With the US general election just six months away, some South Asian election activists are gearing up to re-elect US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to the White House. The all-volunteer group, South Asians for Mr. Biden, kicked off its activities for the election season with a virtual event on April 25 that featured messages from lawmakers and Democratic National Committee (DNC) executives and focused on issues. Reproductive rights and gun control.
The group, like other groups working in this space, is motivated by the idea that South Asian populations in battleground states have outpaced Democrats’ margins of victory in previous election cycles (such as 2020 and 2021). This makes South Asians, like other Asian American and Pacific Islander groups (AAPI or AANHNPI to include Native Hawaiians), a potential deciding factor in who wins battleground states.
In a close election like the 2020 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, winning swing states is key to winning the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. However, Democrats and Republicans are focused not only on a Trump rematch against Biden this year, but also on other ‘down ballot’ races — contests for crucial Senate and House seats and state offices.
South Asians for Biden reached a few hundred thousand South Asian and AAPI voters directly and through its digital and video campaigns in 2020 and 2021, according to Neha Dewan, the group’s national co-director. Ms Dewan also charted the group’s influence in states like Georgia and Wisconsin, where Mr Biden won by wafer-thin margins (about 12,000 votes in Georgia, for example).
At a virtual event called ‘Equipping the South Asian Community as a Victory Edge’, Ms Dewan highlighted the Biden administration’s work in areas she said were important to the community: reproductive rights (eg, women’s access to contraception and abortion), curbing gun violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans.
“I know the calls to Georgia and Wisconsin are beyond the margin of victory,” Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for Biden-Harris 2024, said in a recorded video message.
The AAPI vote made up 4% of the electorate in Georgia and a significant portion (just under 3%) of the margin (just under 3%) that re-elected Senator Raphael Warnock to the Senate (December 2022), Mr. Fulks said. Democrats retain control of the US Senate (51-49) with Mr. Warnock — who came to the chamber after initially winning a partial term in 2020 — elected to a full term in the 118th Congress beginning in 2023.
“It will take all of us again in 2024 to make sure we hit 270 electoral votes,” Mr Fulks said.
A majority of US-born and foreign-born Indian Americans lean toward the Democratic Party (as of 2020 data), a statistic that benefits the group. At the virtual event, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, a Washington (state) Democrat, cited data to support the view that South Asian social and political priorities align with the Biden-Harris platform.
Member of the US House of Representatives, Ro Khanna, an Indian American California Democrat, emphasized that South Asian voters were crucial to electoral victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Mr. Biden won electoral college votes in each of these states in 2020.
“We are key to the historic victory of President Biden and Vice President Harris in 2020. We need to have a popular movement again,” he said.
Mr. Khanna, whose constituency includes part of Silicon Valley, highlighted his involvement with the CHIPS and SCIENCE Act, one of the Biden administration’s big-ticket policies aimed at boosting semiconductor production in the US (Mr. Khanna was one of the lawmakers who introduced one. The two pieces of legislation later became law).
“Many South Asians are involved in creating good jobs and in Arizona, upstate New York, Ohio, as a result of that act,” he said.
Democratic National Committee (DNC) AAPI Caucus Chair Bell Leong Hong described the 2024 elections in existential terms.
“We’re fighting for a place to be, we’re fighting for who we want to be,” he said.
Democrats are rallying around abortion rights and gun control
Issues important to South Asian Americans — particularly reproductive rights, voting rights and gun violence — surfaced repeatedly through the event. It reflects the Democrats’ overall approach — starting with Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris at the top — to rally voters, especially women, who may or may not have voted for Mr. Trump, to vote for Mr. Biden.
Anita Somani, a physician who is a representative in the Ohio State Assembly, had a message for voting officials who protect reproductive rights.
Abortion, and – more broadly – reproductive rights, will be a major election issue, especially from June 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade, a ruling that broadly protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. With reproductive rights becoming a state issue since the ruling was overturned, several states have enacted measures to protect these rights, with Ohio residents voting to do the same in November 2023.
“Imagine kids now mastering how to dodge bullets while sitting at their desk, walking to the corner store,” said Shikha Hamilton, a bi-cultural Indian and black parent of a daughter who has worked on firearms for two decades. Violence prevention.
Anita Somani, a physician who is a representative in the Ohio State Assembly, had a message for voting officials who protect reproductive rights.
Ballot access is a problem
Battle lines will be drawn this year around voting rights, with several Republican-governed states tightening voting access. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, last year (data for October) at least 14 states passed laws making voting more difficult, while 23 made voting easier.
At the South Asians for the Biden re-launch, Gen Z candidate for Georgia State Senate, Ashwin Ramaswamy, a former election security official, discussed the growing legislative challenges to voting in Georgia. The 24-year-old is running against state senator Shawn Still, who has been indicted along with Mr. Trump and others for trying to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Americans will elect the next president of the United States, as well as several US senators and congressmen, state governors and local officials on November 5 this year.