The intense US presidential election four years ago was decided by tens of thousands of votes in just three states.
As the bitter 2024 campaign enters its final stages, party organizers are looking to Canada as a new source of votes to determine who will hold the keys to the White House.
Opinion polls show Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in a tight race, with both sides courting as many as 700,000 voters in the North.
“In 2020, Joe Biden won the Presidency by a margin of 45,000 votes out of more than 160 million voters. Just 45,000 votes in three battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin made the difference. These numbers are very small,” said Bruce Heyman, former U.S. ambassador to Canada.
“When you start looking at the groups of votes that could influence this election, all signs point to both the election and the battlegrounds being effectively evenly matched, with a small number of votes being the deciding factor. “It’s possible. The country with the greatest voting potential is Canada,” he said.
The United States’ use of an electoral system that allocates presidential votes in such a way that certain states have great political influence is an attempt to gain an advantage in races that are likely to be decided by the fewest number of states. It has become a focus for both Democratic and Republican activists. margin.
Of the estimated 2.3 million U.S. voters overseas, about 700,000 live in Canada. And with elections decided by a small number of votes in several key states, organizers are targeting every voter they can find.
Three major states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, are close to Canada and have a higher proportion of residents living across the border than other battleground states.
Heyman, an Illinois native, has been working with a cadre of volunteers working to ensure Harris’ victory. They have ramped up their efforts in the past three months, doing outreach in border cities such as Windsor, Ont., putting up billboards, visiting college campuses and “doing whatever they can to enroll as many people as possible.” doing something.
“This is going to be very close,” Heyman said. “But we won’t know until the end whether those efforts have paid off. You never know what will work. We need to use different strategies with Americans living overseas. There’s no directory to look at to find them. We really don’t know where they are.”
Americans abroad often have different voting intentions than those at home, and “local issues drive local votes,” Heyman said.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign promises included halting aid to Ukraine in its war effort and launching the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history, leading him to push the U.S. back into an era of protectionism. There are concerns that this could have a significant impact on trade. Our largest partner is Canada.
President Trump previously said his team was “very dissatisfied” with the content and “negotiating style” of Canada’s trade envoy in negotiating the new North American Free Trade Agreement.
Canada has its own protectionist policies that support dairy farmers by imposing heavy taxes on cheese and milk imports, likely making it a new target for the second Trump administration.
“I certainly didn’t think much about how domestic elections would impact a place like Canada,” said Austin Pettigrew, who moved to Toronto in 2021. “But right now, everyone here is talking about the election. And there’s a sense of powerlessness that people here feel they have no stake in the outcome. If you tell them you sent in an absentee ballot, thank you. Some people even do it for me.”
Mr. Pettigrew will be voting in New York state, which has an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters in the presidential election. “I know it’s not going to determine the outcome. But I feel like it’s important to vote, and oddly enough, it feels even more important to live in Canada.”
Michael Santema, a Toronto resident who voted for Joe Biden in the last election, said the president’s decision not to support Kamala Harris’ candidacy gave him “a feeling of hope and excitement that we could actually win.”
But that optimism is tempered by an acknowledgment of the sober math Democrats will need to win.
“Voting matters. The states that are swing states now weren’t swing states eight years ago. And the lessons I learned from 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost, “No matter how sure you were, you should vote,” he said.
Santema, whose state will vote in California, acknowledged that even if Trump were to win a second term, living in Canada would make it easier to accept the election results.
“But I was nervous and just had a feeling of fear,” he said. “I look forward to knowing the outcome and seeing this end.”
This article was amended on November 1, 2024 to clarify that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are close to Canada.
