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........