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Over 100 APAs Elected to Office in Last Week’s Election

By May Chow
AsianWeek Staff Writer

With almost 200 Asian Pacific American candidates running for office in this November’s election, voters all across America went to the polls last Tuesday and elected more than 100 APAs to represent them locally and nationally, with the most significant APA gains in state houses.

A Tipping Point

Michael Liu, community programs coordinator for the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, said the success of APAs in this year’s elections might reflect a “tipping point” for APA political participation.

“There’s enough of an APA base in many parts of the country that APA candidates can seriously consider running and winning,” Liu said. “Here in Boston, Chinatown has increased its voter turnout rate by 70 percent and has led all neighborhoods in the city in increasing voter participation in the last three years.”

APA candidates declared victory on all levels of office, from a seat on a rent stabilization board to the state governorship. Hawai‘i and California saw the most wins by APA candidates; however, the buzz around the election results is centered in the Midwest.

Also in Minnesota, incumbent Satveer Chaudhary, 32, retained his seat on the State Senate for District 50. Chaudhary is the youngest member of the Minnesota State Senate. Chaudhary’s parents emigrated from India in the 1960s and settled in Minnesota where Chaudhary grew up. He is an attorney and business consultant.

South Asian Power

Around 30 South Asian Americans ran for office this November, a number that many attribute to heightened South Asian American political participation after Sept. 11. Among the winners include Maryland State Assembly delegate Kumar Barve, who will return for his fourth term. Barve, 43, is the longest-serving elected Indian American elected official. He was first elected to office in 1990 and reelected in 1994 and 1998.

Uma Sengupta won the position of district leader in the 25th Assembly District of Queens, New York. Sengupta has lived in the United States for more than 30 years and is the founder of the Rainbow Montessori School. Sengupta was the first South Asian candidate endorsed by the Queens Democratic Organization.

Incumbent Leela Rai held onto her seat as trustee for the Yuba Community College District in Sutter County, Calif. Rai’s parents were among the first immigrants to settle in Sutter County.

But ever since Dalip Singh Saund was elected in 1952 to the U.S. Congress, no other Indian American has been successful. This year, five South Asians ran for U.S. Congress: D.C. Amarasinghe (Va.), Stuart Johnson (Calif.), Syed Mahmood (Calif.), Ayesha Nariman (N.Y.) and Vijayant Pawar (N.J.). Amarasinghe ran as the Green Party candidate for the 2nd District in Virginia. Both Johnson and Mahmood are Republicans, and Nariman and Pawar are Democrats.

“While it’s a good sign that many Indians and Asians throughout the country are running, our community has done a horrible job overall in supporting our own candidates,” said Viran Nikore, president of the Indian American Leadership Incubator (IALI), a Washington-based organization that follows the political involvement of South Asians in U.S. politics. “On the other end, our candidates must get the proper training to be ‘electable.’ At the end of the day, it’s not the fact that you ran for office that empowers the community, but it’s whether you won or lost that moves people.”

Rahul Mahajan, who ran on the Green Party ticket for Texas governor lost to current Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Nikore said although South Asians had a nice showing in the elections, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.

“On the Indian America side, I’d say that we did horribly, to be blunt,” he said. “Many of the folks running were city council and school board. Many of these first-timers had not done a well enough job in building roots and foundations in their communities. For example, one’s platform or base shouldn’t be that you were head of the local India Club or Indian Association. Your roots must be broad across the community. Deepka Lalwani’s race for Milpitas [Calif.] City Council was particularly disappointing since she was head of the local Chamber of Commerce for several years.”

Splitting the Vote

In other races around the nation, the hotly contested seat on the New York State Assembly in a newly redistricted area in Flushing, Queens involved four APAs. Ethel Chen, Evergreen Chou, Jimmy Meng and Meilin Tan split the vote and lost the race to Barry Grodenchik. In San Francisco, the supervisorial race for District 4, also involved four APAs in a heated race. Ed Jew, Marks Lam, Andrew Lee and Fiona Ma ran against five other candidates for the seat. Quashing the expectations of many, Ma came out in the lead among her APA challengers and is up for a runoff against Ron Dudum in December.

Liu believes that the diversity within APA communities has led to the situations in New York and San Francisco. He added that successful candidacies remain concentrated primarily among Chinese and Japanese American candidates.

“Most importantly, there is the lack of a common vision and therefore unity among the APA electorate,” said Liu. “Solving these issues is necessary to take APA political participation to the next level of success.”

In a very important race in Colorado, State Senate Pres. Stan Matsunaka lost his bid for a congressional seat to State Sen. Marilyn Musgrave. Matsunaka received 42 percent of the votes to Musgrave’s 55 percent.

Despite many defeats in key APA races, Clayton Fong, chair of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS) said he was still happy to see many young APAs run for office on local and state levels.

“Whether they won or lost the APA candidates have galvanized new people into the electoral process,” Fong said. “With every election, we are getting more people elected into the system, which is going to be very beneficial for the constituents as well as for the legislative bodies.”