Kamala Harris (File photo) TOI correspondent from US: An IIT-Bombay alumnus, who moved to the US for graduate school, and after finishing his studies lived and worked Silicon Valley for four decades; Sunil Mehta had not thought of a career in politics till the election in November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected President. “I worked in the hi-tech sector and was not into politics. In fact, I was independent about my political view and did not support either Republicans or Democrats. But with Trump’s election, I felt that America was changing, with extreme right wing politics coming centre stage,” he told the Times of India.
And that was when the idea of setting up They See Blue was born. The name was a pun on the word Desi and the organisation, which Mehta set up with two like-minded Indian Americans from Silicon Valley, Rajiv Bhateja and Rajat Srivastava, was launched in 2018 to mobilise and engage Americans of South Asian origin to help Democrats win federal, state, and local races. “Before launching TSB, I had worked with the political organisation Swing Left in some of the swing districts with thin margins of support between the two political parties. While knocking on doors, I found that South Asian voters were ready to engage and felt comfortable when someone like me, who looked like them, approached,” says Mehta. He, along with the two co-founders of TSB who are also techies, decided then to focus only on the Indian American and South Asian community. “We started small and since all of us are engineers, we took the problem-solving approach and decided to work only in the swing or ‘purple’ districts that were close to Silicon Valley in Central Valley, California, for the House of Representatives elections in 2018,” he recollects.
The organisation that started as a small grassroots group has now grown to 5000 plus members with 24 chapters across America. “Initially, we were a small group of volunteers channeling our energies on canvassing door-to-door among South Asian families in areas near Silicon Valley to get out the vote (GOTV) or increase voter turnout. We customised our efforts towards a large Punjabi population in that area, many of whom immigrated from India many decades back. We reached out with flyers, phone calls and advertisements in Punjabi language and tapped local radio stations. We had, in fact, reached out to over 5000 South Asian voters in that area and were able to achieve a larger turnout from them making a difference for the Democrats who flipped the seats of California 10 and California 21 districts in 2018,” says Mehta. And since those days of early success, there has been no looking back.
The organisation ramped up during the 2020 election, when President Joe Biden defeated Trump, and in Senate electoral races as well. “With our Silicon Valley roots, we took a start-up approach in building the organisation and established a presence in every state. We continue to customise our efforts targeted at Indian American and South Asian voters with data-driven decisions working only for those seats which are in swing districts and have strong Democratic candidates. Finding South Asian candidates to support is a bonus and that is what the Presidential election this year, with Vice-President Kamala Harris’s nomination, has turned out to be,” Mehta says.
In the Presidential elections next week, Mehta feels that majority of South Asians will be voting for Harris. “In 2020, around 65-70% voted for President Biden; this time the margin will be higher for Harris,” he says. While the Vice-President’s Indian roots is one of the factors that appeals to Indian American voters, he adds that there are other issues too. “During the campaign, Trump and many who are close to him are using strong racist rhetoric which our immigrant communities are not comfortable with. Besides, Trump has stated that if he becomes president, his administration will eliminate citizenship by birthright, which is also difficult to accept,” he says.
In the swing states, which could decide the US Presidential election results next week, Indian American voters will make a big difference for Democrats, feels Mehta, “Pennsylvania is an example; there are around 100,000 Indian Americans there and thousands more from other South Asian communities. We will certainly make a difference to the election results,” he feels.
His confidence is not surprising considering that thousands of members of the organisation have been working across all the states of the US over the past months. “We have been knocking on doors to get out the vote; along with phone banking and sending out post cards and mailers. For text messaging, we have been using an efficient tool of acquiring voter data and then filtering out South Asian names, instead of just cold calling, for better return on investment,” he says. TSB has also tapped social media and mass media in a big way, with content focused on South Asian voters, in the run up to the presidential election.
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Publish date : 2024-11-01 05:59:00
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