On March 23, 2020, news arrived that Bernie Sanders had scored his biggest percentage-term victory so far in the US Democrats’ presidential primary season, winning almost 58% of the vote (and nine of 13 delegates) in the Democrats Abroad (DA) Global Presidential Primary. By the time this news was released, 13 days after the contest concluded, public and private life in the United States was fully focused on Covid-19; therefore, the results garnered little attention. Yet, whatever its impact on the presidential race, for the Democrats, the far-flung contest marked a success in terms of voter mobilization. The 40,000 votes cast represented a 15% increase compared to 2016. This was a major organizational accomplishment, even if these voters were only a fraction of the more than 3 million voting-eligible US nonresidents.Footnote ¹

The DA is one of two major partisan organizations dedicated to reaching out to this global electorate. In an era of many differences between the main US parties, perhaps it is no surprise that these organizations differ profoundly in both their legal status and relations with their parent parties. The DA is a suborganization of the Democratic Party, with seats on the Democratic National Committee and a status similar to that of a state party. In 2020, the DA used a Global Presidential Primary for the fourth time to allocate its pledged delegates to the Democrats’ presidential nominating convention. The primary was open to all adult US citizens living abroad who support the Democratic Party.Footnote ²

The DA’s Republican counterpart is the Republicans Overseas (RO). Unlike the DA, the RO is not a party subunit. Instead, it is a registered 501(c)4 organization, making it an interest-advocacy group. In keeping with this advocacy status, its main political activities have revolved around lobbying to change or repeal the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and the Foreign Bank Account Report, policies that the organization considers unfair to expatriates. (For more details on both organizations, see Klekowski von Koppenfels Reference Klekowski von Koppenfels, Kernalegenn and van Haute2020.) The RO—like its predecessor organization, Republicans Abroad—has never held seats in the Republican presidential nominating convention. As a result, it does not organize a primary or another process to allocate convention delegates (although in some presidential years, it has conducted a candidate straw poll). Lacking such an event to spur mobilization, the RO has less need to coordinate the work of its country affiliates, and it conducts less outreach to enlist supporters. Both the DA and the RO are similar in their low funding and almost exclusive reliance on volunteers. Neither organization releases membership figures; however, given that the largest RO chapters (in the United Kingdom and Germany) claim at most 1,000 members, its reach seems well below the participation levels recorded by the DA in its recent Global Presidential Primaries.

One reason that these differences in organizational capacity are notable is because two decades ago, the Republican expatriate operations were better funded and seemingly more effective, and the Party seemed to have good reasons to continue investing in them. Indeed, in Reference Dark2003, Dark III (Reference Dark2003, 242) predicted that both US parties, given their large and growing numbers abroad, would increase their activities to mobilize overseas voters. However, this has turned out to be only (modestly) true for the Democrats, whereas the Republicans’ overseas organizing has gone in another direction.

What explains these differences in US parties’ approaches to the challenges and opportunities of representing and mobilizing expatriate partisans? Klekowski von Koppenfels (Reference Klekowski von Koppenfels, Kernalegenn and van Haute2020, 49) rightly notes that in the US system, federalized vote counting and the lack of congressional seats reserved for expatriates minimize incentives for parties or candidates to attempt to mobilize expatriate voters. However, she attributes the parties’ organizational differences to their differing political philosophies: the Democrats see politics as more group-based and Republicans take a more individualistic approach. Nevertheless, it might be argued that it is Republicans, not Democrats, who mostly treat expatriates as a distinct group and who seek to represent them accordingly. Thus, the RO prioritizes advocating for co-partisans on an issue that uniquely affects expatriate citizens. In contrast, by constituting the DA as similar to a state-party organization, the Democrats are treating their expatriate supporters like all other supporters. That is, rather than being defined as having a shared interest, they are encouraged to make their voices heard by participating in the party’s policy and personnel-selection processes (and then by voting in the general election). Although the DA, like the RO, also objects to some of the ways that current tax laws affect expatriates, it prioritizes mobilizing partisan electoral participation over providing representation on a specifically expatriate issue.

In summary, since the turn of the twenty-first century, the DA has overtaken the RO as a force for overseas mobilizing. With electoral turnout of Americans residing abroad remaining under 10% (Federal Voting Assistance Program 2018), and with more than 3 million US expatriates who are eligible to vote, there seems to be scope for increased overseas organizational efforts from both parties. Nevertheless, the geographic localization of US federal and state elections dampens incentives for candidates or parties to invest in such mobilization, setting firm limits on how much growth we should expect in this area.