South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Asians a new force in Georgia politics
New voters may be a bright spot for Democratic Party
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — Four years ago, Maliha Javed, an immigrant from Pakistan, was not paying attention to politics. A community college student in suburban Atlanta, she was busy buying books and studying for classes. She did not vote that year.
But the past four years changed her. The Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban affected some of her friends. The child separation policy reminded her of living apart from her parents for three years during her own move to the United States.
Then, this summer, the discovery that shewaspregnant made it final: On Election Day, she marched into the Amazing Grace Lutheran Church near her house and voted for the first time in her life. She chose Joe Biden.
“I want it to be a better country for him to grow up in,” said Javed, who is 24 and is having a boy.
Javed is part of a small but powerful new force in Georgia politics: Asian American voters.
She lives in Gwinnett County, Georgia’s secondmost populous county and the one with the largest Asian American population. Biden, who narrowly defeated President Donald Trump in Georgia, won Gwinnett County by 18 percentage points, a substantial increase over Hillary Clinton’s performance four years ago and only the second time the county went blue since the 1970s.
The county is also the heart of the only tightly contested House seat in the entire country that Democrats flipped this year — Georgia’s 7th Congressional District. A survey of Asian American early voters in that district found that 41% reported voting for the first time, said Taeku Lee, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped conduct it.
The emergence in Georgia of Asian American voters is a potential bright spot for a Democratic Party counting on demographic changes to bring political wins across the country.
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing segment of eligible voters out of the major racial and ethnic groups in the country, according to the Pew Research Center; their numbers, nationally and in Gwinnett County, more than doubledbetween2000 and 2020.
Families of Asian descent in the United States come from dozens of countries, but according to Pew, a vast majority of the voting population comes from just six. China, the Philippines and India account formore than half, followed by Vietnam, Korea and Japan.
But interviews with Asian Americans in Gwinnett County showed that their political preferences are fluid. Whilemany voted for Biden, they are hardly a done deal for the Democratic Party. A large portion are socially conservative, often observant Christians and owners of small businesses.
Many new voters were drawn to the presidential race because it had loomed so large in American culture. But that also means they are no guarantee for Democrats inGeorgia’s runoffs for two crucial U.S. Senate seats in January, in which control of the upper chamber hangs in the balance.
“People are like, ‘What?’ ” said Cam Ashling, 40, a Democratic activist, referring to new voters’ responses when she raises the runoffs, which she referred to as “a giant uphill battle.”
She added: “We have to try very hard to keep Georgia blue. It is not solid.”
As a group nationally, Asian Americans tend to prefer Democrats, but that masks deep differences by ethnic origin and generation.
AAPI Data, a data analytics firm that focuses on Asian Americans, has found that many Vietnamese immigrant voters lean Republican, while very few Bangladeshi voters do. And American-born Vietnamese voters lean less toward Republicans than do their foreign-born parents.
Two-thirds of all eligible Asian American voters in 2018 were naturalized citizens, according to Pew, the highest ratio of any major racial or ethnic group.
“I would love to be a Republican, but right now they’re just crazy,” said Jae Song, 50, an ITworker who was picking up lunch at Vietvana Pho Noodle House in Duluth, an upscale town in Gwinnett County that is24% Asian American. Song, a Korean immigrant, said he loved Trump on the economy, but hated him on the coronavirus. His daughter in New York has had racist slurs flung at her.
But he said he was also confused by Democrats’ priorities.
He had heard a lot of the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” andheunderstood that. But this also led him to wonder, “What about us?”
Surveys suggest a substantial increase in Asian American votes this year, a jump that follows the expansion of the group’s population in the state. About 2.5% of Georgia’s voters were Asian American this year, up from 1.6% in 2016.
The Asian American population in Georgia is mixed economically. Some are doctors and upper-income professionals, but others are owners of beauty supply stores, restaurants, mobile phone franchises and laundromats.
James Woo, 35, who immigrated from Seoul toMeridian, Mississippi, in the late 1990s, said Korean immigrants had a saying that whatever the business of the person who picked you up at the airport would become yours, too.
His father was picked up by his brother-in-law who owned a beauty supply store. Now Woo’s extended family owns more than two dozen beauty supply stores in Georgia and Louisiana.
In the early years, being Asian American was not easy, and Woo, who moved to Georgia in sixth grade and worked at his parents’ shop on the weekends up through college, had searing experiences of discrimination.
“I saw that growing up, the discrimination, and I don’twant that formy kids,” he said. “Iwant them to feel like we belong. Because we do. This is our home.”
Today, Asian immigrants have reached a critical mass and their children, entering their 30s and 40s and many of them educated in the United States, are pushing for representation. In Gwinnett County, about
12% of people are of Asian heritage, according to William Frey, senior demographer at theBrookings Institution.
An important turning point for Asian American voters came in 2018, several Democratic activists said, when Stacey Abrams in her race for governor had a staff member assigned to Asian immigrant communities. Exit polls later showed that
78% of Asian American voters cast their ballots for her.
But not all Asian Americans are Democrats. According toAAPIData, about a fifth of Korean immigrants in the country voted for Trump in 2016, and a number in Gwinnett County this month said they trusted him more on the economy.