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Could US voters abroad decide the election?
Less than two weeks before the US presidential election, polls and projections are pointing to a photo finish. The New York Times has Democratic contender Kamala Harrisup a point over Republican Donald Trump, and both are within one or two points of each other in the seven battleground states that may decide the election.
While Harris enjoys an advantage in the Electoral College, according to 270 to Win, the 538 model has Trump winning 51 times out of 100 simulations compared to Harris’ 49 wins. The point? The race could come down to a few thousand votes in one county or another as control of the White House hangs in the balance.
With such a razor-thin margin, absentee ballots from Americans abroad (expats in Canada, we’re looking at you!) could prove decisive.
Millions of votes from abroad are up for grabs
According to the US Federal Voting Assistance Program, or FVAP, which helps citizens outside the country and those in the armed forces cast ballots, there are roughly 3 million eligible voters outside the US, though some scholars suggest there could be even more. Over 600,000 of them — a whopping 20% — are in Canada.
FVAP, however, estimates that a mere 7.8% of eligible voters cast a ballot from outside the US in 2020. Turnout was 8% from Canada and 9% from the UK.
In the fall of 2023, the US had just over 170,000 active duty military personnel stationed in 178 countries. In terms of raw numbers, the top five states of origin for troops are California, Texas, Florida, New York, and, crucially, the swing state of Georgia.
In 2020, over 40% of citizens covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), which includes members of the military and their families and US citizens living abroad, had a legal voting residence in three states: California, Florida, and Washington. Since 2016, the majority of these registered voters have been civilians rather than uniformed personnel.
Both parties want to reach voters abroad, but Dems have an advantage
In 2020, Joe Bidenbested Trump by over 4% in the popular vote and 74 Electoral College votes, but that win was closer than it seemed as the Democrats eked out victories in a few states with narrow margins. Biden’s win margin in Wisconsin was a mere 0.63% and an ultra-thin 0.23% in Georgia. The victory was reminiscent of Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by fewer than 80,000 votes in three battleground states.
This year, each campaign is working hard to get eligible voters to cast absentee ballots, which could prove decisive in swing states. In fact, both former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Obama-era US ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman think votes from abroad could determine the outcome of the presidential race, and they argue that Democrats should be out marshaling them.
Heyman says Americans in Canada alone could tilt the race, with nearly 606,000 Americans there eligible to vote, including plenty who can cast ballots in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Some Democrats are even going door to door in Windsor, Ontario, just across from Detroit, to mobilize US voters.
The purported Democratic advantage in voters abroad explains why the party is spending $300,000 to reach out to them through Democrats Abroad, which aims to register and help Americans outside the country vote — and to help elect Democrats.
The DNC says there are roughly 1.6 million Americans abroad who are eligible to vote in the seven swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Vote From Abroad says the majority of these voters are likely to be Democrats.
Democrats Abroad claims to have played a “pivotal” role in growing the vote from abroad in 2020 by 73.5% over 2016. “As a result, overseas votes made up the margin of victory for White House and Senate races in Georgia and Arizona” and were greater than Biden’s win margin in those same states, it says.
The group also says that since Biden stepped aside, registration by voters outside the US through the organization has increased 100% – a jump that could be decisive, especially if it is correct that roughly half the ballots requested in 2020 by voters abroad, excluding military personnel, were cast in swing states.
The GOP has its own program for voters abroad, Republican Overseas, which aims to identify and mobilize voters. While the Trump campaign has sought to appeal to this base by supporting “ending double taxation” for Americans working overseas, it’s also seeking to limit their votes (more on that below).
Kym Kettler, a spokesperson for the group, reminds us that overseas votes won George W. Bush the close 2000 race in Florida — and the White House — as a mere 537 overseas ballots tipped the scales for the Republicans.
Court challenges could complicate things
Trump is claiming, without evidence, that overseas votes are fraudulent and a threat to a free and fair election, suggesting the Democrats will use the UOCAVA to collect ballots without checking citizenship — which isn’t how it works.
