By Andrea Shalal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Democratic National Committee will spend $300,000 in a first-ever push to register the 9 million Americans living abroad, working to win votes for the party’s candidate Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
The funding for Democrats Abroad, which represents Democrats living outside the United States, will be used to pay for voter registration drives and spread information about how to vote from overseas, a DNC official said on Monday.
The official said it was the DNC’s first time funding Democrats Abroad and the efforts would be focused on Mexico and Europe, where the largest number of overseas Americans live.
DNC officials said there were over 1.6 million Americans from the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin living overseas, and it would fight for every vote.
Those states are essential for Harris or Republican former President Donald Trump to win the election. When President Joe Biden beat Trump to win the 2020 presidency he did so by a margin of just 44,000 votes across Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
“The DNC is leaving no stone left unturned to ensure that Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States,” it said in a statement, noting that only 8% of Americans living outside the country had registered to vote in the 2020 election.
“This election will be won on the margins, and with only three months until the election, every vote matters – including the votes of those who are serving or living abroad.”
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, last week toured multiple political battleground states, packing rallies with thousands of people and building on the momentum that has propelled her since she took over at the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden stepped aside.
Biden, 81, ended his candidacy and endorsed Harris after a poor debate performance against Trump sparked turmoil within the Democratic Party and fueled concerns that he could not beat the former president or finish a second four-year term.
Harris has pulled ahead of Trump by four percentage points each in separate polls of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, a big change from polls in those swing states taken before Biden quit the presidential race last month.
Nationally, Harris was ahead of Trump by five percentage points, 42% to 37%, in an Ipsos poll published on Thursday, widening her lead from a July 22-23 Reuters/Ipsos survey, which found her up 37% to 34%.
Martha McDevitt-Pugh, who chairs Democrats Abroad, called the DNC funding “a powerful affirmation of our work and the importance of the overseas electorate, who vote back in their home state and have been the margin of victory in numerous pivotal races, such as delivering Georgia in 2020.”