Sugar Land — On Sunday, TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier tweeted that with 9 days still left in early voting Asian Americans in Texas have already cast more ballots than they did in total in 2016. TargetSmart is an industry leader in political data.

When discussing Asian American turnout in Texas, it’s impossible to ignore the work of Sri Preston Kulkarni, the Democratic nominee in Texas’s 22nd Congressional District.

Running in the largest and most diverse district in the country, Kulkarni is campaigning in 27 different languages, 19 of which are spoken in predominantly Asian-American households—the first campaign in American history to do so. Kulkarni’s outreach efforts have led to more than 63,000 new voter registrations in TX-22 since 2018 alone — in a district where the 2018 election was decided by roughly 14,000 votes.

As Kulkarni explained in his recent MSNBC appearance, TX-22 is ground zero for flipping the state blue in 2020, and it’s because of unprecedented turnout from previously ignored communities, such as Asian Americans. 

Sri Preston Kulkarni issued the following statement:

“Asian Americans have been ignored by both political parties for far too long. When I first decided to run, they told me not to speak to these communities because they don’t vote, but we’ve found the opposite, these communities don’t vote because we don’t speak to them.

This massive rise in Asian American turnout isn’t surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. While these communities aren’t overly partisan, they are tired of the nastiness in our politics, and are motivated to bring reason and decency back to our government, and that is exactly what our coalition is united behind.”