Kirsten Verdel cleared her schedule in the days surrounding the election, forgoing sleep to glean wisdom from some of the 500 American pollsters, officials and journalists she follows on Twitter and fire off her own analysis onto the social network as new results rolled in.

But she can’t vote in the election she’s obsessively watching. Verdel lives in Roelofarendsveen, a small village in the Netherlands, and her prolific tweets — almost entirely in Dutch — are at this point just a very intense hobby.

“I think hundreds of thousands of people stayed up through the night this past Tuesday, out of a population of 17 million people,” she told The Nevada Independent about her countrymen. “And basically all the news here is about the U.S. elections this week as well. So it's not just me.”

Verdel is just one of the billions of people living outside the U.S. whose lives are affected by the outcome of elections in the most powerful country in the free world. She has a particularly keen understanding of the process from her former work for the Dutch Labor Party and some time spent in the U.S. and Canada, where she worked for a stint on President Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign.

“It was the greatest learning experience of my life,” she said.

The questions her more than 13,000 followers are asking aren’t elementary. Many have been watching the process unfold in major outlets such as CNN and The New York Times, but have questions about how the run-off Senate elections in Georgia work and the role of provisional ballots.

“I think a lot of people in the Netherlands know more about American politics than a lot of Americans,” she said. 

When she informally polled her Twitter followers about why the Dutch care so much about the U.S. election, she got some tongue-in-cheek answers: it’s like another episode of The West Wing, some said. It’s like disaster tourism, and it’s entertaining during lockdown.

But it’s also about the leadership role the U.S. does — and sometimes doesn’t — play. 

“We're very interested in the political system. Not the two-party system, but the values from the Constitution, things like that. They're examples to us,” she said. “But it's also the importance of the United States on the world scale.”

When the U.S. walked away from the Paris Climate Agreement, that in turn affects the Netherlands. There are consequences related to America’s participation in NATO and treaties. 

“I think right now, the United States of America are more the polarized states of America,” she said. “And that polarization has to stop. So I hope that Biden would be able to at least calm things down a little bit, create a bit more stability.”

Brage Eidsvik, an engineer who lives in Stavanger, Norway, said American news is ever-present in his country of about 5 million people. It was the talk of the town heading into election night, then when Norway woke up on Wednesday morning with the results still far from final.

“It's the most impactful country in the world,” he said. “American politics has just been jammed down our throats for the past 20 years. Every time something big happens in America, that's what we hear about, even though it doesn't affect us directly.”

Few Norwegians are openly pro-Trump, he said, and many are surprised that after four years under Trump’s leadership, there aren’t different candidates in the race. The ongoing debate over whether the Affordable Care Act should remain in place is also a curiosity for Norwegians.

“Most people in Norway consider it to be a human right, that everyone should have free health care. And if you're in trouble, you know that your government is going to take care of you and you're not going to be financially disabled for the rest of your life,” he said. “That's one of the biggest, biggest differences we see.”

Gabri Rizzi, a politics student who lives in Rome, follows the U.S. election so closely that he had planned to organize a results watch party, had not stricter coronavirus regulations come into play. He noted enthusiasm among Italians that Kamala Harris, a woman of color, is vice president-elect. For him, Biden’s win signals hope for more collaboration with other countries.

“We saw that during the Trump administration, there was this kind of ‘Europe doesn't matter. Let's negotiate with every state,’” he said. “I think that maybe Biden will be much more pro-European.”

He said he sees America’s embrace of Trump as shaping Italian politics, fueling more nationalist and anti-establishment movements that already had a foothold in the country. Biden’s victory could mean a return to prioritizing the environment and restoring bilateral agreements.

However it goes, Italians — and people all over the world — will be watching.

“Even though maybe in the United States it's like America is losing, we have to make America great again,” he said. “In Italy, America still plays a role, still is important, still is a model to follow."

For more, listen to the IndyMatters podcast episode coming out Friday.