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Jimmy Williams
President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is starting a big push to connect with Asian American voters. Vice President Kamala Harris will lead this effort with events in Nevada and Pennsylvania this week.
The new campaign group, AANHPIs for Biden-Harris (which stands for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander), kicks off with an event in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Former “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi will join Harris at this event. Harris, the first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, has taken on a bigger role since Biden’s debate performance last month raised questions about his candidacy.
Harris will also speak at a town hall meeting in Philadelphia on Saturday, hosted by APIAVote, a group that encourages Asian Americans to vote. In a video released by the campaign, Harris said, “We need to make sure that AA and NHPI voices are heard at the ballot boxes around our country, just as we need to make sure that those voices are represented in all levels of government. Asian Americans must be in the rooms where the decisions are being made.”
The Biden campaign had already launched groups focused on Black and Latino voters, with kickoff events attended by the president himself. Now, they are expanding their efforts to include Asian American voters. The campaign plans to be active in every battleground state and is organizing events in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.
Nadia Belkin will lead the new group as the campaign’s national AANHPI engagement director. The campaign also hired Andrew Peng as its national AANHPI spokesperson.
Experts say that language barriers can make it hard to reach Asian American voters. To address this, the Biden campaign will offer resources in several languages, including Chinese, Tagalog, Hindi, Hmong, Vietnamese, Urdu, and Korean.
By focusing on Asian American voters, the Biden campaign hopes to ensure that this important group has a strong voice in the upcoming election. With Kamala Harris leading the charge, they aim to make a significant impact and secure votes from the Asian American community.
Asian americans, particularly those who immigrated hear from Asia, don’t like authoritarianism, fascism, or welfare states. In terms of those who immigrated, that’s kind of why they came here, to get away from that crap. So when they get here and see Democrats espousing all that same crap or the precursors to it, they tend not to like Democrats. Same thing goes for hispanics, and several other demographics people for some reason assume to be shoe in Democrat votes. If to Biden campaign thinks it’s a good idea to market to them and their own native languages, all the better, the corporatism and socialism Biden stands for will be more clearly communicated, and more Asian Americans will be aware that this guy is essentially the poster boy for everything they stand against and, in many cases, actively fled from.
My two cents anyways.