the president Joe Biden’s re-election campaign begins official outreach to Asian American voters, appoints vice president Kamala Harris This week is at the forefront of the effort with events in Nevada and Pennsylvania.
For Biden-Harris, the AANHPIs (AANHPI stands for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) will kick off with an event Tuesday in Las Vegas with former “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi. Harris is the first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, and attention has only grown since Biden’s tenure. stumbling debate performance last month, there were questions about whether he would withdraw his candidacy and succeed Harris.
Harris will also deliver a keynote address Saturday at a town hall in Philadelphia hosted by APIAVote, an advocacy group focused on mobilizing Asian American voters.
“We need to make sure AA and NHPI voices are heard at the ballot box across our country, just as we need to make sure those voices are represented at all levels of government,” Harris said in a video released by the campaign Tuesday. . “Asian Americans should be in the decision-making rooms.”
The new effort to target Asian American voters comes after the Biden campaign launched coalition groups already focused on it. Black voters and Latino voters. Both opening events were attended by the president himself. The campaign says this advocacy effort will be active in each battleground state and plans events in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia.
The coalition will be led by Nadia Belkin, the campaign’s national AANHPI engagement director, and the campaign is recruiting Andrew Peng as a national AANHPI spokesperson.
Experts on Asian American politics have long said language is one of the barriers to effectively reaching voters. The Biden campaign’s effort plans to offer resources in several languages, including Chinese, Tagalog, Hindi, Hmong, Vietnamese, Urdu and Korean.