Fil-Ams for Kamala on double time

THE NEED TO BE HEARD Melissa Ramoso (far right), the first Fil-Am mayor of Artesia, California, leads a delegation at a Democrat event in Las Vegas, Nevada, in August. —Photo courtesy of Fil-Ams for Harris

PHOENIX, Arizona — It’s four days to the US presidential elections on Nov. 5, yet longtime Filipino-American community organizer Melissa Ramoso is still flying across the country to drum up support for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her vice president, Tim Walz.

There simply is no time to spare with the race hanging on a knife’s edge. “I’m planting myself in Nevada starting tonight until Election Day,” Ramoso, who was the first Fil-Am mayor of Artesia, California, told the Inquirer in an interview. “It’s not just me, we have over a hundred people from various parts of the nation making phone calls, knocking on doors.”

These volunteers, she said, are part of the Fil-Ams for Harris-Walz group campaigning for the Democratic ticket in this election. Much of their work entails courting what is now the third-largest Asian group in the country, and whose voting bloc—which stands at 2.14 million eligible voters—could help determine who wins the White House.

READ: Kamala Harris: can underestimated trailblazer beat Trump?

The presidential race is still too tough to call as Trump and Harris remain deadlocked a week before Nov. 5. But a recent survey by the Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote showed that if the election were held today, 68 percent of Filipino-American voters surveyed said they would be inclined to vote for Harris, versus 28 percent who would vote for former President Donald Trump.

Battleground states

The Fil-Am—or Asian-American—vote is especially critical in the seven battleground states where elections are won by a narrow margin, Ramoso said.

This is truest for Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes and where Asian-American voters have grown by 55 percent between 2010 and 2020; Nevada, which has six electoral votes and where there are 181,000 eligible Fil-Am voters; and Arizona, a new swing state seeing a large influx of Asian Americans.

To win the White House, a presidential candidate must win the majority of the 538 electoral votes, or 270.

“This is about strengthening our numbers and what this means for democracy,” Ramoso said. “You know, we fight to make sure that … the people who are at the table making the decisions understand our issues, [ensure] that we will be heard.”

The key figures behind the Fil-Ams for Harris-Walz are by no means ordinary community leaders. Many are incumbent officials like Hawaii State Rep. Trish La Chica, North Carolina Rep. Maria Cervania, Nevada State Assemblymember Erica Mosca, Alaska State Rep. Genevieve Mina, New Hampshire State Rep Luz Bay and Georgia Rep. Marvin Lim.

Some, like Rick Sobreviñas and Cynthia Bonta, fought against the dictatorship of former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and are now seeing the late dictator in Trump.

“But I think Trump will be worse. We’re beginning to lose our freedoms now. I don’t want to make you nervous or stressed out, but it’s our life. It’s very critical. We have to fight for our lives, for our future,” said Bonta, who also became a community organizer in the United States after migrating.

Ramoso is hoping that Harris’ core platforms could appeal to fellow Fil-Ams being a diaspora community.

‘Life or death’ election

In fact, the incumbent vice president herself appealed to Filipino voters at the end of Filipino-American History Month on Oct. 30, where she promised to support small businesses, strengthen the health-care system, and create an “orderly and humane” system of immigration.

In her op-ed published at the Asian Journal News, Harris also “honored the ways Filipinos and Filipino-Americans have helped bring our nation closer to fulfilling the promise of America. In a democracy, while we can hold on to it, our vote is the power that each of us as an individual has. It is an extraordinary power, and we will not give it away.”

Harris’ presidency, Ramoso added, also bodes well not just for the diaspora community in the United States but for the Philippines as well, especially amid China’s increasing aggressions in the West Philippine Sea.

“She even committed to making sure that the Philippines has rights over the South China Sea, and that’s very important,” Ramoso said. “She has taken the time to learn about the community and engage with us.”

For other Fil-Am community leaders, the elections also go beyond better representation in government.

During their miting de avance last week, Loida Nicolas Lewis, national chair of the US Filipinos for Good Governance, said the upcoming presidential election signaled “life or death for the America that we believe in, where the rule of law, decency, integrity should be the norm.”

Echoed retired US Army and former Department of State diplomat Sonny Busa: “I won’t go so far as to say that this coming presidential election is an existential moment for the country, but it sure feels that way.”

“Also, it’s not just about policy. It’s mostly about character. Do you really believe that Trump has the temperament, knowledge, and morals to lead America and also the free world? Character is destiny, and the destiny of the US depends on the election,” Busa added.

‘Mind-blowing’ choice

During the 2016 elections, Fil-Ams supposedly voted by large for Trump, a concept that was “mind-blowing” for Ramoso considering that Trump’s policies, especially on immigration, could potentially hurt the community.

A key platform of the former president is to deport millions of migrants if he is elected, which he also said would be in the style of former President Dwight Eisenhower’s infamous military-style sweep of Mexicans in the 1950s.

“It could be that simply many are Republicans and are going to vote for a Republican candidate regardless of whether their candidates have felonies or does these atrocious things and they’re still not gonna mind that,” Ramoso said.

“Other people say it’s because of our strong Catholicism,” she added, referring to Trump’s conservative views about, for example, abortion. “But at the end of the day I keep telling them, which candidate is for the common good? And I can tell you it’s not Trump.”

(The Inquirer is part of the media delegation on a reporting tour organized by the US Department of State’s Foreign Press Center for the coming elections but it reports independently.)