With the Democrats at an expected advantage with votes from abroad, Republicans are challenging absentee voter laws, especially in swing states.
Noah Daponte-Smith, an analyst at Eurasia Group, says that Americans living abroad could absolutely make a difference in the presidential election in favor of Democrats, which is why Republicans are seeking changes to election rules.
“Republicans don’t want the vote from abroad to possibly mess up their route to the White House,” he says. “So there’s an effort to make it difficult for them to vote because that could be the margin."
Republicans have filed over 100 lawsuits aimed at raising the bar for voting from abroad — or having those votes counted. The measures they seek include requiring that ballots count only if received by Election Day, rather than being postmarked by that day.
New GOP suits in Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are taking aim at identity verification and eligibility requirements for voters abroad. But judges in Michigan and North Carolina shot down efforts to block some overseas votes in those states and rejected Republican claims of overseas voter fraud — while the judge in Michigan went so far as to call the suit an “attempt to disenfranchise” voters.
Experts are concerned that whether or not the lawsuits succeed, they may deprive voters since just casting doubt on the process for voters abroad may depress turnout and sow distrust in the result — which may be decided, one way or another, by votes from abroad.
An American Airlines aircraft flies past the U.S. Capitol before landing at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., January 24, 2022.
Hard Numbers: American Airlines fined over poor treatment, Millions of Canadians exposed to radon at home, McDonald’s tied to deadly E. coli outbreak, Mexico sees fatal shootout between troops and cartel members
50 million: American Airlines was fined $50 million by the US Transportation Department for allegedly mistreating passengers with disabilities. “The era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over,” US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday. His department said the airline committed “numerous serious violations” of laws protecting passengers with disabilities, at times resulting in injuries.
10 million: Over 10 million Canadians live in homes with high levels of dangerous radon gas, which can cause lung cancer, according to a new study. Radon is colorless and odorless — it also happens to be radioactive. The study found that roughly 18% of Canadian homes have levels of radon gas above what Health Canada designates as safe.
10: The McDonald’s quarter pounder has been linked to a fatal E. coli outbreak that’s spread across 10 states, killing one person in Colorado and leading at least 49 to fall ill — with 10 hospitalized. Federal health investigators are looking into the matter, and the fast-food giant has pulled its famed juicy burger from the menu at a fifth of its US locations.
19: Mexican troops killed 19 suspected members of the Sinaloa cartel in a shootout this week, the Ministry of Defense said Tuesday. This comes amid rising violence in the region since the arrest of cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in the US back in July.
A Japan Maritime Self-Defense Forces US-2 search-and-rescue amphibian plane, manufactured by ShinMaywa Industries Ltd, is seen in this updated handout photo released by the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Forces, and obtained by Reuters on November 4, 2013
US, Japan boost military ties
The United States and Japan announced Sunday that they will deepen defense cooperation in response to increasing threats from Russia and China. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Japanese counterparts Minoru Kihara and Yoko Kamikawaannounced the move in a joint statement following a meeting in Tokyo. The announcement builds on Japan’s 2022 commitment to boost defense spending to 2% of its GDP by 2027, which will make it the third-largest defense budget in the world.
Japan currently hosts 54,000 American troops, hundreds of US aircraft, and Washington’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier strike group. The new plan will reconstitute US forces in Japan into a joint force headquarters for better coordination. And for the first time, the two countries also discussed “extended deterrence,” meaning a US commitment to use nuclear force to deter attacks on allies.
Austin described the move as a “historic decision.” The two countries criticized Moscow’s “growing and provocative strategic military cooperation” with Beijing and labeled China’s “political, economic, and military coercion” the “greatest strategic challenge” facing the region and the world.
So far, there has been no official response from Moscow or Beijing, butpro-China media warn the deal will “put Tokyo in the front line of a counterattack from other countries, including a nuclear conflict” – a sensitive subject on the eve of the 72nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on Aug. 6 and 9.Cityscape of the Guanabara Bay at the peak of Corcovado Mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1 July 2019.
