Kamala Harris’ historic candidacy energizes Texas’ Black and Indian American voters

Beverly Hatcher wears a “VOTE” necklace in her home in Beaumont on Tuesday, July 23, 2024. Hatcher had seen Michelle Obama wearing a similar necklace and immediately bought some for herself and others. (Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune)

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KATY — Mika Rao has known Kamalas her whole life.

The 49-year-old Katy resident has several family friends and relatives named Kamala. So when Vice President Kamala Harris emerged this week as the prohibitive favorite to replace President Joe Biden atop the ticket, Rao marveled at the idea that a woman of the same name, a fellow second-generation Indian American, was on the verge of becoming the Democratic presidential nominee — and that Rao’s two college-aged children would witness it.

“That would have been completely unbelievable to 10-year-old Mika,” she said. ​​“I want to go back and tell [myself], guess what? … You thought you had to limit yourself in all these ways, but that's not the world that you're gonna see.”

Elsewhere on the outskirts of Houston, Vernita Metoyer, a 48-year-old Black woman from Cypress, was also feeling inspired. She, too, could see herself in Harris.

“I never thought I could feel more excited than the moment when President [Barack] Obama took the office,” she said. “But this is a whole new adventure for America. It shows that even through recent rhetoric and divisiveness, America has taken true steps to diversity and equality.”

The sudden ascendance of Harris, the daughter of an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father, has delivered a jolt of optimism to many Black and Indian-American Texans, who are more likely to vote for a Democrat.

Mika Rao in her home in Katy on Monday, July 22, 2024. Rao’s parents were proud Americans and she remembers being tuned into elections as early as elementary school, with a core memory of Geraldine Ferraro’s nomination as the first female vice-president in 1984. (Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune)

Black and Asian American voters collectively made up just 15% of the turnout in Texas’ 2020 and 2022 elections, according to exit polls. But both voting blocs have the numbers to decide close statewide and local elections. Black voters are an especially critical group for Democrats, making up about 12% of the vote in recent statewide elections and breaking more than 80% for Democrats. As of 2022, there were 2.9 million Black Texans who were eligible to vote, more than in any other state, according to the Pew Research Center.

Many in those communities said they hope Harris will revive support among Black voters, who had shown fading enthusiasm for the president, and boost Democrats’ appeal to the South Asian community, a burgeoning political force in Texas. They also hope Harris will inspire female voters by campaigning on abortion access more effectively than Biden could.

Rao, a progressive, said she had concerns about Biden’s declining acuity and was feeling increasingly anxious about his ability to beat Donald Trump. Now, she and other Democrats see the historic nature of Harris’ presumptive nomination as an energizing force for those detached from politics and who may see themselves represented in a candidate who would be the first Black female president, the first Asian American president and the first woman to hold the job.

Black supporters moved quickly to rally around Harris after Biden’s withdrawal from the race this week. A nationwide “Win With Black Women” Zoom call on Sunday raised $1.5 million for Harris’ campaign, and a “Black Men for Harris” call hosted by prominent Black journalist and Houston native Roland Martin on Monday night raised $1.3 million.

That’s part of a record $100 million haul for the Harris ticket in the first 36 hours of her campaign.

Beverly Hatcher, a Democratic precinct chair from Jefferson County, said she waited an hour and a half to be admitted to the Zoom call Sunday night because of high demand. The organizers eventually let in 44,000 women.

“I cannot tell you — I’m almost still speechless — what it was like to be on that Zoom,” she said. “But when you ask me what it’s like to be a Black American, to know that someone of color like Kamala may become the first woman president of the United States? Oh my goodness, that’s exhilarating.”

Hatcher, who will be a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, said she was already behind Biden. But Harris’ presumptive rise to the top of the ticket has given Democrats some much needed momentum. Hatcher believes Harris, a former prosecutor, can take Trump to task on the issues of reproductive rights, which Republican states have severely restricted across the country. And it’s not just organizers who are backing Harris, so are high-powered donors.

Beverly Hatcher in her garden home in Beaumont on Tuesday, July 23, 2024. Hatcher, who takes great pride in being an older American, loves Joe Biden and was shocked when he dropped out of the race. But after joining a Zoom call with tens of thousands of other Black women, she's looking forward to voting for Kamala Harris as a delegate in Chicago and for president in the November election. (Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune)

Taft Foley II, a Houston lawyer who gave $275,000 to Biden’s presidential campaign, said he “fully backs” Harris, calling her the “right person to move forward.”

“I will support her not just financially, but getting out with the NAACP and assisting with voter registration. I’m gonna make calls, knock on doors and go to swing states if they need me to,” he said.

Before he exited the race, polls showed Biden’s support was eroding among Black voters in Texas and nationwide. Last week, a national CBS News poll found that Trump had doubled his support among likely Black voters from the estimated 12% who voted for him four years ago.

Asian American Texans are a much smaller bloc, but they are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group within the Texas and U.S. electorates. They are a highly disparate group that ranges from more conservative Vietnamese Americans to the more liberal bloc of South Asians — those descended from a region that includes India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — among whom Harris could make the most inroads.

There are at least 250,000 South Asians who are registered to vote in Texas, with the total population of eligible voters “closer to 400,000,” said Rish Oberoi, the Texas state director of the Indian American Impact Fund. That outpaces the roughly 215,000-vote margin that decided the 2018 election between U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Democrat Beto O’Rourke.

As with Black voters, a national survey of Asian American voters recorded similar movement away from Biden earlier this year, seeing an 8-point dip among those voters compared to four years ago. The dropoff was even more pronounced among Indian American voters.

