In 2020, voters elected the primary three Korean American women to serve in Congress: Marilyn Strickland, Young Kim and Michelle Steel. Strickland is a Democrat — like nearly all of the 67 Asian Americans who’ve ever held congressional seats. But Kim and Steel defied that norm as Republicans. Additionally they did greater than simply win: Each congresswomen flipped seats in Orange County, California, quickly reversing the gains Democrats made in those districts, that are predominantly Asian American, through the blue wave of 2018. The share of voters in each districts who voted for former President Donald Trump also increased from 2016 to 2020. Taken together, these dynamics represent a slow but regular warming stance toward the GOP by Asian Americans.
Though Asian Americans currently compose just 6.2 percent of the U.S. population, they’re the country’s fastest-growing minority and have many tight-knit diasporic communities in battleground states like Texas and Georgia. And historically, voter turnout has been low amongst Asian Americans, a large share of whom also discover as independent. In other words, as toss-up races and razor-thin margins increasingly influence our politics, Asian American communities are a potentially untapped voting bloc. While Asian Americans still largely align with Democrats, the demographic’s support for the party is commonly, at best, misunderstood. At worst, it’s taken as a right.
For context, Asian Americans haven’t all the time voted blue. In 1992, when The Recent York Times first added “Asian American” as a racial category in its exit polls, 55 percent of Asian Americans voted for former President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, while 31 percent forged their ballots for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Within the 1996 presidential election, Democrats narrowed the margin, with 48 percent going for Republican Sen. Bob Dole and 43 for Clinton, and by 2000 Asian Americans had drifted into the blue: Fifty-four percent voted for former Vice President Al Gore and 41 percent for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
But in recent times, Asian Americans appear to be shifting red. In line with a 2016 survey from Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, 19 percent of Asian Americans held at the least a somewhat favorable view of Donald Trump. When the survey was conducted again in 2020, Trump’s favorability amongst Asian Americans had risen to 35 percent.
One reason it’s been hard to get a transparent understanding of Asian American voters is that the community is commonly misunderstood as a monolith. In point of fact, the many alternative ethnic groups inside Asian America have many alternative views. For instance, a plurality of Vietnamese American voters (45 percent) supported Republican congressional candidates in 2020, in response to that yr’s Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote survey. Vietnamese Americans, a robust force in Steel’s California district, have been a loyally red voter bloc dating back to former President Ronald Reagan, whose anti-communism policy stances resonated with the Vietnamese diaspora by nodding to homeland geopolitics.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the survey found that Indian Americans were more likely (63 percent) than some other Asian American group to support Democrats. “After 9/11, South Asians were impacted by how political language and policies helped others formulate opinions that discriminated against them,” said Lakshmi Sridaran, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together. She explained that even those that weren’t actually Muslim could still seem like within the eyes of white Americans, and facing bigotry subsequently influenced many South Asian Americans to embrace the Democratic Party.
“There’s a misunderstanding from political leaders once they frame hate violence against Asians and other minorities as interpersonal — people not liking one another for whatever reasons,” said Sridaran. “It feels reductionist once they don’t acknowledge how these opinions originated from governmental policies and stances.”
An analogous trend emerged more recently with Chinese Americans, too. In line with AAPI Vote data, Trump lost support from the group between 2016 and 2020, which could partially be attributed to his sharply anti-Chinese rhetoric on COVID-19, like referring to the virus because the “kung flu.” Even still, Trump’s overall numbers amongst Asians didn’t markedly suffer — suggesting that the loss was made up with growing support from other Asian ethnic groups, specifically Vietnamese Americans and Indian Americans.
This yr, Republicans are promoting issues — the economy, education and crime — that they hope may also help solicit Asian American support in competitive political regions like Georgia. The recent news of the Supreme Court’s pending decision on affirmative motion, too, has allowed conservatives to align themselves with the subset of Asian Americans who’re against such policies. Meanwhile, in Nevada, considered one of the important thing states whose races could influence control of Congress, Republicans have leaned into highlighting Democrats’ inability to handle the economic concerns of many Asian small-business owners who’re affected by inflation, and polling data suggests it’s helped secure more red votes.
Interest in Asian Americans as a voting bloc is comparatively recent, said Christine Chen, co-founder and executive director of AAPI Vote. “[It] really began after the 2010 census due to population growth coming from the Asian American community,” she said. “Democrats began pointed outreach then, but Republicans are catching up now.”
But each parties still have a protracted method to go in reaching Asian American communities. In line with this yr’s AAPI Vote survey, a majority of Asian American voters said they weren’t contacted by their candidates or local political groups leading as much as the midterms: Sixty percent said Republicans hadn’t reached out, while 52 percent said the identical about Democrats. Moreover, political literature and outreach have only recently turn out to be multilingual, said Sridaran, which could pass over the views of many Asian immigrants for whom English just isn’t their first language. All of those aspects contribute to Asian American voters saying they feel ignored.
But one current House race in California also proves that not all targeted outreach is constructive, especially when it leans into inter-ethnic conflict.
In California’s newly redrawn forty fifth District, Steel is running against Jay Chen, a Navy veteran and entrepreneur, in what has devolved right into a bitter battle. For instance, posters describing Chen as “China’s Alternative” were found plastered around local areas, presumably circulated to sour his image among the many sizable Vietnamese American community by “red-baiting,” or harassing and discrediting someone for alleged communist sympathies. Chen, meanwhile, got here under fire for mocking Steel’s accent when speaking English.
Attempting to tap into these homeland dynamics isn’t recent, nevertheless. Trump, for one, closely aligned himself with right-wing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an try and appeal to Indian American Hindus, the most well-resourced and affluent group in Asian America. It could have worked, except President Biden’s vice-presidential pick of Kamala Harris, whose mother was an Indian immigrant, looked as if it would have foiled Republican inroads with Indian Americans.
Ultimately, inter-ethnic dynamics amongst Asian American communities are only recently being understood politically, said Sridaran. And these distinctions can be increasingly essential, considering Asian Americans haven’t been reliable Democratic voters for all that long. While many Asian Americans proceed to align with the political left, it’s no guarantee that Democrats will hold onto the support of the country’s fastest-growing racial group.