AALDEF survey: Georgia's AAPI voters come through for Democrats

Asian American voters played no small role in the election of Georgia's two new senators, according to a preliminary report by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Georgia's Jan. 5 runoff Senate elections in which the Democratic challengers upset two Republican incumbents is the result of a multi-racial coalition of Asian Americans, Blacks and Latinos.

According to preliminary results of the AALDEF multilingual exit poll on Jan. 5, Asian American voters in Georgia favored both Democratic candidates 2 to 1 over their GOP rivals. Rafael Warnock earned 64% of the vote and Jon Ossoff 68% in the Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections.

AALDEF Executive Director Margaret Fung said: “Asian American voters played a critical role in electing Warnock and Ossoff in two extremely close races that will result in Democratic control of the U.S. Senate. Asian American voters must no longer be ignored in the political process.”

By flipping the two Senate seats, Democrats will have the majority in the Senate. There will be 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. Vice President Kamala Harris will cast the deciding vote. With control of the Senate, it will be easier for Democrats to pass Biden's policies, most of which would undo or correct Donald Trump's policies particularly on climate change, immigration, health care and foreign relations.

Biden's biggest challenge, though, will be taking control of the coronavirus pandemic that has been ravaging the country and the rest of the world. Trump's mishandling of the virus has resulted in 363,000 deaths due to COVID-19.

The allies of young Black, Latino and Asian American progressives turned Georgia, usually a Republican stronghold, into a battleground state by awarding it's electoral votes to President-elect Joe Biden last November and this Jan. 5, giving the state's two Senate seats to Democrats Warnock and Ossoff.

Key to the new powerful coalition was waking up the Asian American and Pacific Islander electorate, getting them interested in Georgia's politics and getting them excited enough to vote in droves. About 22% of the AAPI voters cast their ballot for the first time.

Many AAPI voters live in the counties north of Atlanta, areas that were among the last to be counted. The results from those suburban voters put Ossoff and Warneck ahead of their GOP opponents where they stayed up until the final count.

AALDEF has conducted its Asian American Exit Poll and monitored polling places in every major election since 1988. This year, AALDEF’s Exit Poll and Poll Monitoring program faced many challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic, mail-in voting, and early voting–all of which created challenges for interacting with voters in real time on Election Day, as has been done in past elections. 

In the Georgia runoff elections, AALDEF volunteers polled more than 270 Asian Americans in Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Fulton counties.

Jerry Vattamala, AALDEF Democracy Program Director, said, “One issue we observed in the runoff elections was that hundreds of voters of color, including Asian American voters, were turned away and told they were at incorrect poll sites. This was particularly egregious where the site to which they were directed was closed. We will continue to work with election officials to investigate these serious voting problems.”

Of all of Georgia's AAPI voters surveyed:

• 29% were Korean, 23% were Asian Indian, 14% were Vietnamese, 13% were Chinese, 8% were Bangladeshi, 4% were Pakistani, and 8% were an Other Asian ethnicities and nationalities.

• 23% were native-born U.S. citizens and 77% were foreign-born naturalized citizens.

• 22% were first-time voters and 78% had voted in previous elections.

• 44% were registered Democrats, 24% were registered Republicans, 28% were independant voters, and 4% were enrolled in another party.

• 33% of all voters were limited English proficient (LEP) and 67% were English proficient.

• 53% were female and 47% were male.

Increased Support for Democratic Senate Candidates in Runoff Elections

Asian American support for Warnock and Ossoff this Jan. 5 appears to have increased from the support that given to the two challengers and Joe Biden received in the November 2020 Presidential election. 

In AALDEF’s Exit Poll in Georgia in November 2020:

• Asian Americans decisively chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a margin of 62% to 36%.

• In the U.S. Senate races with identical candidates in November, Asian Americans voted for the Democratic candidates over the Republicans by a margin of 61% to 34%.

• All Asian ethnic groups in the state supported Biden over Trump except for Korean American voters (60% for Trump and 39% for Biden).

• Among voters not enrolled in any party, the breakout was 63% for Biden and 30% for Trump, and among voters affiliated with other parties, 60% for Biden and 20% for Trump.

• First-time voters supported Biden by a wide margin of 61% to 36%.

AALDEF will release a more detailed analysis of its exit poll numbers soon, with specific data related to ethnicity, gender, age, language ability, and nativity, among other data points. Special thanks to all of our volunteers and community partners, particularly the Center for Pan Asian Community Services (CPACS) in Atlanta, for their many years of service to the Asian American community.

Stephanie Cho, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice’s Atlanta chapter, told the Post that Asian Americans are the "new electorate." She believes the AAPI vote helped the campaigns of Ossof and Warnock in upsetting the Republican incumbents.

"Us, along with Black women voters, along with Latino voters, along with young people, really have changed the trajectory of what Georgia looks like," said Cho.

Asian American voters can be difference makers in Georgia

Georgia's AAPI community were energized by the 2020 Presidential race.

Now that it has been established by a host of mainstream media that the Asian American vote helped push Georgia towards Democrat Joe Biden, a coalition of AAPI organizations are joining the Democratic Party to replicate the Nov. 3 record turnout in order to elect the two Democratic candidates to the U.S. Senate.

The stakes are enormous. If Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock beat incumbent Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, Democrats would wrest control of the Senate from Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If the GOP keeps the majority in the Senate, the upper house would make it difficult for Biden to pass major legislation and reform,

FiveThirty-eight has both races a virtual toss-up with only .1 or .2 percentage points separating the candidates, well within the margin of error.

This year, Georgia saw a 91% increase in AAPI voter turnout over 2016, and exit polls showed Asian American voters preferred Joe Biden to Donald Trump by a 2 to 1 margin. 

