The South Asian Community are reportedly inspired by Kamala Harris to turn out massively to vote in the 2024 US presidential election as the vice-president is the first US presidential candidate to come from South Asian heritage.
“It’s going to be a new history that we get to talk about and experience,” Tanjina Islam tells BBC Asian Network News.
Tanjina is a Bangladeshi American who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a DNC delegate. She has previously expressed doubts because of the party’s position on the Israel-Gaza war.
But come 5 November, she said she has no doubts about stopping another Donald Trump presidency, worried about what it could mean for Muslims like her..
“A part of the area I live in, I’d say is more conservative,” she explained.
“My mum’s experienced it, because she wears the hijab. And she’s been threatened that if Trump doesn’t get elected, they’ll come after her.”
Reshma Saujani, CEO of Girls Who Code and the first Indian American woman to run for US Congress in 2010, said “You cannot be what you cannot see,” pointing out that so many South Asian girls see themselves in Harris.
The challenge for Harris is to channel that enthusiasm among a booming immigrant population that’s moved beyond the traditional South Asian strongholds of California and New York to battleground states like Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
In 2020, 71% of Indian Americans that were eligible to vote did, a 9% increase from 2016. And according to Karthick Ramakrishnan, co-founder of AAPI Data, Harris’s candidacy could boost South Asian voter turnout to 75% among eligible voters.
