South Asia diaspora group starts mobilising for Biden

With just over six months left for the American general elections, some South Asian election activists are mobilising to re-elect U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to the White House. The all-volunteer group, South Asians for Mr. Biden, kicked o… its activities for the election season with a virtual event held on April 25 that featured messages from lawmakers and functionaries of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and focused on issues such as 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 had exceeded the margins of victory for Democrats in previous election cycles (2020 and 2021 for example). 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 in battleground States.

In a close election, such as the 2020 race between Donald Trump and Mr. Biden, winning swing States could be key to winning the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. However, Democrats and Republicans are focused not just on the Biden Trump rematch this year but also other ‘down ballot’ races — crucial Senate and House seats as well as contests for State of–ces.

South Asians for Biden had reached out to a few hundred thousand South Asian and AAPI voters directly

vand via its digital and video campaigns in 2020 and 2021, according to Neha Dewan, national co-director of the group. Ms. Dewan listed the group’s outreach in States such as Georgia and Wisconsin where Mr. Biden won by wafer-thin margins (around 12,000 votes in Georgia for example).

Important areas

During the virtual event, titled, ‘Mobilising the South Asian Community to be the Margin of Victory’, Ms. Dewan highlighted the work of the Biden administration in areas she said were of importance to the community: reproductive rights (e.g., women’s access to contraception and abortion), curbing gun violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans.

“I know that the calls that were made into Georgia and into Wisconsin, were beyond the winning margin,” said Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for Biden-Harris 2024.

The AAPI vote was 4% of the electorate in Georgia, and an important part of the margin ( just under 3%) that got Senator Raphael Warnock re-elected the Senate (December 2022), Mr. Fulks said. Democrats retained control (51-49) of the U.S. Senate with Mr. Warnock getting elected for full term in the 118th Congress that began in 2023. “It’s going to take all of us again in 2024 to make sure that we hit 270 electoral votes,” Mr. Fulks said.

The majority of U.S. born and foreign-born Indian Americans lean towards the Democratic Party (as per 2020 data), a statistic the group appears to capitalise on.

One of the speakers at the virtual event, Washington (State) Democrat, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal cited data to support the view that South Asian social and political priorities were aligned with those of the Biden-Harris platform.

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Ro Khanna, an Indian American California Democrat, emphasised that South Asian voters were critical to electoral victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Mr. Biden won the electoral college votes in each of these States in 2020.

“We were key to President Biden and Vice President Harris’s 2020 historic win. We need to mobilise again,” he said.

AP South Asian social and political priorities were aligned with those of the Biden-Harris platform, a speaker at the event says.