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The Biden-Harris campaign is launching a new ad buy targeting AAPIs in battleground states with a focus on President Joe Biden’s investment in small businesses amid high living costs for middle- and working-class families.
The new video “Better and Better,” shared first with The Yappie, builds off of the November ad “Family Business” and spotlights Jenny Poon and Odeen Domingo, a married couple that owns a small business in Phoenix, Arizona.
“When the economy slowed down, we were hanging on by a thread,” Poon, whose parents came to the U.S. as refugees of the Vietnam War, says in the ad. “The Biden-Harris administration is really working hard to lower the barriers. Biden is investing in businesses like ours.”
The video, which shows Poon and Domingo speaking about their difficulties juggling company operations with children and health care costs, emphasizes the message that Biden fights for “families like us.”
The ad buy will target AAPI voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and other key battleground states where AAPIs have become an increasingly important voting bloc in this year’s elections. It will run on YouTube and feature in national AAPI-serving news outlets like the Asian Journal and Korean Daily as well as local publications like Hmong Times in Wisconsin, and Saathee Magazine in North Carolina.
“Building off our historic investments to date to reach AANHPI voters, this ad buy makes clear President Biden and his campaign won’t take any vote for granted this November,” Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement to The Yappie.
“This ad highlights the clear choice facing AANHPI communities in November—between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who will fight for small businesses and families, and Donald Trump who is promising to double down on his failed and losing agenda of tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and corporations,” Chavez Rodriguez added.
The investment—part of the campaign’s larger $30 million ad buy—comes on the heels of its new messaging strategy, which The Yappie first reported earlier this month, to highlight Biden’s actions on the economy and convince AAPIs that Trump’s agenda could “raise costs, jeopardize their Social Security, and rip away their rights.”
Support for Biden among AAPI groups has wavered in recent years due to his handling of climate crises such as the Maui wildfires, as well as concerns around gun violence and inflation.
The Trump campaign, which to date has not made similar ad investments in AAPIs, has hammered in hard on Biden’s record with the economy.
A December survey of AAPI voters found that roughly half of those surveyed disapproved of Biden. That same survey showed about half of AAPIs still lean toward Democrats, and just over a quarter identify as Republican.
Trump has made gains with Vietnamese American voting blocs, however, who tend to lean Republican compared to other AAPI ethnic groups and support Trump’s hardline approach to U.S.-China relations.
During the 2020 election cycle, AAPI voter turnout in Georgia increased by 84% from the 2016 election, according to AAPI Data. That came alongside high increases in AAPI voter turnout in other states such as Texas, Nevada, California, and North Carolina, and a general increase in AAPI voter turnout nationwide.
In 2022, AAPIs were similarly critical to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-Georgia) victory in his heated face-off against Republican Herschel Walker. Warnock’s team and Georgia Democrats targeted AAPIs through in-language Mandarin, Korean, and Vietnamese ads as well as in-language messaging aimed at countering misinformation on ethnic social media platforms.
Warnock ultimately won 78% of AAPI voters in the runoff, higher than the 60% he netted in the general election, per an exit poll conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
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