On the second floor of a Sydney pub, the mood shifts from nervous, browser-refreshing anxiety to champagne-popping within a matter of hours. More than 100 US expats and election enthusiasts have packed into the function space at the Keg and Brew in the inner-east suburb of Surry Hills to watch the midterm results roll in. They’ve followed a sign reading “Democrats Abroad” guiding them upstairs on Wednesday lunchtime as live reports began broadcasting on the pub television screens.
Early on, the American voters, their Australian partners and British spectators said they were “cautiously optimistic”. Within a couple of hours, news of the Democrats’ historic win dramatically shifts the mood. Katrena Henderson, from North Carolina, says she has “not been this excited about an election in a long time”.
Sitting with her Australian husband and adult son, the trio compulsively refresh their phones for results and celebrate when former governor Roy Cooper flips her state’s Senate seat to the Democrats. And they won decisively,” she says. He says the writing was on the wall as voters went to the polls, with the president’s approval ratings at a “historically low” level.
She says she was compelled to mail in a ballot because of “the stakes of this election” were too high. Her Senate vote for James Talarico was one of many that helped him flip the Texas upper house seat for the Democrats. She was “amazed” at the result, she says, because “it’s such a hard job for a Democrat to win in Texas”.
Aliana Hensel is another first-time voter. The 18-year-old Californian has lived in Australia for about eight years with her American parents. She says that while her parents “don’t generally vote” and have not done so since moving abroad, it was something she wanted to do because “something really, really needs to be done” about US leadership.
It’s something I feel really passionate about. I wasn’t old enough to vote in the presidential election, but I watched that, and it was quite the disappointment,” she says. The event was posted as a meetup for some Republican expat groups, but attracted more of a mixed bag of libertarians and independents interested in the drama of an American election.
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