…’Unprecedented’ interest in midterms from U.S. voters living abroad***

As the final countdown begins to Tuesday’s midterm elections, the contest is turning into a tale of two presidents. The current occupant of the White House is fighting to retain control over Congress. He is also locked in mortal combat with his immediate predecessor, who is battling to hold on to his legacy.

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, and Barack Obama, the 44th, both took to the stump on Sunday. Their first rallies of the day were separated by 750 miles of interstate highway, but in content and vision they were lightyears apart.

Trump, addressing a crowd in Macon, Georgia, set out his now familiar dystopia of an America overrun with criminal aliens and radical socialists. He unleashed his firepower on Stacey Abrams, the Democrat seeking to become the first black woman governor of any state in the union.

“You put Stacey in there and you are going to get Georgia turn into Venezuela,” Trump said. “Stacey Abrams wants to turn your wonderful state into a giant sanctuary city for criminal aliens, putting innocent Georgia families at the mercy of hardened criminals and predators.”

Obama was in Gary, Indiana. He implied that the existential threat came from his successor himself. Though he did not mention Trump by name, he laid out a picture of today’s politics that was in its own way equally dystopian, led by a man who had no qualms about lying or about playing to people’s fears.

“What kind of politics do we want,” he asked Democrats in a state where Senator Joe Donnelly is struggling to be re-elected. “What we have not seen at least in my memory is where, right now, you’ve got politicians blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly lying. Just making up stuff.”

As Obama spoke, his voice hoarse, he banged the podium with the passion of a politician who has seen his legacy unpicked in record time. From his signature Affordable Care Act – dubbed by Democrats with affection and Republicans with equal disdain as “Obamacare” – to his actions on climate change, immigration reform, income redistribution and the composition of the US supreme court, his achievements have been brutally assailed.

Obama ridiculed Trump’s focus in the final days of the campaign on the caravan of Central American asylum seekers making their perilous way to the US border. “Two weeks before the election they are telling us that the single greatest threat to America is a bunch of poor, impoverished, broken, hungry refugees 1,000 miles away.”

But he warned: “Sometimes these tactics of scaring people and making stuff up work.”

He painted the stakes at Tuesday’s election as no less than the future of democracy itself. “There have got to be consequences when people don’t tell the truth. When words stop meaning anything, when people can just lie with abandon, democracy can’t work. Nothing works… Society doesn’t work unless there are consequences.”

Despite their conflicting approaches, Trump and Obama shared one message: that the normally lacklustre and low-turnout midterms could not be more significant this time. As Obama put it: “America is at a crossroads. The character of our country is on the ballot.”

Here’s how Trump put the same idea: “This election will decide on whether we build on the extraordinary prospective we have created or whether we let the radical Democrats take a wrecking ball to our future.”

It seems their message is working, if the response of the electorate is an indication. Some 33 million votes have already been counted in early voting, vastly more than at this stage four years ago. Turnout is on track to be the largest in a midterm election for more than 50 years.

When polling stations open on America’s eastern seaboard at 6am on Tuesday, both main parties have much to win and lose. With all 435 seats of the House of Representatives up for grabs, the Democrats look well-placed to gain the 23 they need to take back control and put a spoke in the wheel of Trump’s ambitions.

A much tougher challenge faces the party in the Senate, where 26 Democratic seats are in play compared with only nine Republican.

The intensity of the fight,on display at the presidents’ dueling rallies, was reflected too on the Sunday political talk shows, which were dominated by disputes over race-baiting. Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told CNN’s State of the Union: “What you see in the closing argument is dog-whistle politics, appeals to racists, just the worst of America.”

The show’s host, Jake Tapper, engaged in a feisty to-and-fro with Perez’s Republican counterpart, Ronna McDaniel. He put to her a racially provocative attack ad made for the Trump campaign and shared on social media by the president last week, which accused Democrats of allowing into the US an undocumented migrant who murdered two police officers in California. In fact, Luis Bracamontes most recently entered the US during the administration of George W Bush, a Republican. The advert was widely condemned.

