US expats in Sydney ride the blue wave at midterm watch parties

More than 100 US expats and election enthusiasts packed into the function space on the second floor of the Keg and Brew pub in Sydney's inner-east suburb of Surry Hills on Wednesday lunchtime to watch the US midterm results roll in. The mood in the room shifted from nervous, browser-refreshing anxiety to champagne-popping within a matter of hours as live reports began broadcasting on the pub television screens.

A sign reading “Democrats Abroad” guided them upstairs. Early on, American voters, their Australian partners and British spectators described themselves as “cautiously optimistic”.

Within a couple of hours, news of the Democrats' historic win dramatically shifted the mood. Katrena Henderson, from North Carolina, said she had “not been this excited about an election in a long time”.

Sitting with her Australian husband and adult son, Henderson repeatedly refreshed her phone for results and celebrated when her Senate seat flipped to the Democrats. She said nobody really believed the Democrats were going to do it, but they won decisively, which pointed to Americans wanting something very different because the current administration was not working for them.

In Henderson's words, what they did not have before today was a lot of hope, and at least now there is some hope.

Associate Professor David Smith of the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre said the midterms were a “referendum on Trump”. He said the writing was on the wall as voters went to the polls with the president's approval ratings at a “historically low” level.

Smith said Americans had been frustrated all year by Trump's lack of focus on things that matter to most Americans — whether the war in Iran, which most Americans did not want and which had sent prices up directly, or Trump's constant beautification projects in Washington, DC — all evidence, he said, that the president was focused on the wrong things and on his own self-aggrandisement rather than the country.

Cindy Herman-Jones moved to Australia from Texas almost 15 years ago and had never cast a vote while living abroad. She said she was compelled to mail in a ballot because the stakes of this election were too high, saying democracy itself was being attacked by the Trump regime.

In her list of the “many terrible things” Trump had done, Herman-Jones pointed to the increased “brutality” of ICE immigration enforcement and the US war in Iran, which she called “the worst thing” he had done. Her vote for Senator James Talarico helped flip the upper house seat, and she was amazed to see him win because it is such a hard job for a Democrat to win in Texas.

Aliana Hensel, an 18-year-old Californian who has lived in Australia for about eight years with her American parents, was another first-time voter. She said her parents do not generally vote and have not voted while abroad, but she wanted to vote because something really needs to be done about US leadership.

Hensel said she had been watching politics closely for the last few years; she was not old enough to vote in the presidential election, but she watched it and it was quite a disappointment, so she had been focused on knowing she could vote this time and wanting to make a bit of an impact.

Just a few kilometres north of the Keg and Brew, a small group of election watchers gathered at the Cheers pub off Sydney's George Street in the CBD over schnitzels and pints of Guinness. The event was posted as a meetup for Republican expat groups, but attracted more of a mixed bag of libertarians and independents interested in the drama of an American election.

Rahn Wood, 60, an Australian who splits his time between Sydney and Vietnam, said it was interesting to see how the population in America was responding to its situation. He said US influence had a long reach in a policy sense: support for the green agenda and the United Nations was waning because the US was not very supportive of those agendas, and this election helped set the policy direction for western countries.

At the Cheers pub, many watchers had wandered off after lunch, and one woman was watching the growing blue wave on Fox News with dread, the report said.

Professor Smith said that while the election could have significant ramifications for things like the Iran war, he doubted it would directly influence Australia or Prime Minister Albanese's relationship with the US, because Congress at the moment does not have a very big role in foreign policy. The most interesting question, he said, was what happens to “Trumpism”: lots of politicians around the world, including in Australia, take their cues from Trump, and an election showing the limits of Trumpism in the United States could make a few right-wing politicians worldwide rethink how much they want to be tied to him.