With a South Asian American at the top of the Democratic Party ticket this election cycle, two party conventions where the issue of South Asian American identity was front and center, both a South and East Asian American featuring prominently in the crowded Democratic primary field and several dozen Asian Americans vying for spots in Congress, Asian Americans experienced greater political visibility than ever before this election cycle.

“I have worked on a lot of campaigns over my lifetime and I can tell you that the Asian American community is usually not even factored in,” Varun Nikore, the executive director of the AAPI Victory Fund, tells me. “Typically, when candidates run, they say ‘okay, well, what’s the minimum amount of votes I need to win?’ It’s called their win margin, win percentage, or win number. Usually, Asians are not even accounted for in that calculation.”

So, at times, this new attention on our community felt welcome. A study conducted by AAPI Data, a publisher of policy research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, found that in 2016, around 70% of voters had not been contacted by either political party during the election cycle. But this year, even in the absence of campaign promises from either of the party nominees speaking to some of the most pressing needs for the most marginalized members of our communities—a radical reimagining of our immigration and criminal justice systems, universal healthcare access, strengthening labor protections after years of erosion, and more—it was clear that neither party took the Asian American vote for granted, given the millions of dollars spent to woo us as voters.

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