How One Campaign Is Organizing An Often-Overlooked New Hampshire Voting Bloc: Immigrants and Refugees

Suraj Budathoki, constituency director for the Sanders campaign in New Hampshire, has made it a priority to engage with the state’s immigrant and refugee communities during this primary season. (Casey McDermott/NHPR)

At first, the scene at the Manchester field office for the Bernie Sanders campaign looked pretty typical: Volunteers milled around after a presentation from campaign higher-ups, fielding invitations to sign up for canvassing shifts from campaign staffers armed with clipboards.

But in one corner of the room, a smaller group huddled together, listening intently to field organizer Susmik Lama, who was delivering a parallel set of instructions for the final weeks of the campaign — in Nepali.

Lama’s family belonged to an indigenous community in Nepal and moved to the United States when she was younger. She’s fairly new to politics, but she’s been an integral part of the Sanders campaign’s get-out-the-vote strategy in New Hampshire, as a field organizer who specializes in outreach to the state’s immigrant and refugee communities.

Read the rest of the story at NHPR’s website.