Embrace Georgia’s Asian American voters. We’ve decided close races before.
Every election cycle, Georgia becomes the center of the political universe. Ad buys blanket Atlanta television. National consultants, party strategists and surrogates land at Hartsfield-Jackson, while pollsters and analysts dissect turnout from Savannah to Rome.
Yet amid all that attention, one constituency keeps getting treated as an afterthought: Asian American and Pacific Islander Georgians, one of the fastest-growing electorates in the state and one with a proven record of deciding who wins.
More than 368,000 AAPI Georgians are now eligible to vote, 4.6% of the state’s electorate, according to AAPI Data and APIAVote. Between 2014 and 2024, our eligible electorate grew 76%.
We are not a monolith: Indian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Filipino Americans are our largest communities, alongside Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Native Hawaiians, Samoans and Chamorro families who have built their lives in Georgia. In parts of Gwinnett County, AAPIs make up about 1 in 5 eligible voters.
Too many AAPI voters aren’t hearing from campaigns
In the December 2022 Senate runoff, U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock won by about 95,000 votes. In 2024, Donald Trump carried Georgia by about 2 percentage points. Georgia’s AAPI electorate is larger than either margin.
Closer to home, margins get thinner. In 2024, Michelle Kang lost Gwinnett County’s House District 99 by just over 600 votes. In House District 105, also in Gwinnett, the Democratic candidate lost by 80 votes after a recount.
That’s fewer people than you’d find at a South Asian wedding.
This year looks no different. The latest AJC/University of Georgia poll puts the race for governor between Keisha Lance Bottoms and Rick Jackson at 45% to 46%, a statistical tie. Georgia’s Senate seat will help decide control of the chamber. And further down the ballot, legislative, county commission and other local races across Gwinnett, Fulton, Forsyth, DeKalb and Cobb can be decided by razor-thin margins.
In Georgia, where close elections are the rule and not the exception, AAPI voters can cast the deciding votes. Still, too many campaigns fail to treat AAPI voters as a priority, investing in outreach too late or not at all.
A national survey released in August by APIAVote and AAPI Data found that 42% of AAPI voters had heard nothing from the Democratic Party in the past year and 58% had heard nothing from Republicans. The same survey found that 90% of AAPI registered voters say they plan to vote this year, up from 84% in 2022.
A community that intends to vote but isn’t being asked is the largest untapped opportunity on Georgia’s map.
We know what works because we have done it before. During the 2021 runoffs, our organization knocked on more than 100,000 doors, made more than a million phone calls in seven Asian languages and reached 1 in 10 registered AAPI voters statewide through direct conversations.
In this May’s Georgia Supreme Court primary, we knocked on 16,000 doors and made 18,000 calls, and county-level analysis showed that the larger a county’s share of Asian American voters, the stronger the support for the progressive candidate in the race.
These voters’ top issue should be no surprise
Our issues are Georgia’s issues. Ask voters anywhere in the state what keeps them up at night and you’ll hear the same answers: the economy, housing and the cost of healthcare.
Nearly half of Georgia’s renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing, a burden shared by roughly a third of AAPI renters and homeowners.
After enhanced federal premium subsidies expired at the end of last year, more than half a million Georgians dropped their marketplace health coverage. For Asian Americans in Georgia with limited English proficiency, every policy change lands harder when no one explains it in a language families understand.
A campaign that earns AAPI votes on affordability is also speaking to every household in Georgia.
We know affordability is top of mind for Asian Americans in Georgia because we’ve heard directly from our community. Every family and household told the same story.
Grocery carts that used to be full became “just two bags,” and families described insurance premiums doubling or tripling.
“We pay so much each month for insurance and it still doesn’t cover much,” one Chinese resident told us. In another conversation, a refugee shared with us: “We work very hard, and then at the end of the month there’s nothing.”
These are voters ready to show up for candidates who will lower their cost of living.
As early voting ended Friday, it is late but it is not too late.
Meet our voters in Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Bangla, Urdu and Mandarin, using our in-language voting resources in Chinese, Bangla, Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese and Urdu. Show up at the temples, mosques, gurdwaras, churches and strip malls where our community gathers. Talk about rent, healthcare premiums, groceries and the cost of caring for two generations at once.
Georgia will once again be decided at the margins, by a few thousand votes statewide and a few hundred in the races closest to home. The question isn’t whether AAPI Georgians will decide these elections. It’s whether campaigns will have made the effort to reach us before the results come in.
Ashna Khanna is executive director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund, a grassroots organization building political power for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities across Georgia.
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The opinions expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.