Hard Numbers: Brazil bets on tourists, Canada braces for flames, Biden beefs up bridges, Is Ottawa spending too much money?
3: Brazil has now, for the third time,prolonged visa-free entry for citizens of the US, Canada, and Australia. For years, Brazil’s visa policy has operated on the principle of reciprocity — “we ask of your citizens what you ask of ours” – but in 2019, the Bolsonaro administration scrapped that for the US and others to boost tourism. While current President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva pledged to reverse that decision, the flood of US tourists has made it a hard sell. Brasilia now says it’ll wait until next year at the earliest.
6,000: As Canada girds for another “catastrophic” summer wildfire season, Ottawa hasdoubled the tax credit for volunteer firefighters to $6,000. Last year was the country’s worst wildfire season on record, with blazes that displaced more than 230,000 people and sent smoke billowing across the US, blanketing major cities with smog for days at a time.
830 million: Speaking of governments spending money, the Biden administration announced Thursday that it has earmarked $830 million to make US infrastructure — roads, bridges, rails, and ports — more resilient to climate change. The money will go to 80 different projects across 37 states and territories.
59: Is the Canadian government spending too much money? Some 59% of Canadians think so, according to anew survey (carried out just in time for tax season!) The partisan divide is stark though — more than three-quarters of conservative voters said Ottawa is too loose with its cash, but just 30% of Liberal voters agreed.
People take cover from gunfire near the National Palace, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti March 21, 2024.
North Americans struggle to flee chaos in Haiti
Both the US and Canadian governments are facing challenges getting their citizens out of Haiti, and neither country seems to be making any headway toward a plan to reduce the chaos and violence in the Caribbean country.
The airport in Port-au-Prince has been closed since March 4, when heavily armed gangs attacked. The attack was repelled, but international carriers stopped providing service — leaving many foreigners stranded and fearful as gangs control the streets.
Both Canada and the US have resorted to helicopter flights to get people to the neighboring Dominican Republic. A spokesperson for Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Jolysaid Tuesday that 36 had been choppered out. Some Americans are exiting via harrowing helicopter flights as others fly out on commercial flights from the airport at Cap-Haitien, where the security situation is better than in the chaos-consumed capital.
There has been no progress in re-establishing security. A police force from Kenya has agreed to go in, but it can’t do so without a mandate from a functioning government, and the unelected prime minister announced he would resign under pressure after the airport attack. US Ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitmanon Tuesday said that the Kenyan police can’t go to Haiti until they are trained, the US sets up a base for them and the necessary structures are put in place to manage the finances for the mission.
The head of Unicef said Tuesday that 125,000 children are at risk of severe malnutrition unless order is soon restored.
There is no sign that the violence will come to an end without outside intervention. Former US Ambassador James B. Foley wrote in the Washington Postthis week that Biden may be forced to order a brief US intervention for humanitarian reasons, although he would surely rather stay out of it.
Are the US and Canada ready for wildfire season?
Last year marked the worst wildfire season ever recorded in Canada as 18.5 million hectares of land burned — shattering the previous record of 10 million hectares in 1989. Those fires accounted for 23% of global wildfire carbon emissions in 2023. They also sent toxic smoke throughout the country and into the US, putting the health and safety of Americans at risk.
At one point, New York City had the worst air quality in the world as Americans were exposed to more smoke per person than ever before. The smoke, which reached as far as Florida, also put US crops at risk.
This year might be as bad — or worse — which means that domestic and cross-border policies for fighting fires will be more important than ever.
An early start to the wildfire season. Last week, Alberta declared an early start to the wildfire season. Dry conditions and warm weather brought about the premature arrival – roughly ten days ahead of the typical season. This comes as the province faces water shortages and prepares for a severe drought atop predictions of a dangerous fire season for the province.
Meanwhile, zombie fires continue to burn both there and in British Columbia — more than 150 of them never went out last year and managed to stay alight throughout the winter. Experts say the scale of the problem is unprecedented.
