Kamala Harris’ biggest moment yet
We’re about 74 days until Election Day 2024 and the Harris-Trump matchup is just beginning.
Issue #72
Hi all —
I still remember 2008, when as a college student in Boulder, Colorado, Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination just miles away in Denver. The public’s fervor was so large at the time that the Democrats had to move Obama’s acceptance speech from the city’s basketball/hockey arena to the nearby football stadium, which could fit three times as many people.
Certainly 2016 felt monumental with Hillary Clinton’s historic run as the first woman to secure a major political party’s presidential nomination and Donald Trump’s historic run as an unexpected candidate. But somehow last night brought the feel of 2008-era scale in the public’s energy (even though Beyoncé didn’t end up making a rumored visit).
On Thursday, in the heart of America’s Midwest in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris made history — yet again — accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States. She is the second woman, after Clinton of course, to secure a major political party’s nomination for the top spot. But Harris is the first Black and South Asian woman to do so.
Political figures and families continue to increasingly reflect the diversity of the American people. Either way the election results go, we will have the first President of the United States with Black and South Asian roots, or a Second Lady of the United States with South Asian roots (Indian American Usha Vance is the wife of Senator JD Vance, who is Donald Trump’s Republican running mate).
With Election Day about 74 days away, below is a roundup of things to watch as the election shifts into the heat of the season and more Americans begin to get to know Harris at a new level of scrutiny.
Thanks for joining the conversation,
Vignesh Ramachandran (on Signal at 773-599-3717)
Co-founder of Red, White and Brown Media
Desi dollars are fueling Harris’ campaign
As the Los Angeles Times’ Sandhya Kambhampati reports, within 10 days of President Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race and shifting to a Harris-led ticket, the vice president’s campaign raised almost $2.4 million in donations from donors of South Asian descent.
The financial momentum taps into Indian American’s large economic power: Indians in the U.S. have a median household income of $145,000, which is higher than the overall $100,000 Asian American household median.
Harris’ candidacy is getting more Indian Americans civically engaged
It’s not just the flow of money. As we saw in 2020, more and more South Asian Americans are getting politically involved.
CNN’s Harmeet Kaur and Aditi Sangal report that segments of Indian American communities are mobilizing in everything from organizing on WhatsApp to writing postcards to appeal to voters.
“Over the past several weeks, national and grassroots political organizers from the community say they’ve seen a groundswell of support and energy for the Harris campaign,” Kaur and Sangal write. “Aunties and uncles are exchanging ‘LOTUS for POTUS’ memes in WhatsApp group chats (Kamala means lotus in Sanskrit). The Indian American Impact Fund said [a] South Asian women Zoom call … raised more than $275,000, and leaders from the advocacy group report an influx of small-dollar donations and volunteer sign-ups.”
Harris’ late South Indian mother will remain a major influence
If you’ve read Harris’ memoir or recall many of her speeches over the years (including Thursday’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention), she has talked a lot about the large influence of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris — a first-generation Indian American who largely raised Kamala Harris and her sister Maya as a single parent. Kamala Harris has often mentioned being taken as a child in a stroller to civil rights events in the Bay Area.
USA Today White House Correspondent Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy wrote this week about Gopalan’s legacy and shared some interesting details, including how revolutionary Gopalan was — a woman raised in a uniquely progressive Tamil Brahmin family who moved to the U.S. at age 19 and eventually married someone of her own choosing, outside her own race and background.
During Thursday’s DNC acceptance speech, Harris said: “When she finished school, she was supposed to return home to a traditional arranged marriage. But as fate would have it, she met my father, Donald Harris, a student from Jamaica. They fell in love and got married, and that act of self-determination made my sister, Maya, and me.”
The New York Times’ Katie Rogers also reported this week on how Harris’ personal family story is part of her appeal to voters: “Tying a parent’s life story to policy platforms, as Ms. Harris is aiming to do as she focuses her economic message on the high cost of living, is not just a political strategy but, in some cases, a driving reason for the fight to make those proposals a reality,” Rogers writes.
Harris’ various identities matter
While we continue to hear some on both sides of the political spectrum write off candidates’ racial or ethnic identities, the symbolic nature of identities and how they shape an individual is no doubt important.
Shefali Luthra of The 19th reports how Harris’ embrace of the “auntie” label in both South Asian and Black communities is key for some voters.
“For those who, like Harris, claim the label of ‘auntie’ — a term rich with meaning, particularly in the South Asian and Black communities in which Harris grew up — the moment is particularly resonant,” Luthra writes. “‘Auntie’ is an honorific with a flexible definition, a word that’s used to define not just blood relatives, but older women in the community who help shoulder caregiving responsibilities, in a role that’s a lot like that of a surrogate or extra parent.”
Harris has also mentioned her “chittis” — a Tamil word for aunt — in the past.
Additionally, Harris represents a growing number of Americans in blended families — an identity she has celebrated through her stepmom role she calls “Momala.” “My heart wouldn’t be whole, nor my life full, without them,” Harris once wrote in Elle magazine.
Harris faces similar criticism Biden did on the war in Gaza and humanitarian crisis
As the AP’s Joey Cappelletti reports, it’s not fully clear yet if voters who have been disappointed with Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war will eventually support Harris, will remain uncommitted or will vote for Trump (or a third-party candidate).
“Weeks of meetings and calls between pro-Palestinian activists and the Harris campaign have yielded progress in some areas, but their core policy demands remain unmet. The activists want Harris to endorse an arms embargo to Israel and a permanent cease-fire. Harris has supported Biden’s negotiations for a cease-fire but rejected an arms embargo,” Cappelletti writes.
Michigan, home to the second-largest Arab American population in the U.S., is one of the crucial battleground states that both Harris and Trump are vying for. Additionally, CNN interviewed AAPI Data Executive Director Karthick Ramakrishnan, who said Biden had lost support among some Indian Americans over the Gaza conflict. CNN also spoke with Rasheed Ahmed, executive director of the Indian American Muslim Council, noting “he and others in his circles are waiting to see how Harris will navigate the U.S. relationship with India, considering the current Indian government’s policies and rhetoric toward Muslims and other minorities.”
Both Harris and Trump need to court South Asian American voters to win battleground states
Asian American voters as a whole, and Indian American voters as a group specifically, are majority Democrat or leaning left.
As we learned in 2016, polls are shaky at best in determining who could win, but Harris has made some gains for demographics in battleground states where previously Trump had an edge over Biden.
Because the margins could be quite small in battleground states, every voting bloc matters for each candidate to secure the state. Asian Americans, at large, continue to be the fastest-growing group of eligible voters in the United States. This week, the Harris-Walz campaign released two new ads targeted more broadly toward Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities — one about health care protections and another about anti-Asian hate.
As CBS News Correspondent Shanelle Kaul reports (see Kaul’s video report below), many Asian Americans increasingly prioritize policy over identity. Kaul also reminds that South Asian Americans are far from a monolith, with roots in at least nine countries and representing six religions.
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