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South Asians Win High-Profile Races, But Voting Clout Lags – India West
by Richard Springer
South Asian American organizations have exulted over the Election Day victories of Republican Nikki Haley as governor in South Carolina and Bangladeshi American Democrat Hansen Clarke for Congress in Detroit, Mich.
But there were also musings by political analysts after the Nov. 2 election who were wondering why a trio of promising, articulate and well-funded Indian American candidates for Congress all lost, despite high hopes that one, or all three, could be elected.
Democrats Dr. Ami Bera in Sacramento, Calif., Dr. Manan Trivedi in Reading, Pa., and state Rep. Raj Goyle in Wichita, Kan., were able to accumulate large campaign war chests.
But on the negative side, they all had to run in congressional districts with conservative voting histories.
Bera and Trivedi were also handicapped by having little name recognition at the onset of their campaigns, running against long-entrenched Republican incumbents in a mid-election year when any endorsement of President Obama’s health plan, no matter how lukewarm, was the kiss of death.
Washington, D.C.-based South Asia Americans Leading Together held a Web conference Nov. 4 to ruminate on the mid-term election results.
SAALT executive director Deepa Iyer pointed out that despite a 87.9 percent increase in voter registration of Asian Americans from 1996-2008, there has also been a corresponding rise in “xenophobia and racism in political discourse.”
One incident cited in SAALT’s recent report, “From Macacas to Turban Toppers: The Rise in Xenophobic and Racists Rhetoric in American Political Discourse” (I-W, Nov. 5), was a tweet from the campaign of Goyle’s Republican opponent, Mike Pompeo, that urged supporters to read a blog that called Goyle a “turban topper” (I-W, Aug. 20, 2010).
Media strategist Toby Chaudhuri of Revolution Messaging, a participant in the SAALT event, noted the “unprecedented amount of political activity” in the Indian American community in 2010 that “transformed the political debate.”
He opined that losses by Indian American Democrats could be mainly attributed to the fact that the “right wing found traction in attacking the White House” and successfully pinned the poor economy on the Obama administration.
Chaudhuri also speculated that Bera and Trivedi might have done better with voters if “their names had been more familiar.”
“The bar is higher (for Indian Americans) in showing why their candidate is seen as ‘one of us’ by mainstream voters,” he said, adding that opponents to immigrant American candidates can follow a strategy to show “why an opponent is ‘not one of us,’ showing that our culture is not part of America.”
One Indian American politician, speaking off the record last week, told India-West, “While some races are won and lost with heavy emphasis on national trends, the vast majority of ‘smaller’ races are won or lost based upon realities on the ground.”
“We saw an unprecedented number of qualified, terrific desi candidates running for federal office across the country,” the politician noted.
“Some of them even came from districts favorable to Democrats (and most of them were Democrats, right?), but few of them seem to have begun their candidacies with a significant electoral base, at least at the outset.”
“So you can have stellar candidates like Bera or Trivedi, who have to work extra hard, building their base from scratch, but they had to do so against a strong electoral current favoring Republicans,” the politician added.
At the SAALT press conference, Glenn D. Magpantay, director of the Democracy Project at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, revealed results of an exit poll of 3,500 Asian American voters in the Nov. 2 election in five states – New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas and Georgia.
The poll was conducted at 34 sites in eight languages: Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Khmer, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu and Gujarati.
The percentage of South Asian voters among those polled was 44% in Texas, 36% in Georgia and 23% in New York, but only 5% in Pennsylvania and 2% in Massachusetts, Magpantay amplified later to India-West.
In New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Asian Americans voted significantly more for Democratic candidates than the electorate at large, while in Georgia and Texas they voted closer in line with voter trends, giving the edge to Republicans, but with a smaller victory margin than that given the GOP by all voters.
In the traditionally Democratic northeastern states of New York and Massachusetts, for example, Asian Americans in two governors’ races voted overwhelmingly (82%) for New York Democratic candidate Andrew Cuomo over GOP conservative Carl Paladino (13%), and for Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick in Massachusetts (84%) over businessman Charlie Baker (14%).
Cuomo won overall 61% to 31% and Patrick won 48% to 42%.
In a state Senate race in New York, Democratic candidate Tony Avella unseated Republican incumbent Frank Padavan, who had made anti-immigrant statements, by a 53% to 47% margin. Padavan’s comments hurt him in Asian American communities. Korean Americans, for example, voted 89% for Avella and 11% for Padavan.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato received 78% of the Asian American vote, while 18% supported Republican candidate Tom Corbett, but Corbett won 54% to 45%.
In Texas, Asian Americans favored the reelection of Republican Governor Rick Perry by a small margin, 50% to 48%. Perry was re-elected by a vote of 55% to 42%.
In Georgia, Asian American voters favored Republican gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal (50%) over Democratic candidate Roy Barnes (46%). Deal won 53% to 43%.
Magpantay also revealed that there were polling problems at some voting locations in the East. One South Asian American voter was turned away at a polling site by a policeman who insisted, wrongly it turned out, that he had seen her voting, when she had not.
In addition, some Indian Americans with Christian last names, such as those named “Matthew” or “Paul,” found that they were not able to vote, because poll workers had wrongly switched their first and last names.
Also, a Bangladeshi American voter in New York “could not get a translator” at a polling site, Magpantay said.
At the SAALT event, Sayu Bhojwani, founding director of the New York-based New American Leaders Project, noted that South Asians still “haven’t demonstrated our electoral power,” especially in New York, where the “city council still doesn’t have an elected official of South Asian descent” despite a diverse population of South Asians dispersed through the city.
Bhojwani urges South Asians to “build coalitions” with other immigrant communities and oppose candidates “who actively advocate for destructive policies that create harm and fear” in immigrant communities.