Tapper asked the RNC chair if she had any concerns about the flagrant inaccuracy of the ad as well as its blatant racist tone. She avoided replying directly, saying: “Regardless. We didn’t want [Bracamontes] in the country. He killed police. That’s not good.”

In the meantime,  Mike DePinto was not involved in politics when he lived in the U.S. and he’s previously voted for candidates in both parties. That changed last month. Feeling upset with the country’s leadership, the former Los Angeles resident decided to volunteer for Democrats Abroad.

He now comes to the group’s U.K. campaign office four or five evenings a week, calling Americans in the Democrats Abroad database and reminding them to vote in the midterm elections.

“I feel like this election is determinative,” said DePinto, 54, who moved to London a year ago to be with his wife who got a job here.

Though midterm elections are typically shrugged off by Americans overseas, not this year.

An unprecedented number of Americans living outside the U.S. have requested ballots, up seven times over the last midterm election in 2014, according to data from the non-partisan U.S. Vote Foundation, which registers a large portion of overseas voters. The group declined to disclose the number who had requested ballots.

“The midterms for overseas voters until this year have gone largely unnoticed. They were previously a big yawn and this year they are more like a scream,” said Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president and CEO of the U.S. Vote Foundation and Overseas Vote.

“There have been some days where our (website) traffic in comparison to 2014 has been up 2,500 percent on just the overseas site,” she added. “It’s unprecedented for a midterm election and a real indicator that overseas voters are really paying attention.”

With so many toss up races around the country, the overseas vote could matter. There were an estimated 5.5 million U.S. citizens living abroad in 2016, with approximately 3 million of them eligible to vote, according to the Federal Voting Assistance Program. Voters register in the state where they last lived and rules vary from state to state on how and when to send in ballots.

Even with an upswing in ballot requests, citizens overseas are much less politically engaged than Americans living in the U.S. In the last election, American expatriates had a voting rate of 6.9 percent, just a fraction of the participation rate in midterm and general elections.

Online registration has made it easier than ever to request a ballot, and voting organizations hope that will translate into increased overseas voter participation in the next few years.

Americans can be found in 170 countries around the world, with the largest concentrations in Canada, the U.K., Mexico and France.

With ties to the Democratic Party in the U.S., Democrats Abroad has 150,000 people in its database and 12,000 volunteers. This year, interest in events and volunteering have rivaled what they see in a general election year, organizers said.

In comparison, Republican overseas organizations seem to be less active and unaffiliated with the national party.

Republicans Overseas in the U.K., where it is estimated there are nearly 80,000 eligible American voters, has around 1,000 members. That, however, doesn’t necessarily mean there are fewer GOP voters abroad. Organizers said that interest and participation in GOP events has gone up this year, though they couldn’t provide exact numbers.

Victoria Ferauge has lived overseas for 25 years and hasn’t voted in an election for at least the last five years. This year, she registered to vote in Washington on the last day possible and plans to support the Republicans on her ballot.

“It’s become clear to me that if we don’t vote, they aren’t going to listen to us and there are some issues on the table that are important to me personally,” said the Paris resident, who also serves as the vice president of communications for the non-partisan support organization, Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO).

She’s particularly upset with current U.S. regulations that she says makes it difficult for Americans to open bank accounts and invest money both in the U.S. and overseas. But what really swung her decision was the lack of response by the Democratic incumbents in her home-state to an AARO questionnaire on issues important to overseas voters.

While opposition to President Donald Trump has motivated many overseas voters, others have been driven by a desire to change what they feel are draconian American tax laws. U.S. citizens are obligated to report their earnings and potentially pay tax even if they aren’t living in America.

“Just because you move, doesn’t mean you stop being American,” said Stephanie Ryde, 27, who grew up just outside Pittsburgh.

Ryde moved to London to be with her British husband and started volunteering with Democrats Abroad after feeling frustrated with the 2016 election result.

“There is a big difference you can make,” she said.

Guardian UK with additional report from NBC