“Our commitment to excluding people from the vote is the reason why we insist that you enroll — so we can figure out who’s eligible and who’s not,” Francisco Pedraza, a political scientist at the University of California Riverside, told me. “There’s a long list. We can’t let slaves vote. So that’s including every black...
Harris, who will square off against Mike Pence during the only vice presidential debate on Wednesday, has family from Jamaica as well as from India. As the first woman of color to run for the country’s second highest office, Harris also breaks major ground for Asian Americans in U.S. politics and has injected new vigor...
Karthick Ramakrishnan is a professor of public policy and political science at UC Riverside and the founding director of its Center for Social Innovation. The author of seven books, most recently Citizenship Reimagined: A New Framework for State Rights in the United States, Ramakrishnan also directs the National Asian American Survey and AAPI Data. Before...
There is a whole new dynamic that pundits, campaign managers, and voters will be negotiating in American politics, and the starting gun has already been fired. That is, the complicated — so says the research — dynamic of how voters regard multiracial candidates. On the national stage, it began with Barack Obama, and continues in...
Trump critics accuse him of an exaggeration, but has he hit a bulls-eye when he says Americans of Indian heritage will target him for re-election? It depends on a lot of who’s is doing the talking, who is reporting the stories and whose polls you choose to believe. In the age of Trump, facts can...
Veronica Hossain registered to vote for the first time during the 2008 presidential election because she wanted to vote for Barack Obama. As an Indo-Carribean American, she didn’t want to miss the opportunity to vote for a Black man for president whose values she aligned with. Ahead of the 2020 Democratic primaries, Hossain supported Sen...
Why are minority voters less likely to show up at the polls? I assume minority voters mean persons of color who are underrepresented in everyday politics. It might make sense to be more precise with this term since what counts as a minority really depends on the location or district. For example, in some areas...
Today, you can say that Ramakrishnan is bringing ivory tower brainpower to the places that can apply it to solve real-world problems. Ramakrishnan serves on the board of The California Endowment, which seeks to improve healthcare and its affordability, and he’s also on the board of the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American...
While two-thirds of Indian American voters said they planned to vote for the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris presidential ticket, President Donald Trump got a surprising, almost double digit, jump, according to the results of the AAPI Data survey released Sept. 15. In 2016, 77 percent of Indian Americans voted for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, while...
Donald Trump has worked for years to make inroads with Indian Americans in ways Republican presidential candidates never have — recruiting volunteers at Indian grocery stores, holding events in five Indian languages and paying for targeted digital ads. Joe Biden undercut those efforts in a matter of weeks... "It was always going to be an...
Decades after UFW’s early voter registration drives, and key amendments to the Voting Rights Act, activists continue to work to raise turnout and registration among Latinos voters in Southern California. The eastern Coachella Valley’s immigrant population, for one, is made up of both citizens and non-citizens, many of whom have lived in the area for...
Indian Americans are being actively courted by both the Republican and the Democratic parties as election day nears in the United States, November 3. The group, which has traditionally been overlooked as a political constituent, is among the fastest-growing segment of voters in the country. Asian Americans, more generally, comprise a record 4.7 per cent...
Indian Americans are having their moment in the political spotlight. Nikki Haley, the Indian American former ambassador to the United Nations and former governor of South Carolina, had a prominent speaking role at the Republican National Convention last night, as the party seeks to improve on its bleak performance among voters of color in 2016...
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at the University of California, Riverside, about the South Asian political moment at the parties' conventions. Read Interview Here
More than 16.6 million people of color who were previously registered to vote have been “de-activated” from polling rosters unbeknownst to them, and will be ineligible to vote in the Nov. 3 general election. 48 million people overall have been de-registered, according to state by state polling rosters. In a number of states, voters who...
While Trump and his supporters are claiming there has been a big movement of Indian-American votes to the sitting President, the latest survey in this area indicates Asian-Americans, including Indian-Americans, remain loyal to Democrats, and Kamala Harris candidacy for V-P may strengthen support, Karthick Ramakrishnan, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at University of...
Though the Senator has struggled to spin her record as a prosecutor in her favour, her flexible positions will help the Democratic Party forge a new policy framework. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s decision to choose Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate has catapulted her back into the national spotlight. Harris bowed out of...
The Trump campaign has released an Indian-American specific ad featuring US President Donal Trump's India outreach and his friendship with Prime Minister Narenda Modi in an effort to woo the nearly 2 million potential "desi" votes in the November 3 Presidential election. There are an estimated 1.8 million Indian-American voters in the U.S., more than...
Southern California's Asian American movements for and against the initiative have been unable to reconcile despite shared interests. “Stop divisive and racist Prop 16!” reads a giant banner, held up by masked protesters at a recent Arcadia rally. “Keep discrimination illegal!” More than 500 community members drove in to a car rally at Arcadia County...
WITH Election Day less than three months away, Filipino Americans in Southern Nevada are ramping up efforts to ensure that the community shows its voting power as the largest Asian American group in the state. The presence of Fil-Ams in the state, and particularly in Clark County, is significant that election materials are available in...
