Former envoy says Americans in Canada ‘could determine’ next president

When former President Donald Trump falsely proclaimed online last month that Democrats were “getting ready to cheat” by mailing ballots to voters overseas, Bruce Heyman couldn’t hold back his excitement.

A former U.S. ambassador to Canada under President Barack Obama, Heyman is now leading an effort to canvass and turn out American voters living north of the border to support Democrats. He is convinced that in a close election, Americans in Canada could make the difference.

To Heyman, Trump’s outburst looked like an admission the Republican nominee agrees.

“There’s zero chance Donald Trump used that language himself,” Heyman told POLITICO in Montreal in late September, shortly after Trump made the post. “It came out of the campaign. The campaign recognizes how many Americans live abroad and the effort we’re putting forth, and they can’t compete against it.”

The presidential race is so tight that Democrats are going door knocking in Windsor, Ontario, in search of American voters to tip the balance for Kamala Harris.

Anywhere he gets the chance, Heyman makes his case to get out the vote from Canada: in media interviews at the Democratic National Convention, in talks with university students at Concordia and the University of Toronto, or on a global Zoom call for Harris-Walz — one of the Democrats’ online telethons that featured such celebrities as Lynda Carter and Jane Fonda.

“I believe in my heart of hearts that Americans living in Canada could determine the outcome of this election,” Heyman told POLITICO.

Millions of American voters live outside the country. While there’s a lot of uncertainty over the exact current numbers, vote-rich Canada is home to hundreds of thousands of potential U.S. voters — estimated to hold the most of any foreign country, followed by Mexico and the U.K.

The non-partisan Federal Voting Assistance Program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Defense to help overseas voters participate in elections, estimates there are 605,697 Americans in Canada who are voting age.

And major Canadian cities are right near the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, making them more likely locations to have key American voters living there. Border cities are even home to Americans who commute daily into the U.S.

Meanwhile Maine democrats have their eyes on Canada’s Atlantic provinces because that state apportions electoral votes differently than most.

While both parties may be wooing Americans living overseas and military voters, the Democrats are making a big push north of the border.

Door to door in Windsor

For the first time, Democratic party activists are headed door to door in the border town of Windsor, searching for Americans from Michigan to cast ballots in the critical swing state.

“This has been a dream of mine,” said Steve Nardi, one of the canvassers and a ranking organizer at Democrats Abroad, a 60-year-old arm of the democratic party that has state-level recognition by the DNC that Heyman is heavily involved with by leading the charge on their voter abroad initiative in Canada.

Nardi has been a vocal proponent of putting boots on the ground in pockets of Canada where high concentrations of Americans are likely to reside. In this case, Windsor shares a border with Detroit and an economic history through the auto industry.

The door-to-door teams have been small so far — only about six volunteers out at a time. But they’ve knocked on more than a thousand doors already, and it’s easier for them to strike up conversations because they aren’t inherently partisan. And they’re planning to go at it until Oct. 31, since Michigan voters can request their ballot up until November 2.

Heyman said Michigan’s Democratic party, Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin and Governor Gretchen Whitmer, are “all-in on getting Michiganders living in Canada to vote.” Slotkin had featured as a keynote speaker at a private fundraiser for Democrats Abroad around the time of the party convention.

“We’re going to need Americans in Canada to vote this time, and we’re going to work hard at getting the vote out,” Heyman said.

‘Tsunami’ warnings for campus voters

The same day Trump made the social media post, Heyman and his wife Vicki, who were major fundraisers for Obama, were preparing to deliver a talk to rally young American voters studying at McGill University.

Kamala Harris once lived in that same city as a teen, and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, had worked as a scientific researcher at that school — which just happens to boast upward of 2,000 students from the U.S., not counting dual citizens.

In a Harry Potter-esque graduate lounge trimmed with wood paneling, burgundy drapes and multiple cozy fireplaces in an old, drafty limestone building called Thompson House, the couple warned upward of two dozen students of the many ways a Trump administration would complicate their lives in Canada.

“This is your tsunami warning,” Heyman told the students in a stump speech he’s honed to hit on things expats care a lot about: foreign policy, America’s reputation abroad and international trade.

Trump deploys harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric as Election Day nearsShare.

If Trump were to bring in inflationary 10 percent tariffs, it would prompt a trade war with Canada and other allies, Heyman warned. Threatening to detain or deport millions of undocumented migrants would lead to an influx of asylum seekers at Canada’s borders — something that happened under the first Trump White House.

