On July 27, Doug Emhoff walked onto a stage in a small Wisconsin city 1,200 kilometers northwest of Washington. He spoke on behalf of his wife, Kamala Harris, just six days after the vice president of the U.S. launched her bid to win the presidency for the Democratic Party this November.
The event wasn’t a union rally, a civil liberties gathering or a climate change conference. It was the Hmong festival in Wausau, the city with the most Hmong per capita in the entire U.S.
“This community right here could decide the election in this state, which could decide the entire election,” Emhoff told festival-goers. “You have the power, right here in this Hmong community. You have more power than you realize.”
While Harris has an edge over Republican Party nominee Donald Trump in some polls, swing and battleground states like Wisconsin broadly remain too close to call. The Hmong community, previously largely overlooked, could be crucial in Wisconsin, a state that President Joe Biden won by a wafer-thin margin of about 20,000 votes in 2020. There are close to 60,000 eligible Hmong voters in Wisconsin, according to data from APIAVote, a nonprofit dedicated to voter engagement among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
The skinny 2020 winning margins in traditional swing states like Wisconsin, Georgia (fewer than 12,000 votes) and Nevada (under 34,000) have thrust Asian American voters, a small minority in many states, into the spotlight of U.S. politics in a way that hasn’t been seen before.
Since becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Harris, who could become the first Indian American and Black woman president, has sought to energize the South Asian community, prompting groups like South Asian Men for Harris and South Asian Women for Harris to quickly raise money.
Asian American voters are the fastest-growing group of voters in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank focused on demographics and social issues.
In the audience at the Wausau festival was Yee Leng Xiong, 30, a Democrat running to represent Wisconsin’s 85th District, which includes Wausau and nearby Weston, as the first Hmong American in the Wisconsin Assembly.
Xiong’s refugee parents fled Laos and came to the U.S. at great personal sacrifice after the Vietnam War, a story shared by many Hmong families in central Wisconsin, he said.
“Wisconsin is a very, very purple state where candidates win by 1%,” Xiong said. “Purple” refers to swing states that may vote either Democratic, typically associated with blue, or red Republican. “We know the Southeast Asian community in the state of Wisconsin here is the margin of victory.”
To have Emhoff at the Hmong Wausau Festival, chaired by Xiong, previously the executive director of the local nonprofit Hmong American Center, underscored that importance. “I spoke with several of the (community) elders,” Xiong said, “and they said they have typically local elected officials — statewide officials — but never really individuals of that stature.”
In his remarks onstage, Emhoff confirmed he had never been to the festival before, and set out his own family history of ancestors fleeing persecution in Europe.
Xiong recognized that in the past, Asian Americans rarely engaged with politics and instead focused on daily economic struggles.
“It’s hard for them to really grasp the impact of policies on their day-to-day life,” he noted.
“[We’re] going out there, knocking on doors, talking with them and communicating with them and providing them with the information that they need … on when, how and where to vote … so that they can truly get their voices heard.”
Harris participated in a presidential town hall organized by Asian Americans in July. Trump did not appear or send a representative. But last month he visited Eden Center, a Vietnamese commercial center in Virginia, to court the Vietnamese American vote.
The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple Nikkei Asia requests for comment.
The Harris-Walz spokesperson for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, Andrew Peng, said Harris has been a champion for Asian American communities.
“That’s why Team Harris is making significant investments in staffing and paid media, crafting in-language materials to combat disinformation in Asian American communities and organizing culturally specific direct voter contact activities and events to reach Asian American voters where they are, across every battleground state,” he said.
Political parties, Asian community leaders say, have in the past overlooked the voting bloc and engaged little.
“While that has actually improved over time, the level of engagement is still quite low,” said Terry Ao Minnis, a vice president at Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
While the numbers are still small — 15 million out of 246 million eligible voters, or 6.1%, compared to the 34.45 million Black voters — Asian Americans, many of whom were first-time voters in the last presidential election, play an increasingly important role in the U.S. electoral system.
In Georgia, 2.5% more Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders turned out in the 2022 midterm election than in 2018, the biggest jump of all voter groups by race and ethnicity. Black and Hispanic turnouts fell, while white participation rose 0.4%.
“Demographics in Georgia have changed so much that now people know that in order to really win the state, you have to be able to talk to voters of color,” said Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, the executive director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund. “You have to be able to mobilize this base, in particular with Asian American voters.
“Our voters will often be part of this multiracial democracy, multiracial voting bloc that will help to win elections, as we’ve seen over the last couple of years.”
