What do Nigel Farage, Liz Truss, Lynton Crosby, Jim Messina, and David Axelrod have in common? They have all campaigned in elections outwith their own country.

Mr Messina and Mr Axelrod, Americans and former advisors to President Obama, found themselves on opposite sides in the 2015 UK General Election. Mr Crosby, the Australian political strategist known as “the Wizard of Oz”, ran the Conservative Party’s 2005 and 2015 campaigns and Boris Johnson’s 2008 London Mayoral campaign.

Mr Farage and Ms Truss campaigned for former President Trump in this election. Mr Farage has spoken at multiple rallies - as he did in the 2020 Presidential election campaign - and Ms Truss spoke at this year’s Republic National Convention. None of these cases was treated as “election interference”, but that is exactly what President Trump’s team is now accusing the Labour Party of.

On Monday, the Trump campaign submitted a complaint to the Federal Election Commission, which regulates American elections, alleging that the participation of Labour activists and staffers in volunteering for the Harris campaign constituted illegal election interference - despite such volunteering being explicitly legal.

At the heart of the complaint is a shaky comparison to a scheme run by the Australian Labor Party in 2016 and some equally shaky reading between the lines of a LinkedIn post by Labour’s Head of Operations to imply that the volunteers may be compensated, which would be illegal. But it contains no evidence that this is the case.

Transnational political campaigning is not new. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of political staffers and activists have set off for foreign shores over the past several decades to campaign for sister parties and politicians with whom they share common values and a common vision. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Westminster knows that it is full of Australian politicos and that every four years dozens of UK staffers and activists - from across the parties - set off to campaign in the US Presidential Elections.

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As someone who has been around politics all my entire adult life, this all seems normal to me, but the arguments triggered by the Trump campaign’s complaint have made it plain to me that this strikes many people as profoundly weird and perhaps even unwise.

The most straightforward reason for activists participating in overseas elections is because they have historical ties to the country they are campaigning in. That might be because they studied or worked there in the past or are part of a diaspora community and wish to influence policies that affect their families, friends, and communities back home, campaigning for candidates or parties that they believe will best represent the interests of those communities.

Beyond personal relationships, activists engage in foreign elections for strategic political reasons. They may support candidates who align with their home country’s policy objectives, foster relationships that advance political interests or oppose policies that they believe are harmful to their country’s interests.

There is little doubt that a Trump Presidency would be a disaster for the UK and Europe. As I argued in July, an unrestrained President Trump pursuing his published and stated policy objectives “would pose a potentially existential crisis to the Western alliance and the UK in particular”. Frankly, the potential diplomatic harm caused by Labour activists campaigning against President Trump is utterly swamped by the damage he will do regardless.

Activists also learn from other political parties and systems by engaging in their elections. Labour activists campaigning for Harris will bring back lessons from American political organising and campaigning that they may seek to implement in their own campaigns.

Perhaps the strongest motivation for activists to campaign abroad is the strength of transnational solidarity and shared values. They often feel a deep sense of responsibility to advocate for causes they believe in, regardless of where those causes arise. These may be a deep belief in universal human rights, social justice, or democratic principles that transcend national borders. Many fundamental rights are at risk in this Presidential election, most notably women’s rights to bodily autonomy. A second Trump presidency would reverse the progress made to combat climate change and stall further progress for at least another four years, significantly deepen economic and social inequality among Americans, and threatens American democracy itself.

Critics of transnational activism in foreign elections argue that it undermines national sovereignty and the legitimacy of the democratic process and that the citizens of a country should have the sole right to determine their political future, free from any external influence whatsoever. However, such arguments simply do not wash, and not merely because the notion of national sovereignty has always been what political scientist and former US diplomat Professor Stephen D. Krasner called “organised hypocrisy”.

Australian Lynton Crosby ran the Conservative Party’s 2005 and 2015 campaigns and Boris Johnson’s 2008 London Mayoral campaign.Australian Lynton Crosby ran the Conservative Party’s 2005 and 2015 campaigns and Boris Johnson’s 2008 London Mayoral campaign. (Image: PA)

In our globalised world, the decisions taken by one nation’s citizens affect the citizens of all the nations they are connected to. The bigger the nation, the stronger its economy, and the more powerful its state, the greater its impact. The decision Americans will make in just eleven days has the potential to fundamentally reshape the world we live in, influencing our politics, policymaking, and even our daily lives. Collectively, we have an obvious interest in the outcome for many reasons.

Fittingly, nobody understands the power of transnational activism as well as the American right. American-led, right-wing networks cultivated by figures like Steve Bannon - once President Trump’s Chief Strategist - reach through far-right European parties into the corridors of power across European Union Member States. Christian conservative organisations spend millions of dollars in Europe every year on campaigns to promote their policy preferences on issues from same-sex marriage to abortion. Alliance Defending Freedom, for example, doubled its campaigning spend in the UK since 2020, lobbying MPs and coordinating religious conservative activism to push back against the decriminalisation of abortion in England and Wales.

State-backed election interference is unacceptable, and it’s vital to ensure that electorates can make free and fair decisions on their terms. But wholesale rejection of transnational activism requires fooling oneself into believing in a world that simply doesn’t exist, and given the scale of American influence in our own democracy, pearl-clutching over some British activists knocking on doors in Pennsylvania is borderline hysterical. Transnational activism has been here for decades and is here to stay – get used to it.

Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social