Pooja Sethi, an Indian American who runs the Travis County Democratic Party in Austin, said she had not even finished reading Biden’s letter announcing his decision to drop out of the race on Sunday, when her phone started pinging with text messages from people as young as 15 and as old as 80 asking how to get involved in the campaign.

Sethi also got a text from her father, who voted for Trump in 2016, saying he was excited to vote for Harris. Online, Indian American voters have also expressed their excitement through memes with the hashtag “Lotus For POTUS” – Harris’ first name means lotus flower in Sanskrit.

“In Vice President Harris people can see themselves,” Sethi said. “Whether you are a woman, whether you stand for equality, whether you stand for health care, for working class families, there’s so much to see in her. ”

Targeting voters of color may be Harris’ best shot at improving her position in Texas, where a recent statewide poll found that 56% of voters view her unfavorably. Black women, in particular, have routinely backed statewide Democratic candidates at rates of 90% or higher. There is also a stark gender divide within Texas’ Asian American and Pacific Islander community: 49% of AAPI women identify as Democrats, compared to just 27% of men, according to a 2022 report from Asian Texans for Justice. (A 27% share of AAPI women, and 38% of men, identify as Republicans. The remainder are independents.)

The Indian American Impact Fund, a progressive group that aims to boost turnout among Indian and South Asian Americans, swiftly rolled out an endorsement of Harris on Sunday, accompanied by a statement from the group’s co-founder, Deepak Raj, signaling they were “ready to leverage our extensive network of resources to mobilize South Asian voters.”

Oberoi, the Texas state director, said the group will continue doing what has worked in recent elections: reaching South Asian voters through the messaging platform WhatsApp and bringing in South Asian celebrities and influencers to galvanize voters. The group also launched a website this week, desipresident.com, to sell t-shirts bearing the message “Kamala ke Saath,” Hindi for “I’m with Kamala.” The t-shirts were sold out by Monday.

But there are also parts of the Indian American electorate who are more conservative, including Abraham George, an Indian immigrant who is the new chair of the Texas GOP.

Sanjay Narayan, a 37-year-old Dallas lawyer and Republican, said if South Asian voters looked at the Biden administration’s policies, they would vote for Trump.

“Whether it’s South Asians or any Americans, the Biden-Harris team are going to be judged on the policies of the last three years like a rise in inflation. Real median wages are down for the average American, we have shut off our ability to expand and develop energy here, and reduced capacity to produce oil and natural gas,” he said.

The GOP ticket has its own South Asian ties: Usha Vance, the wife of vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and Trump has a close relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Narayan said immigration is also a huge concern for Indian Americans, many of whom had to wait months or years for visas to enter the country legally. Republicans have blasted Harris’ immigration record in the days since Biden withdrew from the race.

“You won’t find somebody who is more opposed to illegal immigration than a legal immigrant who has had to wait patiently to get in the right way,” he said.

South Asian voters who support Harris largely agreed that while her ethnic background is meaningful, it’s more important she aligns with their top issues, like climate change, access to abortion and gun restrictions.

Swati Narayan, a 55-year-old Bellaire resident and daughter of Indian immigrants, said she expects Biden’s exit to provide a shot in the arm for Democrats across all demographic groups, not just Black and South Asian voters. She lamented that so much of the reaction to Harris’ likely nomination has touched on her demographic ties, rather than her policy stances.

Swati Narayan in her Bellaire home on Monday, July 22, 2024. Narayan “loves the promise of America” and is motivated more by policy than politics. She has three children and helps care for her mother. (Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune)

“I wish that … we wouldn't be talking about, ‘Oh, she's the first this or she's the first that,’” Narayan, no relation to Sanjay, said. “I wish it would just be about, OK, here are her views on this, here are her views on that.”

Even among constituencies that support Harris, there are questions about her history as a prosecutor in California. Harris has billed herself as a “progressive prosecutor” but her record is mixed.

Chas Moore, a criminal justice reform advocate in Austin who works with low-income Black and brown communities, said he’s grappled with Harris’ past embrace of certain “tough-on-crime” policies. He said he’ll support Harris if she is the nominee over Trump but is hesitant to publicly endorse her until she discusses her past policy decisions.

“If she addressed it, it would help people like me to hear from her about the harm those policies caused,” he said.

For some of Harris’ Black and South Asian female supporters, the excitement about her candidacy has been tempered by anxiety over how the nationwide electorate will receive her. They worry Harris may face a combination of the racism directed at Obama during his presidential campaigns and the misogyny that dogged Hillary Clinton in her 2016 run, creating a built-in advantage for her white male opponent.

“If she doesn’t win, it’ll just be a reminder, frankly, of what I think I and many women already feel, which is it's a sexist world out there,” Rao said.

Metoyer said Black women like her were already thinking about how to defend Harris amid questions from opponents about her qualifications for the job and what they see as distorted attacks on her record.

But, Metoyer said, she’s also trying to take in the historic nature of Harris’ candidacy. Growing up, her grandmothers and great grandmothers told her about the suffering they endured as Black women during a time of legalized segregation and inequality in the country.

“It’s that sense of pride, like America is truly growing,” Metoyer said. “I think about how my grandmothers and great grandmothers would be so proud. Not only am I in the fight, we have a lady at the top of the ticket giving it her all.”

Vernita Metoyer in Houston on Wednesday, July 24, 2024. When asked about Joe Biden stepping down, Metoyer said, “What a selfless person to put democracy first,” and is ready to see what Kamala Harris will do for America if elected president. (Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune)

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