Americans in Malaga have their own Democratic convention to coincide with the nomination of Kamala Harris

Several hundred Americans living in Malaga are registered with Democrats Abroad, the umbrella organisation for Democratic Party supporters around the world. And the group is practically new to the area: it has not yet been established in the province for a year.

Earlier this month, coinciding with the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago, which has nominated Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as the new presidential and vice-presidential hopefuls for the November elections, they held a meeting in Malaga to analyse how to contribute to the electoral victory of their party against the Republicans whose candidacy is headed by Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.

Carey Ramos, promoter and director of Democrats Abroad in Malaga, told SUR how the candidacy of Harris and Walz after Joe Biden's resignation has excited Democratic supporters: "Kamala Harris is doing very well in the polls. It's true that the margin is small, but we were clearly losing before. In most of the key states, Trump was winning. That's why our people were quite depressed. Nobody thought we couldn't win, but now there's a lot of energy."

This renewed enthusiasm is measured by the fact that in the middle of August, in the middle of the Malaga fair, this Malaga-style Democratic Convention was much better attended than the group's previous activity, Super Tuesday, the big day of the primaries when it was still necessary to back Biden, a candidate who no longer generated the enthusiasm that Kamala Harris has awakened. On that Tuesday in March, the Spanish Socialist party headquarters in Calle Ollerías, which they used for the voting, was not as crowded as the terrace of the Corte Inglés, the setting for this week's meeting to set the strategy for supporting Harris.

They are very hopeful of a Democratic victory in the presidential election: "Trump doesn't know what to do with Harris; before with Biden he had his strategy which was to say he was old and had dementia. But Kamala Harris is young, has a lot of energy and is giving rallies every day in key places. Trump has not found the solution," explained Ramos. And, in fact, she pointed out how there have been many Republicans who have gone to the Democratic Convention in Chicago to show their support for Harris because they consider the candidacy led by Trump to be a danger to democracy and freedoms.

The Democrats, said Ramos, have one more strength in the face of this: unity around their electoral ticket; even the left wing, represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, is rallying behind Harris and Walz.

The wind is blowing in their favour, but they are not resting on their laurels and, in fact, the meeting they held last week in Malaga was to organise the work they have structured into three fundamental activities to promote the candidacy of Kamala Harris.

First of all, they are going to develop a strategy that is very common in the United States: telephone calls to inform and mobilise the electorate. They will call Americans living in Spain and other countries who are registered as members of Democrats Abroad to encourage them to vote. Americans vote in the state where they last resided before moving to other countries. And with their wave of calls, the Malaga-Americans are going to put the emphasis on those citizens who come from the so-called 'swing states', that is, the most decisive ones because those are where the chances of victory for Democrats and Republicans are similar and, in fact, usually fluctuate in their support from one to the other. These are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.

Ramos stressed they are not going to ignore the rest of the country's territories: while the swing states are essential for the presidential election, all the other places are fundamental for the elections to renew Congress and the Senate, because if the president's party does not control the chambers, it cannot govern, its hands are tied.

The purpose of these phone calls is also to remind voters to ask for their ballot papers in order to be able to vote, because there is still time to do so. And to those voters who have already requested them, they will inform them that before 21 September they must receive the ballot paper by e-mail in order to exercise their right to vote.

The second task they have set themselves is to both make and ask for donations to be made to the Democrats Abroad organisation. Donations can only be made by US citizens, never by anyone of any other nationality, so they cannot accept donations from other Malaga residents supporting their cause and that of Kamala Harris.

For fundraising they are not only appealing to Americans living outside the US, they are also encouraging their family and friends living on US soil to donate to Democrats Abroad, because they believe there is a lot of potential to improve the Democratic vote from other countries: only 8% of Americans living outside their country vote in elections. And they need the money to pay, for example, for the platform through which they make the calls. Ramos confesses that she gets very excited when she talks on the phone to people from swing states who say yes, their vote is for Harris. She believes that whoever wins will do so by a small margin and that is why she considers the response of each voter and each ballot paper to be so important.

The third task they have entrusted themselves with is to make sure every citizen knows how to vote, because the American system is very complicated; each state has its own rules: in some states you have to vote by fax, in others you have to vote by post, in another group you can vote by email... In addition, according to Ramos, there are some states that are looking for ways of not accepting foreign votes, and his organisation also has legal resources to deal with this.

"We know that we have to work hard and that overseas votes can make a difference in some states. Biden, in the last election, won in Georgia and Arizona because of the overseas vote," Ramos pointed out.