AUSTRALIA WOW: JENNY LEE, JOYFUL WARRIOR

The story of a retired Australian schoolteacher who decided to volunteer with the Eau Claire, Wisconsin Democrats in the 2024 election.

In the world of Australian politics, the final two weeks of a parliamentary year are known as the “killing season” If a party is going to make a move on its leader—unlike in U.S. politics, the leader of the party comes from and is chosen by its elected representatives, rather than as a separate candidate; as a result they can toss their leader at any time, too—it often happens in these two weeks at the end of November when Parliament is sitting for the last time and everyone is together.

But the month of December can also be calamitous for Australian party leaders. The last prime minister Scott Morrison was on vacation in Hawai’i in December of 2019 as horrifying bush fires swept across the country, and didn’t return until two firefighters were killed. In his apology upon returning, he explained it wasn’t as though he was going to be out there fighting the fires himself. “They know I’m not going to stand there and hold a hose,” he said.

While current prime minister Anthony Albanese hasn’t made a blunder of anywhere near that scale this holiday, over the course of the last month I’ve watched the press and Opposition ratchet up their own attacks on him. What began as questions at the beginning of the month about whether Albanese’s Labor Party will be able to outright win the next election (which must be announced by May) or will need to form government with independents has shifted to a growing feeling that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton may be the next prime minister, despite a long history of anti-immigrant and anti-aboriginal positions and fear-mongering.

And the Murdoch press is doing everything it can to amplify Albanese’s perceived problems, with pages upon pages of stories attacking Labor in Australia’s only national newspaper, The Australian.

(On New Year’s Day, every story on the front page was either an attack on Albanese or celebrated the Liberal Party. Even its story about New Year’s Eve celebrations began with a series of comments about how bad things in the country were.)

Ever since I first came to Australia in 2008 I’ve been interested in the unique dynamics of its politics. In part it’s just so different from the U.S. system. But it’s also true that it is not the U.S. political system, and therefore in its own way an escape from all of that, a welcome one. (Since I got here a month ago I can’t tell you how many times Australians have asked if I am Canadian. I’ve learned over the years this is usually not a mistaken interpretation of my accent, but an attempt to give me the benefit of the doubt. And while I always admit that no, I am one of that people responsible for George W. Bush and Donald Trump (twice), I can’t say I haven’t been tempted to instead extol the beauty of my home in Vancouver or the underappreciated genius of the Levy family.)

My sister says I remind her of David. While I think she’s just being nice, I will absolutely take it.

Given the complete train wreck that is U.S. politics today, imagine my surprise to meet retired Australian school teacher Jenny Lee, who felt so passionately about the 2024 election, she flew to the States and volunteered in Wisconsin the final two weeks of the campaign. (And to her credit and that of the local Democratic machine, while the press reported that pretty much every district in the country swung to the right this election, in point of fact the Eau Claire district where she volunteered actually end up favoring Harris by a greater margin than it had Biden, Clinton, or Obama.)

I was so stunned to hear that she’d done this, I asked Lee if she would do an interview with me about her experience. We talked by phone a few weeks ago.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Have you always been in interested in U.S. politics?

Jenny Lee: I’ve spent my career as a history teacher and in that time, as is the nature of our curriculum, there is a lot of American history that you can choose to do, and I chose to teach a lot of it. I used to teach a subject called How Slavery Made America.

And academically, my Master’s is in Australian Studies, and then I started a Master’s in American Studies. We have an American Studies unit that is very very well resourced as part of the University of Sydney. Both my husband and I started our Master’s degree, but then our grandchildren started to be born. Any extra hours that I had devoted very happily to American history were taken up by grandchildren.

I have to say that American history and American and all the ways that the United States has responded to the challenges of the evolution of your democracy has always intrigued me. The complexities of it—in so many ways you are so much more diverse than the Australian experience, even though we are on a similarly large geographic setting. The experiences are so different. That interaction of place and culture and demographics and then the political differences, the similarities and the differences—I always found that intriguing.