But when it comes to understanding what Asian American voters prioritize, political parties face hurdles. For a start, there is limited survey data available on these voters, despite their being the fastest-growing group. Campaigns conduct their own polling but there is little public polling done, leaving Asian Americans with limited visibility throughout the election campaign season.
AAPI Data, a research organization that focuses on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, publishes monthly public opinion research on them.
The most-cited data comes from the Asian American Voter Survey, jointly conducted every two years by Asian Americans Advancing Justice, APIAVote, AAPI Data and AARP. The multilingual questionnaire began in 2012 and provides political parties, the media and the public an insight into the political views and attitudes of Asian Americans.
The latest survey was released on July 10, before the assassination attempt on Trump and the end of Biden’s reelection bid. Another survey will now be released in September to reflect those unprecedented events.
“We keep hearing the excuse, that it’s still quite expensive to be able to oversample Asian Americans, especially when it comes to languages,” said Christine Chen, APIAVote’s executive director. “It just boils down to whether it’s a priority. If it’s really a priority, then they should be including that.”
But it is also crucial to understand the nuances among Asian Americans, who come from as many as 20 countries, speak numerous languages and have varied cultures and religions. Polls conducted in English alone are not accurate, community leaders say.
The economy, education, inflation and immigration are high on the list of issues important to Asian Americans this cycle, according to the Asian American Voter Survey, but vary widely between people from East Asia and those from South Asia.
The Asian American Advocacy Fund’s Yaqoob noted that East Asian communities place more emphasis on issues such as xenophobia and anti-Asian hate, while inflation and cost of living are slightly more important to Indian Americans. The war in Gaza is a top issue for Muslim communities from Asia, she added.
With 90% of Asian Americans planning to vote in this November’s election, according to the Asian American Voter Survey, engagement by the two main political parties has improved over the past several election campaigns, APIAVote’s Chen said, but continues to fall short. Half of the survey’s respondents had not been contacted by the Democratic Party, and 57% said the same of Republicans.
“They need to go ahead and engage the Asian American voters, because we are actually bringing in a larger number of first-time voters, and so that’s a clear example in terms of how we are actually seen as a margin of victory,” she said.
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On July 27, Doug Emhoff walked onto a stage in a small Wisconsin city 1,200 kilometers northwest of Washington. He spoke on behalf of his wife, Kamala Harris, just six days after the vice president of the U.S. launched her bid to win the presidency for the Democratic Party this November.
The event wasn’t a union rally, a civil liberties gathering or a climate change conference. It was the Hmong festival in Wausau, the city with the most Hmong per capita in the entire U.S.
“This community right here could decide the election in this state, which could decide the entire election,” Emhoff told festival-goers. “You have the power, right here in this Hmong community. You have more power than you realize.”
While Harris has an edge over Republican Party nominee Donald Trump in some polls, swing and battleground states like Wisconsin broadly remain too close to call. The Hmong community, previously largely overlooked, could be crucial in Wisconsin, a state that President Joe Biden won by a wafer-thin margin of about 20,000 votes in 2020. There are close to 60,000 eligible Hmong voters in Wisconsin, according to data from APIAVote, a nonprofit dedicated to voter engagement among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
The skinny 2020 winning margins in traditional swing states like Wisconsin, Georgia (fewer than 12,000 votes) and Nevada (under 34,000) have thrust Asian American voters, a small minority in many states, into the spotlight of U.S. politics in a way that hasn’t been seen before.
Since becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Harris, who could become the first Indian American and Black woman president, has sought to energize the South Asian community, prompting groups like South Asian Men for Harris and South Asian Women for Harris to quickly raise money.
Asian American voters are the fastest-growing group of voters in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank focused on demographics and social issues.
In the audience at the Wausau festival was Yee Leng Xiong, 30, a Democrat running to represent Wisconsin’s 85th District, which includes Wausau and nearby Weston, as the first Hmong American in the Wisconsin Assembly.
Xiong’s refugee parents fled Laos and came to the U.S. at great personal sacrifice after the Vietnam War, a story shared by many Hmong families in central Wisconsin, he said.
“Wisconsin is a very, very purple state where candidates win by 1%,” Xiong said. “Purple” refers to swing states that may vote either Democratic, typically associated with blue, or red Republican. “We know the Southeast Asian community in the state of Wisconsin here is the margin of victory.”
