At 1pm on a Wednesday in Sydney, Cameron Caccamo was sending and receiving a lot of texts about Bernie Sanders.

On the other side of the world the New Hampshire primary was taking place, and the results were rolling in from Merrimack County. There was a new field office opening in San Antonio, Texas. In California they’d just gotten their mail-in ballots for Super Tuesday and the 27-year-old office manager from Australia was determined that every one should say Sanders.

Some 16,000km away, his Sydney University contemporary Alistair Kitchen was in the snow near Manchester, New Hampshire, knocking on doors for the same man. In Detroit, Michigan, in a hotel bar, another Australian, Alistair Stephenson was organising for Elizabeth Warren.

As the US Democratic primaries ramp up ahead of the Nevada caucus on Saturday, a small cohort of Australian volunteers have been watching, organising and even winning votes for their candidates, in a race that they say has significant ramifications for domestic politics.

Caccamo has been texting for Sanders from home. The Australian student politics devotee saw the callout on a Facebook page he had followed four years ago called Australians for Bernie Sanders.

“It’s really easy,” he says. “The organisers will tell you: ‘We have an event in a week in Texas, you need to tell people.’ You send out a hundred texts to those people.”

He has been texting on the bus, from home (in the week before he starts a new job), at lunch and as he followed the New Hampshire results.

Sometimes he has substantive policy arguments with voters. “Someone asked me what were Bernie’s thoughts on abortion up to and after birth,” he says. “Yep, they said ‘after birth’.

“For some people, who were leaning towards Trump on his economic policies, I will talk about what Bernie wants to do. How Medicare for All will decrease their costs over the year. Or the minimum wage increase and how that will bring up the working class … I actually took the policy and explained it. It does make a difference to have that interaction.”

Alistair Kitchen meets noted progressive intellectual Dr Cornel West on the campaign trail in the US. Photograph: Alistair Kitchen

In the US, Kitchen has been volunteering for Sanders for nearly three weeks. He estimates he has knocked on a few hundred doors and his voice is hoarse from shouting and training other volunteers for this first primary.

The 28-year-old had just finished a job as a communications manager at a tech company and found himself with three weeks to spare.

“I have deliberately been embedding myself in the office to soak up as much knowledge,” he says. “This has easily been the most fulfilling three weeks of my life.”

He is also in New Hampshire because he feels there isn’t an Australian political equivalent to what the American left is doing.

“I don’t have a lot of confidence in any of the political parties in Australia at the moment to bring about the type of grassroots direct political engagement that is occurring in the US,” he says. “But it doesn’t mean that can’t happen, it doesn’t mean that we can’t learn.

“I wanted to see how US political groups respond to that [political] crisis. So that when and if it happens in Australia, we know how to respond to it as well.”

In Michigan, Stephenson is the head of the Detroit volunteer wing of the Warren campaign.

The 30-year-old digital strategist moved to the US to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and naturally fell into volunteering in the primaries.

“The way I see it is, the progressive politics in America dictate what happens everywhere in the rest of the world,” he says.

“I knew I was going to be heavily invested in the 2020 race. It was pretty important that I ended up supporting a woman and someone who was as deeply progressive as I was.”

The Michigan primary is on 10 March and it’s a state where people already have their ballots and can vote early – which means Stephenson has been winning votes already.

He says the greatest barrier, which he and other volunteers worried about, was the accent.

Australian campaign volunteer Alistair Stephenson with the candidate he is supporting, Elizabeth Warren. Photograph: Alistair Stephenson

“In Detroit, I think I have met two other Australians,” he says. “It’s not like New York where being Australian is boring and commonplace. In Michigan people are like: ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

“Having this accent and being Australian, I thought would be a big barrier, but it’s a really nice conversation starter. The issue on most people’s minds is healthcare and coming from a country where – it is not perfect – but our healthcare system is just far and away better that what America has, makes it a very good comparison, and easy way into it.”

Kitchen agrees: “My fear was that they’ll think: ‘Who is this Australian telling me what to do?’

“Instead when I begin to tell them I was in Australia for Christmas and the country was on fire – and for that reason it is extremely important to me that the US has a president who is invested in climate change … it turns out that comes with a lot of weight and they take you very seriously.”

All three stress that foreign nationals can’t be paid by the campaigns, and all are volunteering their time.

“Foreign nationals cannot be employed by, donate to, or receive any kind of compensation for working on US presidential campaigns,” says Kitchen. “That meant that even the housing I lived in could not come from the campaign. Instead a volunteer was able to lend housing.”

‘We are still living in the shadow of Reagan’

At the end of January, the New South Wales branch of Young Labor gathered, and after an amicable, not “particularly intense” debate, decided to endorse Elizabeth Warren – and even write a letter to the Massachusetts senator.

It was a fairly split room, says president Paul Mills, and not too serious.

“It wasn’t a formal endorsement,” he says. “The event was more of a social event.”

In the photo posted to Facebook of 5o or so smiling members, two very passionate Pete Buttigieg fans can be seen in the front row, with signs and T-shirts, and behind them, a lone Joe Biden shirt, off-cream and partially obstructed.

NSW Young Labor was proud to endorse @ewarren tonight.



We hope she appreciates the letter we intend to write expressing our support for her campaign. pic.twitter.com/sCUFuw2liS — NSW Young Labor (@NSWYoungLabor) January 30, 2020

There were even, before he dropped out, a fair few Beto O’Rourke supporters, Mills says. And as the results have rolled in, he says he has seen the Buttigieg fans – who he knows personally – and his Sanders-supporting friends crowing on social media.

“At the end of the day, while the policy and politics is serious, for us it is very much something people can get around because it’s exciting,” he says.

But for Caccamo, in Sydney, and Stephenson and Kitchen in the US, it is much bigger than that.

“It goes beyond just being an American politics aficionado,” Caccamo stresses.

“There are a lot of people that think: ‘Oh it’s the American election, why should we care?’ Part of it is that we follow America, here in Australia. We are still living in the shadow of Reagan’s reforms. The idea that the rich shouldn’t pay too much tax because it will trickle down – that has got us into the economic quagmire we are in.

“We are still in the shadow of George W Bush … Now we are in the shadow of Trump. ”

He says the reason he supports Sanders is “essentially to shift the Overton window” – the idea of what is acceptable to discuss in politics – in Australia.

“Sure Bernie means a Green New Deal for Americans, but it also means someone in the White House who cares about taxing big corporations. It means a reversal of neoliberalism … That has engaged me and it has engaged tens of thousands of people around the world.”

In Michigan, Stephenson says the reason he supports Warren is a similar belief in bold, and thus potentially global, change.

“I like her because she has guts,” he says. “She is just fearless and that is what I admire in leaders, people with real moral convictions.

“It’s been really inspiring,” he says. “I have learned a lot about how progressive politics works. And one day I imagine I will move back to Australia, and I am really excited to take what I have absorbed into progressive communities in Australia.”



