A New Political Force Emerges in Georgia: Asian-American Voters
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — Four years ago, Maliha Javed, an immigrant from Pakistan, was not paying attention to politics. A community college student in suburban Atlanta, she was busy paying for books and studying for classes. She did not vote that year.
But the past four years changed her. The Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban affected some of her friends. The child separation policy reminded her of living apart from her parents for three years during her own move to the United States. Then, this summer, the discovery that she was pregnant made it final: On Election Day, she marched into the Amazing Grace Lutheran Church near her house and voted for the first time in her life. She chose Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“I want it to be a better country for him to grow up in,” said Ms. Javed, who is 24 and is having a boy.
Ms. Javed is part of a small but powerful new force in Georgia politics: Asian-American voters. She lives in Gwinnett County, Georgia’s second-most populous county and the one with the largest Asian-American population. Mr. Biden, who narrowly defeated President Trump in Georgia, won Gwinnett County by 18 percentage points, a substantial increase over Hillary Clinton’s performance four years ago and only the second time the county went blue since the 1970s.
The county is also the heart of the only tightly contested House seat in the entire country that Democrats flipped this year — Georgia’s Seventh Congressional District. A survey of Asian-American early voters in that district found that 41 percent reported voting for the first time, said Taeku Lee, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped conduct it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/us/georgia-asian-american-voters.html?referringSource=articleShare
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