Daly City Marilou
 | |
| Era | The Nineties |
|---|---|
| Age | 30-45 |
| Home | Daly City, CA |
| Demographic | Filipina, nursing, immigrant breadwinner |
| Lean | Lean Democrat |
| Race | asian |
| Successor | Fremont Anjali |
Marilou is a Filipina nurse working night shifts at a county hospital south of San Francisco, and the chief earner of a household spread across two continents. She is a Democrat on healthcare and immigration, though her Catholicism keeps her off the party's social platform.
Who they stand for
Filipino nurses have staffed American hospitals since the 1960s, recruited on employment visas to fill shortages that domestic nurse training could not close, and this made Daly City the most Filipino city on the American mainland. In the 1990s this workforce became a test case for two political arguments at once. Federal welfare and immigration laws passed in 1996 cut legal immigrants off from food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, a change that fell hardest on households that sponsor relatives to immigrate. The California Nurses Association won the nation's first legally mandated nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, signed into law by Governor Gray Davis in 1999, which turned hospital staffing into a union issue. Asian American voters were still evenly divided in this decade. George H. W. Bush won a majority of them in 1992, and Al Gore won a majority in 2000. Marilou is on the Democratic side of this divide because she is a union wage-earner, whereas Koreatown Daniel, an immigrant in the same state, owns a small business and is on the Republican side. Her successors, Fremont Anjali and Bay Area Priya, keep her Democratic loyalty but lose her attachment to the Catholic church.
Playing to them
Marilou responds to hospital funding, Medicaid spending, legal protection for overtime pay, and immigration visas that reunite families, and to a president who talks about nurses as skilled professionals rather than as a budget cost. She will not forgive a benefits cut aimed at legal immigrants, an immigration bill that lengthens the wait her sister already faced, or a policy on hospital staffing written from a hospital administrator's point of view rather than a nurse's. Abortion is where her politics and her union's politics part company. A president who leads with abortion rights loses ground with her and gains no one who was not already supporting him. A president who quietly funds Medicaid and family visas holds her support without ever raising the subject.
Winning Marilou's support through health spending costs a president the support of Greenwich Chip, who objects to the deficit, and of Dot-Com Drew, who objects to regulation. Winning her support through immigration policy costs the support of Anaheim Darlene and does nothing to win over Koreatown Daniel, who is torn on the issue. Marilou is one of the cheapest Democratic votes to hold in California, and one of the easiest for a president to waste.
Where they live
The five states where Daly City Marilou makes up the largest share of the electorate in the nineties:
- Hawaii
- California
- Nevada
- New Jersey
- Washington
Lineage
Daly City Marilou → Fremont Anjali → Bay Area Priya
Immigrant professional women in the Bay Area, Democrats in all three decades and further left in each. Marilou is a Catholic nurse: for the union and health spending, against abortion. Anjali is a non-religious engineer: for skilled immigration and science funding, against affirmative action because it threatens her daughter's admissions. Priya is the daughter's generation: a software engineer who supports the Green New Deal and Bernie Sanders. Each is further left because her workplace is further left, and the religion is gone by the third. Priya got into a good university and never thinks about how, so Anjali's admissions concern is invisible to her.