Democrats may have found their secret weapon in the Georgia runoff elections: Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters.
Tuesday’s election has big implications for the U.S. Senate. Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock are taking on Republican incumbent Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Should both Ossoff and Warnock win, Democrats will control the Senate.
While much attention has been devoted to other portions of Georgia’s electorate, it’s only until recently that Democrats have started to realize the importance of the Asian American vote.
According to the Pew Research Center, Asian Americans are the fastest-growing minority voting bloc in the U.S.; about 11 million Asian Americans are eligible to vote this year. That’s about 5% of the nation’s eligible voters, a number that’s more than doubled since 2000.
In Georgia, eligible AAPI voters total 238,080, according to a study by Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to increase civic engagement among AAPIs. Although that’s only about 4.7% of the Georgia electorate, it may be enough to tilt the election in favor of one party.
As it stands, polls show the race to be virtually tied. The latest polls show Ossoff and Warnock with slight leads, but the polls are within the margin of error. In essence, no one knows what will happen on Tuesday. Some organizers, however, believe AAPI voters will be the deciding factor in the races.
With so much at stake, numerous AAPI organizing groups have launched campaigns to mobilize Asian American voters in Georgia.
One such group is the Asian American Advocacy Fund—a grassroots group dedicated to building a progressive Asian American base in Georgia. Its PAC arm launched Asians for Georgia, a campaign to mobilize Asian Americans to vote for Ossoff and Warnock. Its primary methods of voter outreach are “engaging community members at their doors, calling them to action over the phone, organizing them across social media platforms, and providing them with in-language resources necessary to make an educated decision at the polls.”
Another progressive organization is the AAPI Victory Fund, which seeks to engage and empower “AAPI progressive voters to be the margin of victory at all levels of the ballot.” Following a successful general election campaign, AAPI Victory Fund launched a “full-scale senatorial campaign” to mobilize AAPI voters in rural Georgia.
“The AAPI Victory Fund has been investing in the Georgia electorate since 2017,” said Varun Nikore, president of the AAPI Victory Fund, in a press release. “This Southern strategy has since paid off, but much work into infrastructure remains, and particularly into identifying AAPI voter sub-ethnicities in order to properly target our voters.”
Nikore added, “There’s still so much untapped potential from AAPI voters in these key battleground states, particularly for the 55,000 AAPIs who live in rural areas. In elections with razor-thin margins, these votes matter more than ever before.”
AAPI Victory Fund board member Katie Kalvoda added, “While there are concerted efforts targeting voters in urban and suburban areas, it is just as critical to focus on rural Georgia, where at least 58% AAPIs cast a ballot for Biden, and more than enough to flip the two Senate seats.”
There are at least 55,000 AAPI Democrats in rural Georgia, twice as many as originally thought, explained the AAPI Victory Fund.
“We believe that these rural AAPI voters will be key to winning both of these seats to take control of the Senate, unlocking a Biden-Harris legislative agenda,” the fund added. “We have the opportunity to reassert our values as a nation of immigrants driven by the promise of equality and prosperity.”
Challenges in mobilizing the Asian American electorate
There are unique challenges in mobilizing AAPI voters, however. For one, “Asian American” is an umbrella term that encompasses people from more than 15 ethnicities, each with its own unique ideological and cultural makeup. In Georgia, the largest AAPI ethnic groups, according to APIAVote, are Indian (150,305), Chinese (75,592), Korean (65,930), Vietnamese (65,547), Filipino (47,406) and Japanese (18,869).
Language access is particularly important in Georgia’s AAPI community. APIAVote found that 80% of Asian Americans in the state speak a language other than English at home. Of these, more than 43% reported speaking English less than “very well.”
To help breach this language gap, Asians for Georgia released several 30-second ads in other languages, including Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese.
Another major issue in mobilizing AAPI voters is that this electorate has largely been ignored. APIAVote found that in 2018, about half of Asian Americans said they had not received contact about elections from the Democratic party; 60% reported they had not been contacted by the GOP.
While AAPI voters preferred Biden, Trump still snagged about 31% of Asian American votes, according to NBC News. As is the case with Latino voters, Democrats cannot assume AAPI voters will support Democratic candidates and must therefore work to win over voters.
Stephanie Cho, who currently serves as the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, recently told The Guardian that campaigns have made little effort to engage AAPI voters and that politicians have failed to understand their potential voting power. “When you think about California, what it was like 30 or 40 years ago, that’s Georgia,” said Cho. “It’s on a trajectory of change.”
According to Cho, the dramatic increase in voter participation by Asian Americans is thanks to voter engagement and mobilization efforts by AAPI organizers and activists.
“When no one was looking, we really changed things in Georgia,” said Cho.
#MyNameIs
Following a $10 million campaign focusing on mobilizing AAPI voters in Pennsylvania and Arizona during the general election, the Indian American Impact Fund (IMPACT) launched a $2.5 million campaign to turn out Asian American voters in Georgia.
“The Democratic Party couldn’t win the presidency or the Senate without Asian Americans,” said IMPACT Executive Director Neil Makhija. “In November, South Asian and Asian American voters were the critical difference between victory and defeat in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona. The numbers are striking: Asian Americans increased turnout more than any other demographic, nearly doubling in Georgia. Asian Americans are becoming a core constituency of the Democratic Party, but they can’t be taken for granted.”
Makhija added, “We are poised to play a critical role in January for the Georgia Senate runoff races. IMPACT’s historic investment over the remaining weeks of the campaign will harness this emerging power of South Asian and Asian American voters to help deliver Georgia and control of the U.S. Senate for Democrats. This election can play a transformative role for the Biden-Harris Administration and for our country, and Asian Americans realize that—which is why they’re already turning in their ballots in record numbers.”
During a Trump rally in October, Sen. Perdue mocked Kamala Harris’s name (her mother immigrated from India). South Asian Americans subsequently launched a social media campaign called #MyNameIs, in which Asian Americans whose names have been frequently mispronounced shared the origins of their names.
In December, IMPACT teamed up with Meena Harris’s (Kamala Harris’s niece) Phenomenal Productions to release a video that highlights the impact of Asian American voters and encourages Georgia AAPIs to vote in the runoff elections. The video features several South Asian American actors, including Kumail Nanjiani, Kal Penn and Sendhil Ramamurthy.
“In 2020, when our leaders disrespect us...they know exactly what they’re doing,” said Nanjiani in the video. Interspersed between his words is a clip of Perdue mocking Harris’s name.
Nanjiani added, “Well, Senator, while you simply mispronounced our names, we’ve simply voted Donald Trump out of office. We’ve simply registered millions of new voters in Georgia. We simply turned out in record numbers. And now we are simply voting for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.”
Asian Americans are “an underrated and often discounted electorate that has an incredible potential to decide elections,” wrote the AAPI Victory Fund. “AAPI groups… have been saying this for years, but for now, the country is coming to terms with the magnitude of this still-emerging voting bloc.”
