We discussed the impact of diversity with trailblazing politicians.
As a young girl growing up in Asian immigrant communities, Sarah Lin couldn’t name a single Asian woman in politics. “Every time I thought of a politician, it would be a white man,” she tells Katie Couric Media. Years later, Michelle Wu’s mayoral candidacy in Boston proved incredibly meaningful for Lin, a Taiwanese American who joined the campaign as a volunteer leader. “When Michelle Wu won the race in 2021 and was giving a speech to her supporters, I saw elderly women weeping with joy in the crowd. It just meant so much to me,” Lin says.
“I think of what Justice Sotomayor said, ‘You can’t be what you can’t see.’ And I saw the image of Mayor Wu building this multilingual, multigenerational, multiracial coalition of people while leading a people-powered grassroots campaign, centering community and people’s voices,” says Lin. “It was something so different from what I was used to seeing in political spaces.” Lin’s now the AAPI Coalitions Director for the Pennsylvania Democrats’ coordinated campaign for the midterms.
Representation matters, especially among those holding national and global positions of power. They not only stand to shape the national narrative and inspire people by holding those offices but also make decisions that impact the lives of thousands if not millions of people. For aspiring politicians like Lin, seeing representation in public office allows them to believe that they too can occupy these spaces.
Official government documents claim the United States is a “representative democracy.” However, according to recent data, non-white Americans make up over 40 percent of the population, but only 23 percent of Congress. Meanwhile, the 50 percent female population of the nation is represented by 27 percent of Congress. In local government, close to 38 percent of elected mayors are female. Here’s a shocking statistic: Over 80 percent of mayors are white.
With the midterm elections upon us, we spoke to current and aspiring politicians to learn about winning the vote and the impact of diversity in elected office.
Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui of Cambridge, MA, immigrated to the United States from Pakistan at the age of two. When she was in high school, she stumbled upon an opportunity to be part of the “youth voice” represented in the City Council. That experience showed Siddiqui what she wanted to contribute to Cambridge city life.
Mayor Aftab Pureval of Cincinnati, OH, was born to immigrant parents in the United States; his mother is from Tibet and his father is Indian. He recalls being interested in politics and public service from an early age, but only came to believe that the doors of U.S. public office were open for him after he saw President Barack Obama take his oath. Pureval tells Katie Couric Media, “President Obama inspired me to believe that no matter what your name is or where you’re from, if you have a passion for public service and a passion to lead, you can. So 2008 was really the first time that I believed that this [public service] could be a future for me. If you see it, you believe it.”
For Pureval, a big part of the journey to office was getting people used to everything that made him different, especially his name. Though many Democrats told Pureval he should change his name to something more common, like “Adam,” he made an intentional decision to be authentic in how he portrayed his identity. “There’s no doubt that if you have an ethnic name and an accent, the barriers to entry in politics are just greater — it’s harder and costs more money,” he said.
“Nationally, there’s not a lot of AANHPI [Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander] candidates or elected representatives, and there certainly were fewer when I was getting into politics,” says Pureval. “In Ohio, there are almost none.”
That meant he had to get creative in introducing himself to the public. “In my first campaign for local office in 2016, every time I said my name in our TV commercial, a big yellow duck puppet popped up next to me and repeated my name in the Aflac voice. But I’m kind of disappointed and sad that I had to be self-deprecating about my name to do away with the xenophobia that some people might be feeling.”
Even as Pureval, who was elected Cincinnati’s 70th Mayor in 2021, did his best to make himself accessible and counter xenophobia, he often found himself at the receiving end of personal attacks. “In any race that I’ve run in, going back to when I was in high school when I ran for Student Council President, my opponent put up signs in the school that said, ‘Vote American.’ So this [xenophobic targeting] is an experience that I’ve had at every level of politics and it’s not unique to me,” he says. “It’s an experience that a lot of Asians and South Asians face — saying that you’re not really from here, or you’re not really one of us, or you’re an outsider, or you can’t be trusted. I’ve experienced just straight-up overt racism too. In 2018, when I ran for Congress, Steve Chabot, my opponent, ran a TV advertisement saying that I was a Libyan terrorist.”
The first time Siddiqui walked into the City Council office, she saw only two non-white people. A few years later, when President Donald Trump won the election in 2016, there was still no one that looked like her in the Cambridge Council. At that moment, she decided that she wanted to run for city council. “Consistently I would be raising the least amount of money, because I don’t have that type of network — I don’t have that family money and we don’t know doctors and lawyers who can just write checks,” says Siddiqui. “So I just did the work and it was challenging. I realized that money’s important, but connecting with people is the most important part.”
Just as President Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris positively influenced Siddiqui and Pureval’s decisions to run for office, these mayors now leave a path for others to follow.
Pureval says that’s the best part of the job: “Young brown people will regularly come to me and say, ‘You’ve inspired me to run for office.’ Recently, a little boy told me that he wanted to run against me, which was great.”
Aneesa Andrabi, a student at the Harvard Kennedy School who aspires to join electoral politics, had the opportunity to work briefly with Mayor Pureval as he transitioned into office. For Andrabi, it was inspiring to see the mayor connect with diverse people — most of whom looked nothing like him. Andrabi, herself a first-generation American born to Pakistani immigrant parents, tells Katie Couric Media, “He’s also a kid of immigrants and it was really valuable to be able to see how he communicates with people in Cincinnati.”
Although she grew up with an interest in understanding how political institutions work, Andrabi never saw herself in politics. “I think it was because most of the people, if not all at the time, especially the majority in Congress and legislature, were white men. So even though I was politically engaged, I never thought I wanted to be a politician because I didn’t see it in front of me.”
It wasn’t until 2016, when several women of color got elected to the House of Representatives (specifically Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley), that her perspective began to shift. “These were women of color — most of them were young, three out of four were children of immigrants — with really diverse stories, and they just really cared about their community and wanted to take the plunge. They ran for office and people voted for them, and they won. I was 21 or 22 years old at the time, and that’s pretty late in life to see yourself represented in political offices, or even represented in a career that maybe you’re meant to be in, but you just didn’t know. Because the representation wasn’t there.”
This representation has contributed to a surge in candidacies of people from underrepresented and often marginalized groups: In 2018, a record-breaking 476 women from major parties ran for U.S. House — a nearly 60 percent increase from the previous election. In 2020, this number jumped another 22 percent to 583 women candidates.
And this year, as we close in on the midterms, a record number of Black men and women are running for the U.S. Senate — 16 Black candidates from major parties. They’re performing brilliantly in fundraising as well, proving that non-white candidates truly are viable and electable. It’s all even more impressive when you account for the fact that the nation has only had 11 Black senators since 1789, and only two were women. Diversity is finally beginning to find its place in politics — slowly, but surely.