South of the border, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillendeclared a state disaster on Monday as wildfires threatened residents near North Platte, mobilizing the National Guard to fight the blazes. Compared to Canada, the US wildfire season in 2023 was modest, but experts warned the calm could be atypical.
The year is barely underway and the US has already witnessed a record-setting fire. Texas on Thursday was battling the second-largest wildfire in US history and the largest, most destructive fire in the state’s history. The deadly, vast blaze, which began on Monday, has since spread across over one million acres.
Worse years to come. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires as the same hot, dry conditions that have started the season early in Alberta make them more likely to start and harder to fight year after year. The coming seasons will approach or break records, with the US set to face the effects from both domestic wildfires and Canadian counterparts. In 2023, summer warnings pointed to a heavy year for both countries as “unprecedented” fires raged and spewed smoke across the border.
In January, observers were already worrying about the 2024 fire season in Canada, citing a combination of climate change and the El Niño effect, which will produce conditions favorable for wildfires. Last year was the hottest on record for the world, and as routinely warmer years are set to be the norm experts are calling for proactive, cooperative policy responses across borders.
Cross-border cooperation remains resilient. For years, Canada and the US have managed to cooperate on shared concerns — even during times of political challenges.
“Regardless of the politics, cross-border cooperation between provinces and states, and between agencies and departments of both federal governments, is good and seamless regardless of the political leaders in power," says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s global macro-geopolitics practice.
The cooperation, Thompson says, is thanks to a “seamless and well-rehearsed order of operations.” The two countries even managed to keep that cooperation up and running during the Trump years, which were, to say the least, fraught.
Recently, the need for cross-border efforts to manage disasters has grown. As the fires raged and smoke blanked much of the continent last summer, Natural Resources Canada and the US Departments of the Interior and Agriculture signed a memo of understanding committing them to enhanced cooperation in fighting wildfires. They pledged to focus on building out a framework for mutual assistance, cooperation, and procedures for resource sharing. That work is ongoing.
A few weeks earlier, in an interview with the CBC, Canada’s then-minister of public safety and emergency preparedness Bill Blair said he’d spoken with the head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) about better cooperation between the two countries, including the potential for “a NORAD-like approach,” noting that emergencies including floods, earthquakes, and wildfires were “borderless.”
At the same time, Canada — which doesn’t have a central, national disaster management agency — was also considering creating its own version of FEMA. Since then, discussion of those options has fallen off the radar (sure to return before long), but the US and Canada are nonetheless prepared to cooperate across the border to fight fires in 2024, guided by the Arrangement on Mutual Assistance in Fighting Forest Fires.
Gordon Sachs of the US Forest Service says the arrangement is “fully in place” and “has no end date.” The origins of the deal, which allows the US and Canada to share expertise and operations capacities to fight fires, stretches back to 1982. Sachs points out that since the 1980s, Canada and the US have provided fire fighting resources to one another in 37 of 40 years.
The newly-enhanced arrangement will take things further. Sachs says the 2023 renewal “goes beyond fire suppression to include training, research, and post-fire activities such as rehabilitation and restoration of burned areas.”
Whatever the 2024 fire season brings, US-Canadian cooperation on disasters, including wildfires, will likely increase in years to come. Climate change is already exacerbating natural disasters and their effects, many of which, as Blair noted, are borderless. Changes in the US administration in 2024 could prove a challenge at the worst possible time, but if past is prologue, there’s reason to believe cross-border cooperation on disaster responses will remain reliable.
America, you need to trust your nurses
When I first read the new Gallup poll about Americans’ trust in various professions, three people immediately came to mind: Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
I’ll explain in a moment, but first let me tell you about the survey, which asks US voters to evaluate the honesty and ethics of about two dozen trades.
This year’s edition shows darkening American views of just about every single profession – from shrinks to stockbrokers, clergy to chiropractors.
Even usually well-regarded professions like doctors, pharmacists, and police officers suffered drops of nearly 10 points in recent years. And for the first time, members of Congress are now in dead last place, seen as highly ethical by just 6% of Americans. That’s even worse than those lemon-slinging perennial bottom-dwellers: car salespeople.