Had you ever been to the States?
I’d been twice, but I was one of those people that had been to New York and Los Angeles and then flown over the rest.

My son-in-law is also Canadian, so we have gone to Canada. That Canadian preoccupation with what defines Canadians as being different to the United States, we’ve also had conversations along those lines.

And we’re also a very politically-oriented family. It’s sort of our thing. Other people like snow and go skiing. I like American politics so I went to the States to work on the election.

How did you arrange it?

It was so serendipitous. So I taught in a very lively, very female history faculty at a school here in Sydney. And in 2016 when Hilary Clinton was running, the student body (it was an all-girls school) were very engaged, switched-on. In our department that we’d arrive every day and say Well, girls, if we were in the United States today, what would we be doing for Hilary Clinton today? That was our distraction.

We’ve all since left the school, but we’ve stayed friends. Two of us are retired, the others are still working. When Kamala had the torch passed to her, a text message went around, asking Well, Girls, is now the time to regroup and get the team together for Kamala? And maybe a day later I thought, Why not?

And my son in law, who is also very political, he ran for the ALP as a federal candidate, one of his friends is from Minnesota, his name is Eric Petersen, he’s a local Democratic county convener. He’s also a grass roots trainer for community organizations of different kinds, and he does a lot of work in Australia.

So I would see him two or three times a year. In fact the front bedroom of my daughter’s house is known not as Marnie and Paddy’s room (my husband and I), but as Eric’s room. So I was telling my son-in-law the anecdote one day of me and my colleagues, and he said Jenny you ought to do it. And he texted Eric right there in front of me and Eric replied immediately, Oh, send her over, there’s work to be done.

(Eric had in fact done some sessions with Tim Walz, when Tim left teaching to run for politics, how to communicate differently or what.)

Eric’s mother lived in Eau Claire, and I was going to stay with her, but as it turned out, she’s 95 and she a fall earlier in the year and could no longer live independently. But they hadn’t yet cleaned out the house, so Eric said Look, it would suit us to have someone living in the house for a bit, making it look occupied. SO I had this wonderfully-set up house in Eau Claire, a really sympathetic neighborhood, every second house had a Harris/Walz yard sign in it.

And why Wisconsin?

Eric said, We don’t need you in Minnesota, we’re 10 points ahead in Minnesota, we need all the help we can get in Wisconsin.

And it couldn’t have been a better place for me to go, because their organizational capacity and their grass roots organization, the number of boots they had on the ground and how well they all collaborated with each other was just exemplary. They were just wonderful to watch.

And in addition, what I couldn’t get over was they operate out of a little corner store, like a repurposed corner store, that they call the Democratic Party Resource Center.

They were tired of gearing up for a campaign, gathering all the things you need, the number of phone outlets, the number of photocopiers and cupboard space for all your literature, and then it all dispersing and then two years later having to do it all again. So a local state senator by the name of Jeff Smith, who is really impressive, and a real public education advocate—and that’s also part of our background, my husband was a trade union official, some of our best friends are teachers and still very, very engaged in the politics of school funding; so I felt like I arrived amongst cousins, and I was very warmly welcomed as a cousin—Jeff said we just need to have a place that is the center of Democratic activity.

So they store all their stuff there, but they also do things like every Thursday they have a thing called the Koffee Klatch where about 40 people turn up at 10 o’clock and for two hours they just talk about contemporary politics and what that means in Eau Claire and what it means in the nation and what it means in the culture.

I got to go to two of those, and they are wonderful. I’m going to try and replicate that at an Institute that I work for, the Whitlam Institute, just as a way to keep the physical space lively.

Wisconsin State Senator Jeff Smith doing chats with people from the area along the roadside.

And they do this all year, or just in campaign seasons?

They do it all year. And every Tuesday night they have a games and discussion night, they open the center and people come in and drink coffee and talk.

