AAPI Vote 2018: Labor, Democrats zero in on Nevada Senate race

NEVADAAAPI

AAPI VOTERS can play a pivotal role in determining who will represent Nevada in the U.S. Senate. Democrats and union activists believe the Republican incumbent is vulnerable and are increasing their efforts to win AAPI votes.

Asian Americans can make an electoral difference, says Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian-Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA). Indeed, two years ago in Nevada, the winner of a tight U.S. Senate race there, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, said “APALA and Asian American media were critical” for her win.

Democrat Rep. Jacky Rosen has narrowed incumbent Republican Sen. Dean Heller's slight advantage to a statistical tie, according fivethirtyeight. Both parties brought in their big guns to support their candidates. Donald Trump visited the state last week to lend his support to Heller's campaign and President Barack Obama came in to rally Rosen's backers.

But when the  TV cameras move to other campaigns and the spotlight dims, it comes down to motivating the voter and here is where Asian Americans can make a difference if the parties don't overlook them or take them for granted. 

“The parties are taking Asian Americans for granted. They don’t want to spend the time or the money talking with Asian-Americans.”

APALA hopes to fill in the void by building on its prior “strong election operations,” despite its relatively small size, to expand both Asian Americans’ political clout and its own reach. 

For now, “Nevada is our biggest program,” Yeh says, with 30,000 door-to-door house visits and more than 80,000 phone calls already concentrating on the election. Most of them, as might be expected, are in Clark County (Las Vegas) and its Washoe County suburbs.

APALA's objective, according to Yeh, is to elect a new pro-worker Democratic governor and legislature and to oust GOP right-wing Heller in favor of pro-worker Rosen.

About 9 percent of Nevada's population is solely Asian American and about 1 percent is solely native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. But the AAPI community hasn't been as active or organized as other ethnic groups in the state like Latinos.

"We are so content with doing well for ourselves pretty much. We don't think about really going out there politically," said Vinuya, a Filipino immigrant.

Culturally, many Asian Americans come from countries with less of a democratic tradition and governments that do not encourage political participation, Vinuya told U.S. News & World Report.

"A lot of us come from different countries," said Vinuya. "Some of the countries that we come from, you're silent. You're not allowed to speak up."

NEVADA FACT SHEET

(Source: APIAVote)

The biggest employers in Las Vegas, to no one's surprise, are the casinos. and hotels  You see AAPI workers everywhere: dealers, servers, kitchen staff, hotel maids, to front desk.

Organized labor has had success in recruiting members. Since many of them are immigrants, unions encourage and assist their immigrant members to become U.S. citizens in order to turn them into voters.

For example, the Culinary Workers Union provides free classes to members applying for U.S. citizenship, with its Citizenship Project helping 16,000 Nevadans become citizens for free since 2001, says union spokeswoman Bethany Khan. 

In 2016, the union helped 2,500 people become citizens in time to vote, she says. The union itself is 56 percent Latino and 55 percent female; many of its members work as housekeepers, casino workers or bartenders on the Last Vegas Strip – which itself is near Chinatown Plaza, which features the city's largest concentration of Asian businesses.

Union membership also provides unique benefits to provide upward movement for its mainly minority workers, Khan says, with a pension, free health care, access to a fund providing $25,000 in down payment assistance for housing, and free training for any other job represented by the union – meaning a housekeeper can become a sommelier.

And hotel and casino management are stepping up, as well. Caesars Entertainment, for example, offers employees reimbursement for the application and preparation costs for naturalization (not all Strip workers are members of the union and so not all can get the full-freight assistance the Culinary Workers provide, Khan says). Station Casinos offers assistance as well. And MGM Resorts International, the largest casino operator on the Las Vegas Strip, announced after the Charlottesville neo-Nazi march and deadly clash with counter-demonstrators that it would match all employee donations to civil rights groups including the NAACP, Anti-Defamation League, Human Rights Campaign, Council on American-Islamic Relations, OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, League of United Latin American Citizens and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"There's just a real corporate mindset to value their employees. Many of them are immigrant families that make their beds and do their lawns," says Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani. "When Culinary would bring up the citizenship programs, they embraced it. They want to make sure they are not splitting families up."

Nevada is an example of how political parties and candidates can work with an increasingly diverse electorate. Asian Americans, Latino Americans and African Americans tend to vote Democratic, boding well for the party. 

In Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign brought in celebrities like actress Constance Wu and comedian Margaret Cho to help register voters. Clinton won the Asian vote by nearly as wide of a margin as Obama did in 2012, even as blacks and Latinos peeled away from the Democratic coalition in 2016. 

Among the findings of a recent survey conducted by APIAVote, about 60 percent of Asian American voters say they disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing; 50 percent say they have not been contacted or don’t know if they’ve been contacted by Democrats; and 62 percent say they have not been contacted or don’t know if they’ve been contacted by Republicans.

“We believe that this information is crucial in accurately framing the narrative about the Asian-American electorate and providing detailed insight on how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders stand on major national issues, how they view our political parties, and more importantly, how they feel about the upcoming midterm elections,” Christine Chen, executive director of APIAVote.

“From what we’ve heard, after two years of anti-immigrant, anti-worker attacks, our community is paying attention – and is not happy about that (barrage), either,” says APALA's Yeh.

AAPI voters showed up to cast their ballots when early voting began last week.
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