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Ashwin Ramaswami, a Democrat running for a Georgia State Senate seat, grew up in a wealthy stretch of Atlanta suburbs transformed by the tech industry and waves of Indian American immigrants, like his parents, who have settled there.
It is a part of the American South where the percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree is significantly higher than the national average. Mr. Ramaswami, 25, fits right in, with a computer science degree from Stanford and a law degree from Georgetown.
He was still in law school when he realized that the state senator for his hometown, Johns Creek, was among the 18 people indicted last year with former President Donald J. Trump on charges that they had illegally interfered with the 2020 election results in Georgia.
That is when Mr. Ramaswami decided to run for office.
Today, his audacious Gen-Z challenge to the Republican incumbent, Shawn Still, a 52-year-old swimming pool contractor, may prove to be a long shot in Senate District 48, which was drawn to tilt Republican. But it will serve as a test of Democrats’ argument that anyone who helped try to change the 2020 election result is unfit for office.
The race will also test the strength, and political proclivities, of the growing Indian American community in the populous suburbs north of Atlanta.
In recent weeks, Mr. Ramaswami has been traveling from subdivision to subdivision, knocking on doors and making his case that Mr. Still should not remain in government. Mr. Still was among a group of Georgia Republicans who signed documents falsely stating that Mr. Trump had won the state and asserting that they were “duly elected and qualified” electors on his behalf.
“We have to play by the rules, and we have to have rule of law and order,” Mr. Ramaswami said at a recent campaign event at a subdivision called Blackstone, in Suwanee, where the well-heeled crowd was mostly Indian American and the soft thwack of tennis balls was in the air. “That‘s the only way we can have a democracy.”
In Mr. Still’s district, which covers parts of Fulton, Forsyth and Gwinnett Counties, the number of Asians grew to 28 percent from 16 percent of the population between 2010 and 2022. And though Mr. Ramaswami has raised a lot of money for a political newcomer — more than $700,000 through the end of September — it is not clear whether his status as a Georgia-born, Tamil-speaking child of Indian immigrants will be enough to win.
Mr. Trump won the district in 2020 by three percentage points, but U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, narrowly won there in 2022. It’s the type of place that both Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are working hard to win as they fight over Georgia’s 16 electoral votes.
Democrats and Republicans agree that there is a strong conservative streak among Indian Americans there, many of whom are drawn to the Republican Party’s message of helping entrepreneurs and strivers realize their dreams with minimal government interference.
“They look for less taxes,” said Narender Reddy, an Indian-American Republican candidate for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives that covers some of the same area.
Mr. Still has acknowledged that his young challenger poses a serious threat this year. “This race has become very real,” he said a recent campaign event.
He and his allies have begun attacking Mr. Ramaswami for his campaign’s unsuccessful effort to obtain the names of local high school students through public records requests with the goal of recruiting them to volunteer for his campaign or encouraging them to vote if they are old enough.
Mr. Still’s campaign mailers highlighting the effort feature photos of Mr. Ramaswami, along with warnings like “PARENTS BEWARE,” asserting that Mr. Ramaswami is “soliciting children in your area.”
Mr. Still was elected to the State Senate in 2022. It was well known at the time that he was under investigation for election interference, but he won the district by more than 13 percentage points. It was a reflection of the strong conservative streak that still runs through the suburbs north of Atlanta, despite demographic changes and a general distaste for Trumpism that have helped make them bluer.
Mr. Still, who declined an interview request but answered questions by email, predicted he would be acquitted of the charges against him.
He also said that he had been a good representative for the Indian Americans in his district, giving keynote speeches at a number of Telugu and Tamil school graduations and working with Indian consular staff to increase trade between India and Georgia.
“The Democrats will lose because they stereotype minorities and assume that race means more to immigrants than values,” Mr. Still said in his email. “Most of those who have moved to District 48 did so for lowering taxes, safe communities and some of the top schools in the state. We are told every day that they identify most with me because my values align with theirs.”
On a recent door-knocking sojourn in Johns Creek, Mr. Ramaswami handed out a flier with Mr. Still’s mug shot on it, and an argument that he is “wrong for Georgia.” The rest of his campaign message is relatively standard for a Democrat in 2024. He has highlighted Mr. Still’s support of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, saying it puts women’s lives at risk. And he has warned that Mr. Still will “fight any reasonable gun safety measure.”
Like many Georgia politicians before him, Mr. Ramaswami speaks openly of the centrality of religion — in his case, Hinduism — to his worldview. At the event in Suwanee, he spoke of his appreciation for Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi, saying they showed “how you can use our culture to bring people together and not divide us.”
Though he is young, and graduated from law school only in May, Mr. Ramaswami likes to emphasize that has already been engaged in the increasingly fraught issue of election security. As a Stanford student, he interned at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and later worked as a part-time employee there. And at Georgetown Law, Mr. Ramaswami worked on a civil lawsuit targeting the fake Trump electors in Wisconsin.
Mr. Still noted in his email that his challenger still lives at home with his parents — proof, he said, that Mr. Ramaswami lacks “life experience” and “is not equipped to represent the most affluent, most diverse district in the state.”
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