As an American living abroad, I rarely think of myself as belonging to any sort of expat bloc, even though, taken together, we would constitute the 12th most populous state: there are 8.7 million US citizens living outside the country. I did, however, vote in the Democratic primary as part of this constituency.

Democrats Abroad will send 13 delegates (as well as eight superdelegates) to the Democratic convention, which is more than Wyoming. The results came in a few days ago, and Bernie Sanders is the winner.

Are Americans who go abroad more liberal, or do they become more liberal as a result?

He is, in fact, the overwhelming winner: 69% of the vote, to Clinton’s 31%, with just under 35,000 votes cast internationally. In the UK, which had the most overseas voters of any country, he gained 62%. Of seven expat Democrats in Afghanistan, five voted for Sanders and two for Clinton. She came top only in the Dominican Republic, Singapore and Nigeria.

It’s hard to know what to make of this, so far-flung and generally unpolled is this particular subset of voters. Are Americans who go abroad more liberal, or do they become more liberal as a result? Two of my sons were old enough to vote in this primary – both did – and they’ve never lived in the US.

It’s even harder to know what to make of the 75 Americans living abroad who went to the trouble of registering as a Democrat in order to vote “Don’t Know”; five were in the UK. It was raining on the day I went. And cold. If you hadn’t made up your mind, why would you bother?

If it’s an interesting, and potentially revealing, win for Bernie, it’s not a terribly significant one. He picked up all of nine delegates. Hillary got four.

The invention of Trump

Overseas Republicans have no facility for primary voting, but they’ll be only too happy to sit on their hands this time round. When I look at the unfocused anger and grim opportunism tearing apart the Republican party, I’m reminded of a story from some years back, when a rightwing gathering held a vote to determine their favourite Republican presidential candidate, and then booed the winner. Or did I just dream it?

No – I looked it up, and it’s true. At the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference there was a straw poll among attendees, with 11 wholly speculative candidates on the ballot. Ron Paul came top, with 31% of the vote, and the audience in the hall booed loudly when the result was projected on a screen. Apart from Mitt Romney, on 22%, every other candidate was in single figures: 11% of those polled had ticked either “Other” or “Undecided”. And still they booed. At the 2011 conference they held another straw poll, and Paul won again.

At the time it seemed emblematic of the madness that had infected the right since the Tea Party’s rise: they had elected a widely despised candidate. If Trump hadn’t come along when he did, they would have had to invent him.

Afterlife crisis

More polling, more weird findings: new research from San Diego State University finds that, while belief in God has declined by half among Americans since the 1980s, belief in the afterlife has actually gone up. The implication – that an increasing number of people either believe in a heaven that is wholly unadministered, or have embraced boneheaded optimism as a kind of faith – is deeply disturbing.

However, a closer look reveals that, of 59,000 participants in the general social survey between 1972 and 2014, the number saying they have no religion has nearly trebled, reaching 21%.

Belief in an afterlife, meanwhile, has risen from 76% to 79%. This means that belief in God and belief in heaven, having been out of sync for decades, now finally tally. A foolish consistency at last.