In the United States, the Asian vote becomes the tip of the balance

Lanhee Chen is something of an antiTrump. In 2012 he was chief political adviser in Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, and in November he will run for the office of state controller of California, a technical assignment, the goal of which is to ensure that the money allocated by the state government is spent properly. “I collaborated a lot with the Democrats,” explains Chen. “What makes me suitable for this role has no connection with ideology.” A phrase that few conservatives would utter. If he were to be elected, Chen would become the first Republican to hold office in California since 2006. Of Taiwanese descent, Chen also embodies one of the Republican party’s boldest ambitions: winning the vote of Asians.

Americans of Asian descent, often designated by the acronym Aapi, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, traditionally vote for Democrats. Two out of three have chosen Joe Biden as president. This percentage brings them closer to Democrats than Latins, whose support for Democratic presidential candidates shrank by more than ten percentage points between 2012 and 2020.

Fast growing
With over 11 million voters (about 5 percent of the total), Asians are the fastest growing ethnic group of voters. Previously concentrated in New York and California, today they live in some of the most competitive districts in the country. Central Ohio is home to the largest Bhutanese community outside of Southeast Asia, while some 600,000 Asian Americans live in and around Houston and another 600,000 are residents of Dallas. Four hundred thousand Asians populate the Atlanta suburbs.

According to data analytics firm Targetsmart, the increase in Asian voters in 2020 compared to 2016 in Georgia was five times greater than Biden’s margin of victory in the state. The Democrats have won both seats in the senate: the victory of the presidency and the upper house would not have been possible without the increase in the votes of the Asians.

Turnout for this group grew by 50 percent between the 2014 and 2018 mid-term elections, and by nearly a third from 2016 to 2020. This is the largest increase in votes by an ethnic group, as well as a major cause of the Democrats’ victories. “We have gone from existence on the sidelines to the margin of victory,” explains Judy Chu, a Democratic lawmaker from California.

But 2020 was an unusual year. The presidential race took place in the context of widespread racist attacks against Asians. The organization Stop Aapi hate, Stop the hatred against the Aapis, reports that it received nearly eleven thousand reports of discrimination and hatred against Asian Americans between March 2020 and December 2021. Among the most violent events are several shootings , including those in a beauty salon in Koreatown of Dallas and those in spas in Atlanta (where six out of eight victims were of Asian descent). Many Asian Americans believe that Donald Trump’s insistent reference to the “Chinese virus” has fueled anti-Asian sentiments. “He made us understand that voting is our only chance to express ourselves,” explains Stephanie Murphy, a Vietnam-born convention representative in a Florida district. Racism persists even if in 2022 Trump’s name is no longer present at the polls.

However, Asian voters today feel disappointed by Democrats, and share national unease about the president’s actions. Polls by Economist / YouGov indicate that Biden’s approval among Asians plunged from 66 percent in July 2021 to 42 percent in March 2022, before recording a slight increase. The decline, however, was more pronounced than that recorded among blacks and Latinos. During the same period, the percentage of Asians convinced that the United States is on the wrong track also increased more dramatically than other groups.

Polls produce mixed results, but several past elections show a common trend. In November 2021 Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, was elected governor of Virginia. His campaign administrators also attributed the victory to AAPIs’ concerns about the economy.

A disputed fiefdom
In February 2022, San Francisco voters forced the removal of three progressives from the school board, highlighting AAPIs’ frustration with discriminatory policies within institutions that favor Black and Latino pupils at the expense of Asians (whose school scores they are better). In New York, a city dominated by Democrats, a Republican ran for mayor in 2021 basing his campaign on the fight against crime. The candidate has clearly lost the elections, but has conquered four districts where there is a strong concentration of citizens of Asian origin. “Our party had better care more than the #Aapi voters,” Grace Meng, a Queens Democrat, wrote on Twitter. These trends suggest that in 2022 the Asian Americans could favor a comeback of the Republicans. It remains to be seen whether a marginal gain could portend a larger change. Will Asians prove to be a reliable member of the democratic coalition, as are American Jews? Or will they approach the Republicans as the Italian Americans are doing?

There are two reasons for believing that the Republican party can reap great benefits from the Asian vote. First of all, Asians are a very diverse group: they come from many countries, speak more than a hundred languages ​​and practice different religions. Until recently they recognized the expression “Asian Americans” only as a census category, in reality they consider themselves Japanese Americans, Korean Americans or Vietnamese Americans. Asians of Vietnamese descent, among other things, form a separate group close to the Republicans, like the Cubans among the Latins.

According to the Pew research center, the top 10 percent of Asian Americans earn more than the top 10 percent of other groups. Migrants from India and China account for a disproportionate percentage of technology employees and boast leaders from Adobe, Google, Microsoft and Zoom among their ranks. At the same time, however, the poorest 10 percent of AAPIs are slightly worse than average. Furthermore, the gap between the richest and poorest Asians is widening faster than the total population. The income gap is even wider among American Chinese. If they voted based on their socioeconomic interests, Asian Americans would almost equally divide their votes. In 1992, a slight majority of Asians had voted for George W. Bush.

Second, the Asian community is the only large racial group in the United States made up largely of immigrants: over 60 percent were born abroad (compared to 35 percent of Hispanics, 12 percent of African Americans and 4 percent of whites). At the current rate, there will be 46 million Asian Americans in 2060, more than there are African Americans today. Republicans appear to have a good chance of winning the vote of many of the newcomers.

However, immigrants tend to take the side of the political force supported by family and neighbors (or alternatively to ignore politics). This gives the Democrats a head start. During the years between 2000 and 2020, when there was a strong influx of Asians, the minority party was more present than the Republicans, bound by xenophobic and nativist currents. According to the polling institute Aapi Data, Democrats outnumber Republicans within nearly all groups of Asians except the Vietnamese-Americans. Overall, the Asian Americans who identify with the Democrats are twice as many as those who sided with the Republicans.

According to Karthick Ramakrishnan of the University of California at Riverside, the left turn of Asians that began in 1996 constitutes the largest political shift by a racial group in the United States. According to Aapi Data, 43 percent of Asian Americans would like more government intervention and more services, while only 19 percent ask for a reduction in the presence of the state and services. More than three-quarters of Asian Americans are in favor of increased federal activity to combat climate change, while four-fifths support more restrictive laws on access to weapons. Varun Nikore, of the Aapi Victory Fund, believes that while Asian Americans are the most diverse ethnic group in the country, they actually vote and organize themselves homogeneously as a democratic lean bloc.

Other trends suggest that Republicans will face great difficulty in their attempt to divide this bloc. American Asians are on average more educated: more than half have a college degree, and among American Indians the percentage rises to 75 percent (the national average is 38 percent). Completion of a university career is one of the elements that tend to identify a Democratic voter.

Asian Americans are slightly younger than the average, but the average age of US-born Aapis is just 19, versus 36 percent of the overall population. Younger voters tend to vote on the left. A survey by Circle, a research group linked to Tufts University, found that an astounding 78 percent of Asian Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Biden in 2020, twenty percentage points more than young people. Americans as a whole. US-born Aapis are closer to Democrats than newcomers. So the percentage of Democratic voters among Asian Americans is likely to increase over time.

At a time when the incidence of Asian Americans is rising, both parties must work to win their votes. “We need to understand their position on political issues, without relying on identity politics,” explains Murphy. “The Republican party hasn’t always been welcoming to people of all ethnicities,” admits Chen with embarrassment. Republicans are targeting the blockade of Asian Americans. But they still haven’t managed to scratch it.

(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)