I’ve kept up correspondence with the people I met. I only knew them for two weeks, but they were so warm in the way they trusted me, they were such like-minded people and such good people and such courteous people, and they are absolutely bereft given this election outcome.

I can definitely appreciate that feeling.

Our county actually returned more votes for Harris/Walz than Biden had won in 2020, or Hilary Clinton, or Obama. So their on-the-ground organizational capacity [is great]. Also the impact of the leadership of Ben Wikler [chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, now running for chair of the Democratic National Committee]. I had never heard of Ben Wikler, but he turned up the first Saturday I was there when they were getting out the vote, and he made this fabulous stump speech. Then I went back and read all about him and my God, he is one impressive man.

The other thing was, the other thing that impressed me about how the Democrats went about their work in Eau Claire was what attention senior members of the party were paying to the grass roots. Elizabeth Warren had been there the Sunday before I got there, and Ben Wikler and then Gwen Walz came through on the Saturday before the election. And it wasn’t patronizing, it wasn’t condescending, it wasn’t the leader come down from the gods to greet the great unwashed. It seemed genuinely grateful—"Thank you for doing this. What you are doing is important.” And that was such an effective message. That sort of quality of leadership I thought was impressive.

Wikler was recently on The Daily Show talking about how exactly he and the Democratic party of Wisconsin managed to overcome years of Republican gerrymandering.

The other thing that blew me away was not just the number of locals who were volunteering, but the waves of people who were coming in from all over the United States. There were so many people. They had to move twice to accommodate the sheer number of volunteers. There were people from 15 different U.S. states who just turned up—Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Vermont, Washington state and from the District of Columbia, they’d come in and say I’ve just driven for three days, and I’m just wondering if there’s something I can do. And the number of people coming in from California, I reckon we had about 25, and they just arrived, they would have booked themselves a hotel room, they stayed for 4 or 5 days.

As it went on, I said does this happen every time? They said Oh no, this has never happened before. The history teacher in me said this should be recorded, so I drew up a survey with their permission, [asking] Who are you, why did you come, what motivated you, What do you notice about Wisconsinites, what has given you hope, what has given you cause for concern. And the bulk of them replied. I called them the Brigade.

Lee shared her write up from the survey with me. Here’s one small section:

There was a strong sense of history in the making. To be part of an undertaking that could see the election of the first woman President of the United States and of a woman of colour was an exciting moment to be part of. One volunteer reported a young woman she came across, saying, “When she wins, America won’t be racist anymore”. A utopian dream clearly but expressive of the hopefulness Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were inspiring, particularly amongst young voters. Volunteers were energised by the joyful rallies several attended en route to Eau Claire. There was repeated reference to the Harris/Walz campaign honouring its undertaking to exemplify joyful warriors, a role and a tenor volunteers were happy to take on. Loyalty of a specific ilk was evident in the Alumni of Tim and Gwen Walz amongst our brigade. These alumni wore emblazoned blue alumni T-shirts as tribute to their teachers who continue to inspire them. The blue-clad alumni were knocking on the doors of Eau Claire to give back to these two loved educators who now embarked on such a different task.

Lee discusses some other of the observations people made below.

You’d never been to Wisconsin before yourself. What were your impressions?

I spent most of my time with Democrats. To a person, I found the people I dealt with so admirable. They were so courteous. They were so considerate. In fact, coming from an Australian political life, watching them—I went to a forum that the city council ran, and I thought they could have done with a bit more mongrel in them. The Democrats on that forum were so polite and so articulate, I thought they were like really clever PhD students. And the Republicans were so smarmy. Eau Claire I think clearly is being punished by the Republican-led legislature in Madison for being a Democrat town. The amount of investment going into Eau Claire is scandalously less per head than the average Wisconsite.

We read over here about voter suppression and gerrymandering: The form you have to fill in to register someone to vote in Wisconsin would be about twice the complexity of what an Australian has to fill in to get a passport. It is just a case study in how to use bureaucracy to [undermine democracy]. It’s the legacy of [former governor] Scott Walker. For me it was like a Master’s class in how you can lose your democracy.

