Democrats across the country celebrated last month when Tom Suozzi, their party’s candidate, won a competitive House special election in New York.
They attributed his success on Long Island to honing a message about immigration, border security and abortion.
But in the weeks that followed, Asian American campaign strategists, consultants and community leaders pointed to another trend that boosted Suozzi: high turnout among Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, particularly in the Queens portion of Suozzi’s district, which is home to large communities of Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Indian Americans and Arab Americans.
Now, Democratic strategists and Asian American political consultants say that replicating the messages and strategies that boosted AAPI turnout in Queens could be the key to flipping competitive House districts and holding Senate seats in some of the nation’s most critical down-ballot battleground territory this fall — places like California, Nevada, Arizona, New York and Georgia.
AAPI political outreach ‘has to be multi-pronged’
In the New York special election, Democratic political strategists knew there wouldn’t be one easy, inexpensive way to convince AAPI voters to turn out for Suozzi.
“In order for outreach like this to be successful, it has to be multi-pronged,” Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., whose district borders Suozzi’s, told NBC News.
Suozzi’s campaign had a staffer dedicated to working with Asian American communities, but “you can’t just have an Asian staffer,” Meng said.
In addition to hosting events with Suozzi and Asian American voters in the district, consultants working with the AAPI Victory Fund, a national super PAC that works to engage AAPI voters, sent direct-mail campaigns in native languages, organized robocalls voiced by local community leaders and broke down Democratic messaging in several languages to better target Asian American subgroups.
“We couldn’t just do, like, an Asian mailer. I think disambiguation is probably one of the most important parts of reaching out to AAPI communities, even amongst Indian communities,” said Albert Suh, one of the consultants who worked with the AAPI Victory Fund. “Do they speak Hindi? Did they speak Gujarati? Do they speak Punjabi? You’ve got to really understand the local communities.”
Other outside national groups also segmented their messaging by language. House Majority PAC, the super PAC aligned with Democratic congressional leadership, ran digital ads in English, Spanish and Mandarin.
The group paid Latino and AAPI people to film and voice digital ads to reach young voters of color in their native languages and with trusted voices.
It matters “when we communicate in a voter’s native language,” said Linh Nguyen, the executive vice president and COO of AAPI Victory Fund.
In the days and weeks after Suozzi’s victory, Democrats across the country pointed to immigration as the biggest issue in the race, but AAPI activists and strategists say successful messaging on issues that matter more to Asian voters helped boost turnout for Suozzi.
“AAPI voters care about issues that everyone cares about,” said Trip Yang, a consultant who worked with the AAPI Victory Fund. “But there’s a couple of nuances,” he added, including that AAPI voters care about the issue of crime more than the average voter.
“The polling shows, you know, when you talk about safety, combating anti-Asian hate crimes, combating violent crime, Asian voters care about that with even more intensity,” Yang added.
There’s also evidence that across the country, Asian American voters care more about gun control and environmental issues than other groups.
“Often, people don’t think of environmental issues as Asian American issues,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, the founder and executive director of AAPI Data and a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside.
But Ramakrishnan said research has shown that Asian Americans “tend to rank environmental issues as a higher priority than the general population.”
The same is true for gun control, Ramakrishnan said, where research has found that “Asian Americans are much more liberal — or progressive — when it comes to gun control than the general population.”
Assuming Asian Americans are Democrats ‘is not enough’
Despite success in New York, strategists and activists warn that AAPI voters across the country aren’t built-in Democratic voters. Republicans have won key congressional districts with high numbers of AAPI voters in recent years. And it could take some convincing to get them to vote for Democrats on Super Tuesday and in November.
“There’s an assumption that Asians are just going to vote Democrat … but that’s not true at all,” Suh said.
“These voters are complex voters, they’re sophisticated voters … and so just tapping them once with a token piece that’s like, ‘Oh, this is a message from the Democrats, please go vote,’ is not enough,” he added.
Nguyen said that in the New York special election, reaching voters with messaging beyond “‘Go vote’ and ‘Go vote for Tom Suozzi’ … translated in five different languages” was important.
“When we can communicate this in a very complex and nuanced way, people will read it,” she added.
Ramakrishnan said that, historically, “there’s been a lack of mobilization as well as outreach on the part of political parties.”
Republican efforts to court AAPI voters have ramped up in recent years, he added, due in large part to the fact that “Asian American voters tend to have weaker party identification.”
In fact, Republicans have had success in the last few years in Asian American communities, particularly in California and Texas, making it more challenging for Democrats to replicate those efforts.
“The GOP, they have been pretty relentless with how they’ve chosen to show up,” Nguyen said, adding that “the GOP will invest in actual physical infrastructure in these districts, right. And whether it’s community centers, whether it’s, like, showing up at every damn community event, registering voters.”
Democrats are planning to put more effort into this kind of relationship-building in 2024.
Earlier this year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched the “Power the People” program, with with “power” standing for “persuade, organize, welcome, educate and reach.” The program will target AAPI, Black and Latino voters across the country in districts that have significant populations of people of color.
“As the fastest growing racial group in the country, Asian Americans are an integral part of our path to victory in congressional races across the country,” Sarah Lin, national AANHPI engagement deputy director for the DCCC, said in a statement to NBC News.
