Huge APA Turnout for Webb
When Senator George Allen of Virginia finally conceded to Senator-elect Jim Webb, the Democrats officially seized the Senate. This key victory was aided by a strong coordinated effort aimed at the Asian Pacific American community.
As an article in Asian Week details:
Their first coordinated canvassing effort was an example of the way they would blend grassroots ethnic outreach with broad Internet outreach for the next five weeks until election day. At the D.C. Asian Pacific American Film Festival, after a showing of Byler's Americanese, Byler denounced Allen's comment and announced he had invited volunteers for Allen's opponent to hand out literature.
At a Korean festival, 10 RVFW [Real Virginians for Webb] volunteers handed out literature and showed the GOP volunteers they were not going to let Allen win without a fight.
RVFW eventually included so many full-time and part-time volunteers that it could well have been the deciding factor in Webb’s victory. Joe Montano, DNC Northern Virginia regional field organizer, said, "This is the first campaign I have ever seen where there were more full-time volunteers than full-time paid staff." Even professional staffers such as Webb's grassroots coordinator Josh Chernila were impressed by RVFW’s innovative tactics.
The efforts of the Democratic National Committee, which printed thousands of Democratic Vision flyers in Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese, also contributed to the remarkable grassroots effort to bring in new Democratic voters. The results speak for themselves:
By Election Day, an exit poll by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund showed that 76 percent of APA Virginians voted for Webb, who won the race by just three-tenths of a percent of the total votes (9,236 of 2.3 million votes). According to CNN exit polls, APAs accounted for 3 percent of the total vote, and 68 percent voted for Jim Webb. In short, while APAs are only 4.6 percent of the total population of Virginia, they contributed between 48,000 and 54,000 votes to his campaign.
