The first event for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in Minnesota focused on winning over Asian voters with a visit to a Hmong shopping center and a roundtable with Hmong business owners.
Campaign staffers and surrogates in Minnesota characterized Tuesday’s efforts as the start of shoring up a key constituency for success in November. Shivanthi Sathanandan, vice chair of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, is focused on Asian voters as the campaign’s battleground states director for South Asians for Harris.
Sathanandan said Harris’s own South Asian heritage — Harris is the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father — is motivating Asian voters.
“Representation matters,” said Sathanandan, who campaigned at Tuesday’s events. “The energy that comes from seeing someone from a shared culture, whether they’re Black or Asian American or South Asian or just a woman, that energy is contagious, and it’s exciting.”
Sathanandan said the campaign is preparing to do hefty outreach to Asian communities between now and election day, November 5. President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he was no longer seeking reelection, and threw his support behind Harris, his vice president.
“The campaign will be doing extensive outreach, door knocking, community events,” said St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, a Harris supporter who is also a delegate for next month’s Democratic National Convention. “In Minnesota, we have a significant number of elected officials from our Asian American community who will be leading the way. I’ll be following them to see how we can engage in all the different ways.”
Carter was one of several Harris surrogates participating in the campaign events in St. Paul. The campaign listened to voters rather than espousing talking points.
Asian voters at the campaign stops offered nuanced perspectives on Harris’ candidacy.
Mai Xiong, who runs M Produce at Hmong Village, plans to vote for Harris this fall, and said a lot of people she knows support Harris because of her experience more than her gender or ethnicity. Harris previously served as California’s attorney general and as a U.S. senator for the state. She ran for the 2020 presidency before dropping out and joining Biden as his running mate.
“She will get a lot of Asian votes,” Xiong said. “I can feel it.”
Ying Sa, CEO and Principal Certified Public Accountant at Minneapolis-based Community CPA, said Harris’s ethnicity alone will not win over Asian voters. Sa, who immigrated from China to Canada and, eventually, the United States, said Republican candidate Donald Trump is also finding ways to motivate some Asian voters.
“For a lot of Chinese people, when Donald Trump praises [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping], that makes them feel good,” she said.
No previous U.S. president has praised dictators the way Trump has, said Sa, adding that she knows many Chinese Americans who support him because of his praise. Sa said she believes that U.S. politics is more about culture than policy for many voters, and that many Chinese immigrants have forgotten what it’s like to live under a dictatorship.
Sa herself said she plans to vote for Harris, not because she likes Harris, but because she despises Trump, who called COVID-19 the “China virus” during his July 18 speech at the Republican National Convention.
However, during a business roundtable with Hmong and Asian business owners at St. Paul-based development company JB Vang, Sa said that in her experience, small businesses do worse when a Democrat is in the White House.
“Democrats tend to regulate businesses, which is a good thing,” Sa said during the roundtable. “But the IRS only knows how to drill small businesses, because they’re easy to audit.”
Kou Vang, president and CEO of JB Vang, also participated in the roundtable. He said that he’s undecided on who to vote for in the coming election, and that he’s previously voted for candidates from different political parties. He also doesn’t think Harris’ ethnicity alone will motivate many Asian voters.
“I think Asian folks are pretty practical people,” Vang said, referring to East Asian and Southeast Asian voters in particular. “I don’t think we let emotions play that much into how we vote. I think we vote based on what we think is best for us.”
Vang said he believes many Asians lean philosophically Republican by nature, in that they’re pro-business and pro-entrepreneur. Socioeconomically, however, Vang said, many Asians are Democrats, in that they’re recent immigrants and “need the policies that help us get out from under our feet.”
He said it’s “a big miss” that Republicans don’t appear to be targeting the Asian vote.
Carter maintained that the general excitement around Harris’ campaign is already equivalent to Barack Obama’s first campaign for president in 2008. In the three days since Biden dropped out, the Minnesota chapter of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign received 200 calls from people who wanted to volunteer, Carter said.
“Some of the conversations in which I thought I was calling to convince somebody, I found out really quickly they were already convinced, already ready to go, and had already donated online,” he said. “So just that, that level of palpable energy is exciting.”
St. Paul City Council Member Hwa Jeong Kim, a DFLer, had a more nuanced take on the matter.
Kim, a progressive, also helped the Harris campaign with its events Tuesday, and plans to continue volunteering. She believes Harris’ ethnicity will help motivate voters of color in general.
“Identity is a really important piece of representation in politics and representation in power,” Kim said. “I think really what people of color are after are shared liberation, radical policies that lift all of us up together and really addressing root causes to some of the things that we see happening in our own neighborhoods.”
But Kim voted uncommitted in the Democratic presidential primary in March because of Biden’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas, and said that in many cases, she’s still waiting to see Harris’ policies. She noted that some other uncommitted voters she’s heard from are reassured by Harris replacing Biden, while others are going to need more convincing.
“Is Kamala going to be very open again about a ceasefire? The issues still remain,” Kim said of the Israel-Hamas war. “I’d really love to see how Kamala is going to step out of the past administration and come forward and be really progressive on issues that matter.”
Kim’s plan for winning over progressive voters who are still reluctant to support Harris is to outline the consequences should Trump win.
“Our democracy is on the ballot,” she said. “There’s no candidate that is going to be perfect. Progress is a faith based practice.”
‘Elect the first auntie’
The Harris campaign’s stump concluded with a rally of about 35 people in an office building in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, where Carter and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey both expressed enthusiasm for Harris before introducing the mayor of Cincinnati, Aftab Pureval.
“You might be wondering, why is the mayor of Cincinnati here in the Twin Cities?” Pureval asked. “It’s because we have an opportunity to elect the first auntie, the first Asian American president in our country’s history.”
Pureval’s mother was born in Tibet and grew up as a refugee in India, where she met Pureval’s father. The couple immigrated to the United States and raised Pureval in southern Ohio.
He recounted the effects of the Trump administration, including an increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The crowd went still when he described one impact of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments on his home state. In 2022, a 9-year-old Ohio girl was raped and became pregnant. But because the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and a recent law in Ohio banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, she had to travel to Indiana for an abortion.
Pureval described Ohio’s Republican leaders’ reaction to this child’s story. “When they found out about it, not only were they not shocked, not only were they not aghast, they denied that she existed,” he said. “This is a time for everyday citizens to take a look at the choice in November, and to choose the side of equity and justice and hope and community.”
Pureval explained that he was in St. Paul because Democrats could not likely win Ohio in the presidential race. In Minnesota, he said, organizing and activism matter greatly.
“Vice President Harris cannot win without coming through and winning Minnesota,” he said. “You have to have our auntie’s back.”
“We do,” said someone in the crowd.
After the rally, Leah Midgarden, a Korean adoptee and DFL activist, said that while she was sad to see Biden step down, she was “thrilled that we get a second swing of the bat to elect the first woman president.”
She said she felt the weight of history at having the opportunity to help elect two transformational presidents in her lifetime: Obama and now, Harris.
Growing up in rural North Dakota, Midgarden was the only Asian girl in her small school. She recalled wishing she could grow up to be tall, blond, and blue-eyed like her cousins.
“To know that there are young girls today who are going to have the opportunity to grow up and see that you can be smart, powerful, hardworking and Asian, and rise to the most important position in the world, and do it without having to pass as white — that just makes me so proud,” she said.
