Sri Kulkarni
Minority voter engagement in Texas is often viewed as an effort to get Hispanic and African Americans to the polls. But Asian Americans are now the fastest growing minority group in the country—accounting for an estimated 5 percent of Texans, according to U.S. Census data—and several observers believe they could have an impact on the November 6 election. That could have positive implications for Beto O’Rourke’s campaign, since most Asian Americans vote Democrat.
Both the Texas Asian Republican Assembly and the Asian American Democrats of Texas said O’Rourke spent more time with the Asian American community than other candidates now and historically. Nabila Mansoor, the president of the AADT, said the Democratic Party has really made an effort to get the Asian community to vote through outreach programs.
“We’re going to see I think a huge turnout rate,” Mansoor said. “If you look at it, there are areas of Texas where we could really make a huge difference.”
The term “Asian American” refers to someone with East, South, or Southeast Asian heritage, and the term is often paired with “Pacific Islander.” The group is massively diverse, which makes it difficult to pinpoint how the group will vote or even which issues are most important. After a while in the country, even on issues like immigration, racial and ethnic groups made up of immigrants might take an unexpected stance. There are an estimated 1.3 million Asian Americans in Texas, according to the 2017 report by the American Community Survey, and 625,112 of them are eligible to vote, according to Census data from 2015. The group’s growth rate of 2.7 percent nationally since 2012 is higher than Hispanics’ rate of 2.1 percent. Nationally, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voter turnout has been historically low, with only 49 percent of eligible Asian Americans voting in 2016, according to Census data. That’s dismal compared to the 65.3 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 59.6 percent for non-Hispanic blacks, but about on par with the reported Hispanic voter turnout of 47.6 percent.
Both Mansoor and Democratic state representative Gene Wu of Houston, one of the few Asian Americans in the Texas Legislature, said this is due to both the culture of the country that many AAPI people immigrated from and the feeling that candidates don’t pay much attention to their community.
“Immigrants have a tendency not to vote, not to engage,” Wu said. “People came from places where there was no voting, or voting didn’t matter. Those are high hurdles to overcome.”
That’s something O’Rourke’s campaign has fought against, and the extra attention may mean higher turnout from the community. Forty-eight percent of AAPI voters are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in this year’s midterm elections, according to a survey conducted by UC Berkeley–based data organization AAPIData released in early October. Issues like immigration, health care, and gun control poll very highly nationally in Asian American communities, and there is much more support for the Democratic positions on those issues. The question is whether that enthusiasm will translate into votes.
Read the rest. As the story notes, Asian-Americans had been a fairly Republican demographic until recently; in 2016, they were even more Democratic than Hispanic voters were. It’s important to keep in mind that “Asian-American” covers a wide variety of ethnicities and nationalities, so a strategy for engaging and turning them out is more complex than you might think. As we’ve discussed before, that’s one of the cornerstones of Sri Kulkarni’s candidacy in CD22, and as it happens the same day this story hit my feed reader, I also came across these two others on the same subject. I will say that as much as I’m rooting for Kulkarni to win, he doesn’t need to win to demonstrate the value of his approach. If he succeeds in drawing out new voters and increasing Democratic turnout as a result, that’s quite a victory by itself.
They are texting each other and telling their community to vote straight Democrat.