Surveys show that 42,000 more AAPI voters voted in 2020 over 2016;  more than 30,000 of those voters voted for the first time ever.  Biden's winning margin was only 14,000 votes.

It's no wonder that the Democratic Party is concentrating to improve those numbers and Republicans are trying their best to dissuade AAPI voters from casting their ballots.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who is of Black and South Asian heritage, campaigned in Georgia Monday (Dec. 21) to energize African American and Asian American voters. Her visit comes a week after Joe Biden came to the state.

Republicans have countered with Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, an Indian American.

One of the stops on Harris' itinerary was supposed to be in Suwanee, is located in Gwinett County – a county the president narrowly won in November 49.6% to 48.4%. CBS News voter files show that 17% of registered voters in the county are Asian American, a number that is higher than the state's average.However, that stop was canceled because she had to return to Washington to vote on the $900-billion stimulus bill.

But in Columbus, she was greeted with large energetic crowds. “As far as I’m concerned Georgia — Columbus — 2020 ain’t over until Jan. 5,” said Harris. “That’s when 2020 will be over. That’s when we’ll get this thing done. Because as you know, everything is at stake.”

Andrew Yang, former Democratic Presidential candidate, was among the first Asian American "names" to go all in to encourage AAPI voters to take part in the runoffs. He hosted rallies and coffee gatherings with AAPI Georgians for both Ossoff and Warnock.

“The Democratic Party couldn’t win the presidency or the Senate without Asian Americans," said IMPACT Executive Director Neil Makhija.

IMPACT, an Indian American advocacy and political action committee, has launched a historic $2.5 million campaign to turnout Asian American voters in Georgia ahead of the January 5 Senate runoffs. The funds will be spent on digital, mail, and turnout operations.

"In November, South Asian and Asian American voters were the critical difference between victory and defeat in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona," Makhija said. "The numbers are striking: Asian Americans increased turnout more than any other demographic, nearly doubling in Georgia. Asian Americans are becoming a core constituency of the Democratic Party, but they can’t be taken for granted.”

Some groups have started to focus on the AAPI vote in Georgia since Nov. 3. The AAPI Victory Fund launched a full scale Senatorial campaign in rural Georgia to mobilize the AAPI vote for Ossoff and Warnock.

“This Southern strategy has since paid off, but much work into infrastructure remains and particularly into identifying AAPI voter sub-ethnicities in order to properly target our voters. 

"In the 2020 election where Biden won Georgia by only 12,000 votes, there were 30,500 who were first-time AAPI voters. ... At least 15,000 rural AAPI voters came out to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris," said the Victory Fund in a statement.

According to a study by by the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund, 68% of Asian Americans were contacted by a campaign, a political party or a community organization, compared to just over 50% of Asian Americans nationwide. 

Sam Park, Georgia's first Democrat state legislator of Korean American descent,  said that during the general election, the party and both candidates put forth coordinated multilingual outreach programs, conducted in-language phone banks and invested in ads in ethnic media. 

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee made a six-figure investment, hiring organizers to contact Georgia's communities of color, including Asian Americans.

"They've got some great folks on the ground who know what they're doing. They know how to organize within the Asian American community," Park told NBC News. "But also, I think, which is important to note, they have long-standing ties and relationships to Asian American communities, given that they're from these communities here in Georgia."

Anjali Enjeti, who co-leads the Georgia chapter of the mobilization group They See Blue, said the key to wooing Asian American voters, they say: a candidate they respect with a coherent plan for the pandemic.

“That's going to get them to the polls more than saying, ‘Oh, we need to flip the Senate and dethrone [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell,’” Enjeti told Politico.

SCREEN CAPTURE / CNN

Bilingual outreach was effective in reaching out to AAPI voters.

This week, They See Blue launched in-language phone banking in Punjabi, Gujarati, Nepali, and Telegu. They also, along with other Asian American groups in the state, deployed door knockers as early voting got underway -- three weeks out from the election, according to Politico.

Person-to-person outreach is critical for new AAPI voters. Before the last Presidential election campaign, neither major party paid attention to the community. But the Biden-Harris ticket and growing anti-Trump sentiment among younger voters pushed staffers and volunteers in community groups such as AAsian American Advocacy Fund and Advancing Justice-Atlanta to produce multi-lingual campaign material; bilingual door-knockers canvassed Asian neighborhoods speaking to voters in Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and any number of Asian Indian languages.

"Language access is always a big thing for us," Yaqoob Mahmood of the Asian American Advocacy Fund told NPR. "We also make sure that outreach is available, and when we're knocking on doors, or talking to voters on the phone, that we have in-language volunteers and staff making those calls, but also having two way communication to let voters know that they can always reach back out to us if they have questions."

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 percent of Asian-American voters cast their ballots for her.

But what made the turnout in Georgia unique, said Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund, was that coalition-building across community groups eventually paid off. Through multilingual, multiethnic, multigenerational organizations, she said, the communities in the state were able to chart a new path.

As community organizations across cultures focused on issues from immigration reform to ending cash bail to getting police out of schools, Mahmood told NBC News, people of color were able to see changes occurring.

"I think the biggest value in our work is not just in how we organized in Asian American communities, but the way that we build community with other Black and Brown voters. That's the story for Georgia," she said.

"It's not just Asian voters," NBC reported her saying. "It's how Asian Americans, Latinos and Black voters really changed the electorate and changed the future of our state, and the future of our country. ... It's always tied into how can we make sure that we're achieving these victories for all of our Black and brown brothers and sisters."

“There’s a saying that the Asian American community has gone from being a marginalized community to being the margin of victory,” said Assemblyman Park. “That could be very true here in Georgia.” 

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this is news sprinkled with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.