But what really jumped out at me was the nurses.
The good news is that they’re still, for two decades running now, the most trusted profession. Close to 80% of Americans see them as highly ethical.
The bad news is, the broader crisis of trust in experts and professionals in America is so severe that even nurses have taken a hit of six points since 2019. Yes, since 2019. The same 2019 that gave its name to a pandemic that taxed medical professionals so severely that more than 100,000 nurses left their jobs due to COVID-19 burnout.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of person who wouldn’t think of nurses in a positive light. Jack Nicholson in the care of Nurse Ratched? Fine. Whatever that guy’s name is who is getting hobbled by Kathy Bates’ in “Misery,” OK. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, whose 1992 line on the Wu-Tang debut about “sticking pins in your head like a nurse” echoes a diabolical Nation of Islam story about the origin of the races? I get it.
In fairness, the poll was conducted in the wake of news about that nurse in Pennsylvania who killed people with insulin shots, or the one at Yale who stole IVF patients’ pain meds. But let’s be honest: There will always be a few Annie Wilkeses for every thousand Flo Nightingales.
And here’s the thing, America – you really need to trust nurses. Why? Because America is a rapidly graying country that really needs nurses.
What better reminder of this than this year’s presidential election, in which there will be only two choices: elect the oldest president in history or elect the second oldest president in history.
But it’s not just our presidents who are getting older. When people say “40 is the new 30,” it’s no metaphor. Since 1980, the median age in America has actually risen by a full decade to 40, the highest in American history.
Over the next three decades, the population of Americans over 65 will rise by nearly 50%, taking the silver-haired set from 17% to 23% of the population overall, according to the Population Reference Bureau.
That’s a time bomb for entitlement programs like social security, but it’s also an alarm bell for nurses in hospitals and homes who will have to care for an aging America.
Are there enough nurses on call? The US Bureau of Labor says 275,000 additional nurses will need to be trained and hired between now and 2030.
Insufficient funding for nurse education, as well as burnout from punishing work shifts at cost-conscious hospitals, are making it harder to find those people.
An outdated and broken immigration system isn’t helping – 15% of nurses are foreigners, but last year the State Department had to cap new visa applications because decades-old quotas had been reached.
And for the techno-optimists in the crowd, this doesn’t seem like a problem that automation can solve. Nurses are like barbers, physical therapists, teachers, or prostitutes: professionals with unique skills and a personal touch that absolutely no sane person wants replaced by robots. Polls show that 80% of Americans agree – nurses are safe.
Which is a good thing. After all, would you trust a robot to change your bedpan?
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testifies before a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., October 31, 2023.
The US is being coy about how it will handle Iran
Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin on Thursday signaled that the US was on the verge of retaliating against Iran-backed militias over the deaths of three service members in Jordan. But the Pentagon chief also repeatedly emphasized that Washington will aim to avoid taking actions that could raise the already feverish temperature in the region amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Still, many questions remain about when and how the US will respond – including whether it will directly target Iranian assets or personnel, as some reporting suggests.
What’s the holdup? The US is seemingly not eager to take hasty actions that could risk sparking a wider war. “There are ways to manage this so it doesn’t spiral out of control, and that’s been our focus,” Austin said Thursday.
The US could also be giving Iran and its proxies time to pull commanders from areas likely to be targeted. If the Biden administration wants to avoid a war, it would make sense to abstain from killing people of high importance to Tehran. But Austin dodged a question on whether the US was “telegraphing about strikes,” and underscored that Washington has “not described what our response is going to be.”
So, what do we know? The Biden administration says its response will occur in phases. Whatever happens next, it won’t be a one-off.
We also know that Iran, like the US, is not interested in going to war. But it’s also warned that it will respond to any US attacks.
It seems that we should brace ourselves for a series of tit-for-tat hits in which both sides attempt to save face while stopping short of any moves that could set the entire region on fire – figuratively and literally.