For me it started about a year ago, when Joe Trippi and the Dean campaign figured out how to use the internets. If you thought Dean's use of meetup.com did wonderful things for his campaign in the United States, you should have seen what it did among the six million Americans living overseas: Meetups worked just as well in Sydney and Melbourne as they did in Philly or Phoenix, and for a short while in early 2004 the Australia branch of Expats for Dean was larger and more active than the Democratic Party itself here.
When the Dean grassroots turned into Democracy for America, his team Down Under took a more direct approach: We merged with, and largely became, the Australia chapter of Democrats Abroad. Dean organizers became Dems Abroad officers, and the meetups continued under a new banner; riding the momentum of the primary campaign, and the enthusiasm among Democrats to take our country back, Democrats Abroad Australia grew from a paper list of 50 names to over 300 active and involved members.
Democrats Abroad Australia now has chapters in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, and members in Alice Springs, Darwin, Tasmania and throughout the continent. With over 100,000 Americans living Down Under — the sixth-largest population of U.S. citizens outside America — we've registered thousands of overseas Americans to vote and helped with hundreds of absentee ballot issues. Unlike our counterparts, Democrats Abroad is a real branch of the Democratic Party (Republicans Abroad is a 527!); we sent Kerry delegates to the national convention in Boston, and we're treated just like any other state or local committee.
In some ways it's harder to participate in the Kerry campaign from abroad: We can't drive over to a swing state and help out, although we did send a guy to Nevada, and those wacky folks in the Melbourne chapter are actually planning to phone bank on Election Day. From Melbourne!
But the things that we can do, we're doing. Our work to GOTV among absentee voters is essentially done now; with support from sites like OverseasVote2004.com, we know we helped over 5,000 Americans Down Under request their absentee ballots. Between handing out leaflets, setting up voter registration booths (and boy did that get a lot of strange looks — a booth in downtown Sydney, Australia, for registering Americans to vote!), and fielding hundreds of questions from anxious voters awaiting their ballots in the mail, we helped to deliver the overseas vote for John Kerry.
And we can raise money.
Tanya Plibersek is a Member of Parliament for the Australian Labor Party, who are roughly the Democrat-equivalents on the Aussie political scene; she spoke to a room of about 120 enthusiastic Kerry supporters about the importance of this election and its effect on U.S.-Australian relations.
…and here's me, talking about the polls. You can see I'm relying on Electoral-Vote.com in the background, along with lots of information I've found on Daily Kos and other sites…
…which, with the help of my trusty iBook, I showed to the audience. Thanks to the wonders of downloadable video clips, we played Barack Obama's keynote speech, the new Eminem video, and the RNC in 90 seconds clip, as well as several dozen zingers from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show.
At the end of the night we ended up raising over $5,000 that went directly to the Kerry campaign, and about $1,600 that will stay here in Australia and help us plan for 2006 and 2008. We're already talking about adopt-a-candidate programs for the midterm elections, what worked this year that we can use again in four years… and, of course, we're planning our all-day victory celebration, when the results start coming in at 10am Wednesday local time.