Working to bring home the vote

U.S. voters living abroad are otherwise spread out across massive geographic distances — some 193 countries. But here, the Democrats Abroad can reach them at home, through their Canadian friends, or with an ad blitz that’s rung up about C$50,000, a relatively healthy but not at all lavish buy by Canadian standards. The DNC has given the organization, which operates in multiple countries, a record amount of money to spend, to the tune of about $450,000.

“We basically purchased everything that we can get our hands on right around any sort of land or water crossing, all the way up from Quebec and down and around through Ontario and all the way across the plains and into British Columbia, curving all the way up to our Alaskan border,” said Erin Kotecki Vest, Democrats Abroad country chair for Canada.

In B.C., they’re using digital posters to target ferry crossings. At the Detroit-Windsor crossing, they’ve put up a large billboard outside the tunnel and billboard ads around the Ambassador Bridge, which handles more than 40,000 cross-border travelers a day, and the Blue Water Bridge that connects Sarnia, Ontario, with Port Huron, Michigan.

Fifteen-second spots run in movie theaters, and they’re considering adding traditional newspaper and radio ads on top of their digital buy, since they don’t know where to find all the Americans.

The most striking thing about the program: Despite being paid for by Democrats, you won’t see Harris or Tim Walz on posters. They all feature a straightforward go-out-and-vote message, and provide a resource to figure out how to vote from abroad to a given state.

The campaign is banking on the notion that Americans living in Canada are mostly, if not entirely, Democrats.

There’s not a lot of hard evidence, but the theory goes that these voters are engrossed in the cultures of the foreign countries they live in, like liberal Canada, and are more likely to fret about a Trump presidency.

There’s ample anecdotal evidence, though. For example, nearly all the donations from U.S. citizens living in Canada go to the Harris campaign, amounting to $152,170, with none so far recorded for Trump. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. raised $26,451 from Canada.

Making sense of Trump’s first win

Heyman has been convinced this is Harris’ path to victory since the aftermath of the 2016 election.

He was ambassador in Ottawa at the time, and had thrown an election-watching bash at the Château Laurier in Ottawa, a castle of a luxury hotel where dignitaries often stay.

He remembers the night well: The TV cameras were rolling as senior Canadian Cabinet ministers from Justin Trudeau’s government, like then-Finance Minister Bill Morneau and then-Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, celebrated as the early results came in.

Everyone thought they would see the first woman president. But Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by 10,704 votes, and official Ottawa — like everywhere else — was dumbstruck.

In their post-diplomatic life, Heyman and his wife set out to figure out why that happened. What they found stuck with them: some 9 million Americans lived abroad pre-pandemic according to the State Department, but only about eight percent of them voted.

It turned out they didn’t know how to vote, or even if they were still eligible.

The pair approached the Biden team in 2020 pitching to champion the American voter abroad effort — a simple website financed by the Democrats, designed to be a non-partisan tool to help Americans overseas figure out how to cast their ballots.

Even though fewer Americans lived abroad during the pandemic, the expat vote total went up by 73 percent from 2016 to 2020, reaching close to 900,000 votes, Heyman boasts.

He’s convinced overseas voters played a key role in helping snatch battleground states. He points to that critical Georgia race in 2020, when 18,000 votes came in from overseas to Georgia, a state where President Joe Biden cleared by 11,779 but Trump attempted to overturn.

Some 44,000 votes across Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin prevented a tie in the Electoral College.

Hopes, questions and guesstimates

But could votes from Canada really swing the election?

Richard Johnston, a professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia, says the Democrats have the right idea.

“There’s sparse evidence on this,” said Johnston, but “there’s every reason to believe expats are disproportionately Democrat,” and the “closer the race is, the more consequential any group, even small groups can be.”

“It’s not at all implausible” that votes from Canada could swing the presidential race, Johnston said, but there “are a lot of contingencies.”

“Are they indeed as one-sided [pro-Democrat] as we suspect? What’s the turnout rate actually going to be? What’s the geography of the states of last residence? If it’s a random draw according to the size of the states, that means there’s a lot of people from New York or California — they’re not going to make a big difference at all.”

Maybe not in the presidential race, but Heyman points out the House races there will also matter.

“These are best guesstimates, as opposed to some deep analysis [from an] exact number, right? So, this is the play,” Heyman said.

“We’re talking about small numbers of total votes that will be at the margin, that America is a divided country, and the wisdom of both parties right now is it’s going to be very, very close — that they’re going to battle out for the marginal voter.”