Anyway, that was my impression of Wisconsites…well, until you run into a Trumper. They were terrifying. I had one particularly frightening episode with an Uber driver who scared the bejeezus out of me. The whole time that he drove me from my house to the Democratic Resource center, it was just this litany of threats and guns and there’s going to be blood in the streets and just craziness. I imagine it was like in Germany in 1934.

And Gloria, who ran the office, she said we’re not trying to persuade anyone to change their vote, we’re just getting out the Democrat vote. And the advice was all the time, if you come across a Trumper, don’t even try. But when you come across them, and the canvassers, it was daily that they would come in and talk—particularly about women who weren’t Trump voters but living with a husband who was a Trump supporter, and how frightened those women were. It’s a real thing.

And I went to a forum, there was a woman who’s a political scientist, and she had written her PhD on rural resentment in Wisconsin. And her methodology was just to go and chat, particularly in the rural areas in northern Wisconsin. They’ve lost their banks and all their kids are leaving town, so they feel left behind and disrespected, and clearly have all jumped on the Trump wagon. And she was quite sympathetic to them, quite more than I would. I think after a while you have to take responsibility when you slide into fascism. It’s not enough to say Oh, well, they feel disrespected. Well they have some obligations to their fellow citizens.

When she was doing her research she was a young graduate student. She rode a beat-up Corolla. Well, now she drives a Prius. And she said, when I drive around Northern Wisconsin now, the phenomenon of those big black or white pickup trucks with the American flag, or the American flag and the Trump flag at the four corners of the car, and how they would drive right up against her and tailgate her in a way that she found intimidating. She said, I think it’s because I now drive a Prius. And she sort of said it like Oh dear, they’re cross with me. And I thought, That’s all you have to do to be intimidated? The kind of car you drive?

So [there is] that ever-present intimidation and threat of violence. When I had this guy, and he worked himself up into an absolute lathering, red-faced and spitting, and the Second Amendment’s there and we’ve got the guns and we know how to use them. He got so adamant. The only thing I said was, Is there a militia outside Eau Claire?And he said Ah no, but it’ll only take one thing.

The way people said, Oh God, it’s going to happen. And then the day after the election no one was worrying about Democratic militias. The longer I was there, the more convinced I was that America is having its 1934 moment.

I have an Australian friend who lives in New York. She’s had two different experiences with American cab drivers since the election behaving much the same. And this was in New York.

I was leaving Brooklyn to go out to JFK and on that freeway near Long Island somewhere there’s this giant advertising sign that read Enroll your child in such and such a school where they won’t be taught to hate America.

Good Lord.

Jenny Lee (right) and Los Angeles volunteer Terry Ajir with a good friend on Election Day 2024.

I met a woman, another example of the sort of volunteer who was coming into Wisconsin, she’s the emeritus professor of history from Georgetown University. She was waiting for me outside the resource center, and she was walking up and down on the phone, clearly agitated. So when she finished, she said, Oh My God, I’ve just driven in, she’d stayed up on one of the lakes, and she’d had a right wing radio station on that was talking about what the CDC was planning. This radio station was claiming that they knew for a fact that within the laboratories of the CDC they were incubating a new and more virulent bird flu which they would release on the American public so that 52% of the American public would die and then they would blame Donald Trump. And as it turns out, her son-in-law is an epidemiologist who works at the CDC and she’d be on the phone to her daughter to say this is what I just heard.

So I’m in this little bubble of lovely, courteous, compassionate, hardworking Democrats, and then every now and then this intrusion of this crazy right-wing world would come into your space, and that would set me back. But then I would go back to my nice, compassionate, thoughtful group.

How would you compare all of this to how things tend to go to Australia?