To have Emhoff at the Hmong Wausau Festival, chaired by Xiong, previously the executive director of the local nonprofit Hmong American Center, underscored that importance. “I spoke with several of the (community) elders,” Xiong said, “and they said they have typically local elected officials — statewide officials — but never really individuals of that stature.”
In his remarks onstage, Emhoff confirmed he had never been to the festival before, and set out his own family history of ancestors fleeing persecution in Europe.
Xiong recognized that in the past, Asian Americans rarely engaged with politics and instead focused on daily economic struggles.
“It’s hard for them to really grasp the impact of policies on their day-to-day life,” he noted.
“[We’re] going out there, knocking on doors, talking with them and communicating with them and providing them with the information that they need … on when, how and where to vote … so that they can truly get their voices heard.”
Harris participated in a presidential town hall organized by Asian Americans in July. Trump did not appear or send a representative. But last month he visited Eden Center, a Vietnamese commercial center in Virginia, to court the Vietnamese American vote.
The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple Nikkei Asia requests for comment.
The Harris-Walz spokesperson for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, Andrew Peng, said Harris has been a champion for Asian American communities.
“That’s why Team Harris is making significant investments in staffing and paid media, crafting in-language materials to combat disinformation in Asian American communities and organizing culturally specific direct voter contact activities and events to reach Asian American voters where they are, across every battleground state,” he said.
Political parties, Asian community leaders say, have in the past overlooked the voting bloc and engaged little.
“While that has actually improved over time, the level of engagement is still quite low,” said Terry Ao Minnis, a vice president at Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
While the numbers are still small — 15 million out of 246 million eligible voters, or 6.1%, compared to the 34.45 million Black voters — Asian Americans, many of whom were first-time voters in the last presidential election, play an increasingly important role in the U.S. electoral system.
In Georgia, 2.5% more Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders turned out in the 2022 midterm election than in 2018, the biggest jump of all voter groups by race and ethnicity. Black and Hispanic turnouts fell, while white participation rose 0.4%.
“Demographics in Georgia have changed so much that now people know that in order to really win the state, you have to be able to talk to voters of color,” said Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, the executive director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund. “You have to be able to mobilize this base, in particular with Asian American voters.
“Our voters will often be part of this multiracial democracy, multiracial voting bloc that will help to win elections, as we’ve seen over the last couple of years.”
But when it comes to understanding what Asian American voters prioritize, political parties face hurdles. For a start, there is limited survey data available on these voters, despite their being the fastest-growing group. Campaigns conduct their own polling but there is little public polling done, leaving Asian Americans with limited visibility throughout the election campaign season.
AAPI Data, a research organization that focuses on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, publishes monthly public opinion research on them.
The most-cited data comes from the Asian American Voter Survey, jointly conducted every two years by Asian Americans Advancing Justice, APIAVote, AAPI Data and AARP. The multilingual questionnaire began in 2012 and provides political parties, the media and the public an insight into the political views and attitudes of Asian Americans.
The latest survey was released on July 10, before the assassination attempt on Trump and the end of Biden’s reelection bid. Another survey will now be released in September to reflect those unprecedented events.
“We keep hearing the excuse, that it’s still quite expensive to be able to oversample Asian Americans, especially when it comes to languages,” said Christine Chen, APIAVote’s executive director. “It just boils down to whether it’s a priority. If it’s really a priority, then they should be including that.”
But it is also crucial to understand the nuances among Asian Americans, who come from as many as 20 countries, speak numerous languages and have varied cultures and religions. Polls conducted in English alone are not accurate, community leaders say.
The economy, education, inflation and immigration are high on the list of issues important to Asian Americans this cycle, according to the Asian American Voter Survey, but vary widely between people from East Asia and those from South Asia.
The Asian American Advocacy Fund’s Yaqoob noted that East Asian communities place more emphasis on issues such as xenophobia and anti-Asian hate, while inflation and cost of living are slightly more important to Indian Americans. The war in Gaza is a top issue for Muslim communities from Asia, she added.
With 90% of Asian Americans planning to vote in this November’s election, according to the Asian American Voter Survey, engagement by the two main political parties has improved over the past several election campaigns, APIAVote’s Chen said, but continues to fall short. Half of the survey’s respondents had not been contacted by the Democratic Party, and 57% said the same of Republicans.
“They need to go ahead and engage the Asian American voters, because we are actually bringing in a larger number of first-time voters, and so that’s a clear example in terms of how we are actually seen as a margin of victory,” she said.
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