Democrats Are Losing The Support Of Asian American Voters

Nationally, Asian Americans have been moving towards Republicans since 2016, with 30 percent voting Republican in 2020 compared to 18 percent in 2016, and 32 percent voting Republican for the House of Representatives elections in 2022. Those national averages disguise even larger Asian American support for Republicans in certain states: in 2020, 54 percent of Asian Americans in Californiaand 40 percent in Nevada voted for Trump.

In recent polls, 67 percent of AAPI adults disapprove of President Biden’s handling of inflation, while 77 percent view his government as doing a bad job dealing with the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. Over 40 percent of registered Asian Americans view inflation as the most important issue in one survey, although health care, the economy, crime and education are other top issues.

Many worry about crime, amid unprovoked attacks such as an alleged assault of a 71-year-old Cantonese-speaking woman in San Francisco by a woman who previously pushed a 63-year-old Chinese immigrant to her death.

More than half of New York City-based Asian Americans reported experiencing race-related hate within the last 12 months, and 83 percent of Asian American women in the same survey said public safety is a major concern.

Education is also critical, but Democrat leaders and liberal institutions have failed many Asian American families. San Francisco’s school board kept schools closed during the pandemic, instead renaming them and attempting to end merit-based admissions at Lowell High School, prompting Asian…   American groups to organize and successfully recall three of the commissioners.

At the national level, Harvard, other elite universities, and Biden himself deplored the Supreme Court’s ruling prohibiting the use of race in college admissions, in spite of Harvard’s record showing discrimination against Asian American applicants. Among the most highly academically qualified applicants, Harvard admitted only 12.7 percent of Asian American applicants, compared to 56.1 percent of African American applicants, over four times as many. The difference was even starker for applicants in the third highest rung, where only 5.1 percent of Asian Americans were admitted compared to 44.5 percent of similarly qualified African Americans. Asian American applicants were the only demographic group with a negative coefficient, such that being Asian is negatively associated with being admitted to Harvard (-.37), while African American applicants enjoyed a positive coefficient of 2.37. Apparently Democrats only care about discrimination against minorities if those minorities aren’t Asian students who are “too” successful in school.

Asian Americans number about 24 million, but are the nation’s fastest growing voting bloc. In 2024, about 15 million Asian-Americans are eligible voters, about 6.1 percent of all eligible voters, up from about 5 percent in 2020. And Asian American voter turnout is increasing: in 2020, votes cast by Asian Americans increased nationally by 10 percent compared to 2016, including in several swing states: up 84 percent in Georgia, 65 percent in Nevada, and 52 percent in North Carolina. Key swing states went by narrow margins for Biden in 2020. Sixty thousand more Asian Americans voted in Georgia than in 2016, an increase in turnout that exceeded Biden’s narrow margin of victory in the state. But March 2024 polls in all seven swing states show Trump leading by one to five percentage points.

The Biden administration can point to initiatives such as a webpage for reporting anti-Asian hate, improved data collection on Asian Americans to support better analysis and more informed policies, and federal agencies’ expanded language access. Recently, the Biden campaign launched an ad targeting AAPI voters across the battleground states. But while costs for the Asian-American small business owner in the ad may have gone down, inflation has increased 19 percent from 2020, and supermarket food prices are 25 percent higher in 2024 than in 2020.

Asian American voters in 2024 are increasingly engaged in politics given recent inflation, crime and education developments. But their concerns play more to Republican talking point strengths than to what Democrats emphasize.

And that could be a problem come November.