We’ve got a really different system. We do have a crazy right wing, but they never score more than 9% of our voting population. And the reason is, we have compulsory voting. If you don’t vote, you get fined. And what do people do with that, do they see that as an incursion on their personal liberties? No, they do not. It’s seen as an obligation of citizenship, like having speed limits on the road. And if they get fined, people pay it, because if you don’t, it just keeps getting bigger.

What that means is that the right wing has been suppressed. Our politics operate out of what we call the sensible center. You would find this on the margins of your left wing liberals. In 1967, we had a referendum asking Australians—because we had a deeply racist constitution which had specifically excluded indigenous Australians from citizenship in as many words, and the referendum was to remove that clause from our constitution. And we’re very proud that 91% of Australians voted for the removal of that clause.

But 9% voted no they shouldn’t. And that 9% has never gone away. They’re always there. There’s always some right wing person around whom they can coalesce. Those people change. And if there are two of them, they split the vote. But they never get more than 9%.

So the working class have got a vote. And the parties have got to reflect in working class electorates the interests of the working class. So for example, Wisconsin’s minimum wage is $7.50. Ours is $17.59 which in American dollars converts to $14. So our minimum wage is twice theirs.

And the other thing we do is we vote on a Saturday.

Australia has a long tradition of doing barbecue sausages outside polling sites on Election Day. They’re known as “democracy sausages.”

Not only that, we have preferential voting, and that suppresses the extreme right. And not only that, but we have an independent statutory organization that is nationwide and they run the election. The Australian Electoral Commission—they decide on boundaries, report on elections. It’s not subject to political interference by any of the political parties. It is generally considered one of the most trusted institutions of the Australian political system.

Can you say a little bit more about preferential voting, and how it ends up suppressing the extreme right?

[Note on preferential voting: When Australians vote, they don’t just identify one choice. They rank all the possible choices. If their first choice drops out of the contention for the office, their vote ends up going to their next choice, etc.]

For us, it’s not first past the post. If I voted for a Green and they don’t get in, my next vote would be for the Labor Party. So you don’t split the progressive vote. The progressive vote stays consolidated.

For example, let’s say you had a middle class electorate where a lot of people are interested in the Greens (you would call them progressives). So you’d have the Greens, Labor, and then our conservative party the Liberal and National parties, who are in coalition.

Let’s say Labor got 33%, the Liberals got 36%, but the Greens got 26%. Normally Green voters would preference labor, so even though the Liberals got more firs preference votes than Labor, by the time the Green preferences are added, the Labor Party wins. So the progressive stance of that electorate is acknowledged. You don’t drift to the right.

One of the things they worried about in Wisconsin was whether if Robert Kennedy had stayed in as an independent, would he have taken votes from Harris or Trump. Whereas if there was preferential voting he would have directed his voters as to where he’d prefer his votes to go.

What was your feeling at the end of the day with the time you spent in the States?

Flying home I just felt like I’m coming back to a world of rationality. And all those people I left behind deserve so much better.

The other thing that really bothered me is that it’s not just Trump. The Republican Party just does not have a commitment to the basic tenets of democracy. And Fox News.

One of the things that shocked me is that many very well respected Republicans stood against Trump, and it didn’t seem to make any difference.

That horrible last week of the campaign, the Madison Square Garden thing and wanting to shoot Liz Cheney in the face. I thought, He can’t recover from that, no civilized person would think that’s alright. All I could think was that last line out of the Second Coming, What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? The Anglican archbishop in Brisbane read that as part of his Sunday sermon [the Sunday after the election].

Wow.

Yeah.

I have to say, to drop everything and fly to the United States to help a bunch of strangers out in their election, it’s just a very generous act. I think a lot of people reading this will be very touched that you would do that.

All I can say is, I got a lot out of it. I’m so glad I did it. “People are more interesting than places” is my new line. I just loved it. They were fine people.

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Thanks to Jenny for the conversation and for the work she did. I’m only more blown away after interviewing you, Jenny.

I’m headed back to the States later this week. There may be a Wow somewhere in there. Keep your eyes peeled! And have a great week.