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“She has done a very good job talking about her mother’s family . . . I saw pictures of her mother’s family, and Kamala among them, and it looks like a picture straight out of my family’s album,” he said. “And the more that they share that story and they more able to talk about that, the more people get magnetized and go ‘wow, that’s me.’”“I saw pictures of her mother’s family, and Kamala among them, and it looks like a picture straight out of my family’s album.”
In his view, it could also win back potential Trump voters in the Indian American community.“The more she can continue to talk about [her heritage] and develop people’s understanding of what her life was like and how it was influenced by being raised by a Indian mother and having so much time around Indian culture, I think that will be powerful,” said Krishnamoorthi. “I think that absolutely could sway some of the people who were voting for Trump back to our column.”
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Kulkarni’s district has a significant Indian American population, but he said traditionally they “don’t participate in the political process.” Kulkarni noted that when he first ran for Congress in 2018, he was told that his campaign shouldn’t bother with Asian American outreach because “they don’t vote.” He pointed to a statistic that 72% of Asian Americans had never been contacted by any campaign. The Democrat said he’s taking a different approach and boasted that his campaign “powered by aunties” had both more Muslim volunteers and more Hindu volunteers than any other campaign ever in Texas.Harris’ selection is only likely to boost Indian American engagement in politics.“We have had record numbers of Indian Americans running for office in the last couple of cycles,” Sevugian said. “This event will inspire more people to run for office, more in the community to give money, give time and see themselves as being invested in the political process.”Cover: Kamala Harris and her mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher who was born in Chennai, India. (Provided by Kamala Harris.)