CHICAGO (CBS)—Asian American representation in politics is on the rise across the nation, credited in part to the Illinois Asian American Caucus.

The caucus hosted an event on Wednesday to celebrate how much growth Asian American communities have seen in Illinois politics.

Vice President Harris is the first Asian American woman to become a presidential nominee, and now the caucus says it’s prepared to put every effort behind Harris for a win.

Just a few blocks away from where the DNC is happening, McCormick Place and the United Center is the only Chinatown in the country that’s still growing, and across Illinois, Asian American political representation is growing right along with it.

“We have grown the Asian American caucus from 0 to 17 members in just eight years, and a state that is only 7% Asian American, we’re so proud,” Cook Country Commissioner Josia Morita said.

Morita is a founding member and chair of the Illinois Asian American Caucus.

“There’s a saying that you’re either at the table or on the menu, and we’re so excited that our community, for the first time in this last decade, has really come to the table,” she said. 

Over 200 DNC-goers and community members came to the table for dim sum and to learn how the caucus has managed to grow — hearing from a panel of Illinois politicians headlined by U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth.

“This community is vibrant and critically important to Chicago’s economic well-being and cultural well-being, and so, I’m really proud of the work that we’ve been able to do here,” Duckworth said. 

“We are in so many races around the country, the margin of victory, and so many of the battleground states, and so, we’re going to get out there and work hard to have some more victories this November.”

The Asian American Caucus plans to mobilize its efforts in this year’s presidential election, not only in Illinois but across the Midwest, into neighboring states as well.

“We’re going to go up into Wisconsin. We’re going to go over to Ohio, we’re going to get races across the finish line in all of these states, especially in the Midwest,” Duckworth said. 

For many members of the caucus, pushing Harris to the White House isn’t just political. It’s personal.

“So often, Asian Americans are seen as others that we don’t truly belong here. I still get asked where I’m from, and I’m a daughter of the American Revolution, you know,” Duckworth said. 

“For me as a mom, my kids are Asian American and Black, and so I’m so excited to bring my four-year-old Blasian daughter on the floor to watch this historic moment here in our hometown on Thursday night, you know, to show that there’s a place for them and that they don’t have to choose,” Morita said. 

The Democratic National Convention is more than halfway done. And long nights of lavish after-parties, coupled with 8 a.m. rallies over breakfast every morning, had Illinois delegates bleary-eyed Wednesday.

But the speakers at Wednesday’s breakfast event brought the energy – and the saltiness, with many attacking former president Donald Trump.

🎧 In this audio story, WBEZ reporter Mawa Iqbal hears from:

• Bob Reiter, head of the Chicago Federation of Labor
• Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, who is a top surrogate for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris
• Eric Dean, head of the international ironworkers union, who took the Trump attacks to a profane level.
• Tim Drea, president of the Illinois AFL-CIO coalition of labor unions, who belittled the Republican National Convention.
• Reverend Raphael Warnock, U.S. Senator of Georgia, who spoke of civil rights icon John Lewis.

Mawa Iqbal covers state government and politics for WBEZ. Follow her @mawa_iqbal.

Today’s story is the answer to the August 2024 puzzler.

The suburbs north and west of Chicago contain golf courses—lots of them. At least ten courses dot the landscape in the Landsat 8 image above, captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on June 14, 2024. The image below shows a broader view of the same image, with dozens of courses visible.

The short grasses in the fairways appear as the caterpillar-shaped light-green features flanked by the darker greens of the rough—often tall fescue or other grass varieties that are allowed to grow to a greater height. In satellite imagery, many courses are speckled with bright and dark patches, the water and sand hazards that golfers avoid.

Despite the large number of golf courses in this part of Cook County and in the region more broadly, other U.S. metro areas have an even higher density of courses per capita. The Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island area in southwestern Florida ranks especially high, according to one analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Florida is also the state with the most golf courses in total (1,262), according to the National Golf Foundation. That’s 31 percent more than California, the state with the second-most courses. Outside the U.S., only three countries have more than the state of Florida: Japan, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

But there’s one other way this part of Illinois stands out that golfers will appreciate. It’s home to the village of Golf, a small community of 160 households west of Glen View Club, one of the oldest 18-hole courses in the United States. The local train station—and later the village—were named Golf, in part because Albert Earling, a member of Glen View Club and the president of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad company, had the company establish a special train station where he could unhitch his private train car from trains going north before hitting the greens, according to Golf Magazine.

Though numbers have declined in recent decades, the U.S. still had around 16,000 golf courses as of 2024, or about 42 percent of the world’s total. The game requires a large amount of space compared to other sports—about five times more per player than doubles tennis and 37 times more per player than basketball.

All those golf courses cover about 2 million acres, or less than 0.1 percent of the U.S. land surface area. That’s still an area larger than the state of Delaware and more than all the land used to raise Christmas trees, according to an analysis of U.S. land use conducted by Bloomberg. For comparison, the amount of land devoted to feeding livestock, the largest use of land in the U.S., spanned 781 million acres, or 41 percent of the contiguous U.S., the analysis concluded. The analysis was based, in part, on the National Land Cover Database, which is built on satellite observations from the Landsat program, a series of Earth-observing missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

NASA and the sport of golf have intersected in intriguing ways over the decades. NASA’s honing of an innovative type of threading technology in the 1980s to make screws on the International Space Station extra resistant to vibration eventually led to a sporting goods company achieving the lowest-ever center of gravity in a golf club, NASA Spinoff reported.

A famous connection to the game came in 1971, when astronaut Alan Shepherd attached a 6-iron head to a tool designed to pick up lunar rock samples and hit two golf balls from the surface of the Moon. Shepherd shanked the first shot into a nearby crater but hit the second ball more solidly, propelling it “miles and miles and miles,” the astronaut joked at the time. Three decades later, image restoration by science writer Andy Saunders worked out the exact distances that each of Shepherd’s “moon shots” flew: 24 yards (22 meters) for ball number 1 and 40 yards (37 meters) for ball number 2, Saunders reported in a story for the United States Golf Association.

How far could a golfer theoretically hit a golf ball on the Moon if they were unencumbered by a space suit, like Shepherd was? “If 2016 PGA champion and space enthusiast Jimmy Walker replicated his Earthbound ball speed of 185 miles per hour on the Moon, and used a club that would ensure a 45 degree launch angle, it would travel 2.62 miles (4,611 yards) and stay in the air for more than one minute,” Saunders wrote. “Literally, ‘miles and miles and miles…’.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.