coast home and show up — in person — at the London offices of Democrats Abroad to host their October 13 nationwide zoom-rally to court their vote? Because, US citizen or not you are probably tired of being reminded, the outcome of this year’s US presidential election is a “toss-up”.
Ancient Roman augurs, the guys who cut up chickens and foretold the future, may have had a better track-record than US pollsters in 2016 did. Those high-priests (CNN, ABC et al) called the race for Clinton. Did they ever get it wrong.
This time around (with battered professional reputations and wavering big-spending clients at stake) pollsters are hedging their bets. Their prediction? “Too close to call”. Maybe they’ve turned chicken too.
A clearer indication of how “razor-thin” the margins are in the 2024 race is a map of where the candidates are spending their final campaign days (and their millions of campaign dollars): Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina – the “swing” states. There’s a whole popular vote thing versus electoral vote thing going on there which, if you buy me a pint, I will be happy to bore you with details of. (And you thought Conservative leadership contests and Vatican papal elections were arcane?)
Here’s the thing though, you 77,000 US ex-pats living in Rye, in London, or lost in Scottish mists somewhere, this time around your absentee vote might actually count. Depending on where you last lived in the US. (If you last lived in Congressional District 2 of Nebraska and haven’t yet voted get on a plane. Now.)
I have already voted. (Full disclosure. I am a US / UK joint citizen. I am also an Irish citizen but that’s another story.)
Here’s how I did it. I emailed the town clerk of the US town I last lived in (Nantucket, Mass). I requested an absentee ballot. 24-hours later that ballot landed in my in-box. I printed it out. I checked the boxes. I signed the affidavit. And re-sent it. 24-hours later Nantucket’s town clerk, bless her stern civic heart, emailed me an acknowledgement.
If you, US ex-pat eligible voter residing in the UK, living in or the environs of Rye, feel moved to do what I have just done it may not be too late.
Each US state, county, city, town has its own particular registration rules. (We, the US that is, are a continuing experiment are we not?)
Click on vote.org (non-partisan) or https://www.democratsabroad.org/uk (decidedly partisan but big tent) to see how and when you may be able cast your vote.
Me? I’ll be watching live on CNN on the sixth of November here in my house on High Street from 3 am onwards. Feel free – be you red be, be you blue — to join me. Door’s open. My hometown of Nantucket may be three thousand miles away but the future of one of my countries still means much to me.
Image Credits: Free Malaysia Today/AP CC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, NARA and DVIDS Public Domain Archive https://www.dvidshub.net/ CC , Gage Skidmore CC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.
To many of us who have very strong links to the USA but who retain British citizenship, it matters greatly and should do to most people in the UK where the consequences could be significant.
Excellent and informative article – Thank you