There are a couple of obvious issues with that damning narrative. One is, of course, that national exit polling data are wrong about Clinton’s support among AAPI voters.
On Tuesday, America will mark yet another Election Day. For Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), this coming election seems particularly relevant.
It seems obvious that greater electoral numbers for AAPIs should yield concomitant greater political power for our community. America is a representative democracy, wherein constituents are promised a seat at the table by a simple sociopolitical contract: our votes are offered to politicians as a quid pro quo promise of beneficial policy changes. More votes might therefore be assumed to invite better policies. Indeed, some AAPI groups – most notably 80-20 — deploy such thinking as rationale for their mission to create a national AAPI voting bloc comprising 80% or more of all voting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders; the group’s leaders seek to leverage that bloc for or against specific candidates.
But what if this thinking is flawed; or, at least, incomplete? What if sheer voting numbers do not alone guarantee greater political power for voters on the fringes of American politics? How do AAPI voters, and other voters of colour, build political power when we must cast our votes in a system structurally resistant to prioritizing issues of race and racism?
We first started informally chatting about Hillary Clinton’s trusted aide Huma Abedin on Friday after the latest email scandal erupted. Seeing Huma and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner once again make headlines quickly inspired us to create this list of South Asian actresses who would be fantastic at playing her. While that was fun, watching Huma be dragged through the mud (AGAIN) hasn’t been.
A rarity among national polls, a new political poll jointly conducted by NBC News and SurveyMonkey has included much-anticipated survey data for likely Asian American voters.
