Name: How Asian Americans Are Thinking About The 2020 Election
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How Asian Americans Are Thinking About The 2020 Election

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Welcome to , our weekly polling roundup.Asian American voters . In 1992, less than a third of Asian Americans voted Democratic. But nowadays, most Asian Americans identify as Democrats, with more than half saying they plan to back Joe Biden and less than a third saying they’d vote for President Trump, according to the latest released this week.Asian American voters are hardly a monolith. The different groups that comprise Asian American voters are divided over how much — and whether — they will back Biden for president. For instance, Filipino Americans are more evenly divided among supporting Biden and Trump than Japanese Americans. And Indian Americans, who have been reliably Democratic for years, now show some signs of slowly shifting to the right. Finally, Vietnamese Americans lean pretty consistently Republican.Asian Americans are one of the in the United States. and make up 4.7 percent of all eligible voters, but there hasn’t been that much reliable polling on Asian Americans, so this survey provides one of the few snapshots of how Asian American voters feel about the upcoming presidential election.That said, it’s important that we don’t read too much into one survey. Only about 250 respondents were in each subgroup, putting the margin of error at +/- 6 percentage points for each group. But by looking at how Asian Americans have politically identified since 2012, we can more clearly see some of the trends in this most recent survey. What immediately jumps out is that while Asian Americans are very Democratic-leaning overall, Republicans have been making some headway — particularly among certain groups of national origin — over the last few elections.Take Vietnamese Americans, who among Asian Americans are the most likely to . Anabelle Vo, a 30-year-old video editor based in Los Angeles who started a (“Americans from Vietnam”) along with her childhood friend Bee Ngo, told me this is partly because the Vietnam War still looms large in how many older Vietnamese Americans identify politically. Many Vietnamese Americans fled to the U.S. after the war, and Vo said they may support the Republican Party because they view it as more strongly anti-communist than the Democratic Party. Her friend and podcast co-host, Ngo, also pointed out that many Vietnamese Americans who may be more socially conservative, a factor that could also explain why Filipino Americans, , are more likely to support Republicans than other groups of Asian Americans.But it’s unclear how strong some of these trends are, according to Linda Vo, a professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. For instance, even though many Vietnamese Americans identify as Republicans, there is some evidence that they might be . And much of this comes down to age, which was a possible cleavage among Asian American voters . Both Anabelle Vo and Ngo have noticed a distinct generational divide in their own personal experiences, with younger Vietnamese Americans much more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than would their parents or grandparents. This is something that Linda Vo has also noticed in her research. “[T]here is a definite generational divide,” Vo said. “That younger generation tends to be for the Democratic Party and tends to have more progressive politics.” She did say the politics of Vietnamese Americans were changing, but slowly.On the other hand, Republicans have seen modest gains among Indian Americans, who are the most Democratic-leaning group of Asian Americans. Some of this may have to do with by activist groups like the Republican Hindu Coalition, who capitalized on ideological overlaps between Trump and India’s popular nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016, leading some Indian Americans to vote Republican. Only 21 percent of Indian Americans identify with, or lean towards, the Republican Party, but that’s still roughly double what it was in 2012.However, the majority of Asian Americans do identify as Democrats. And that could be in part because there is a lot of overlap between the policy preferences of Asian Americans of every stripe and those espoused by the Democratic Party. For instance, according to the survey, 81 percent of Asian Americans support stricter gun laws, 77 percent support stronger legislation to address climate change, 70 percent support affirmative action in higher education, 63 percent believe the government should do more to give Black Americans equal rights with white Americans, 59 percent support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, 59 percent support shifting funding away from law enforcement, and 55 percent support expanding access to health insurance to all immigrants regardless of legal status.“When you break it down to certain issues like health care and things like that, that’s how it gets easier for me to discuss things with older folks,” Anabelle Vo said. Vo describes herself as more progressive than the typical Democratic voter and has attended demonstrations and marches for like-minded causes. And interestingly, there weren’t significant divides on these issues between more conservative Asian American groups, like Vietnamese Americans, and more liberal Asian American groups, like Indian Americans. For instance, Vietnamese Americans were more likely to favor stricter gun control legislation, policies to curb climate change and affirmative action, than Asian Americans as a whole.If Republicans are looking to persuade Asian Americans, however, there is one potential issue where they may have the upperhand. Ninety percent of Asian Americans said that jobs and the economy are either “extremely” or “very” important. And on that issue, 35 percent said that Republicans are doing a better job, while only 31 percent said Democrats are. The rest said there was no difference, or that they don’t know.It is hard to imagine that Asian American voters will greatly shift in their support before the election, so the real question is whether they’ll come out to the polls (or mail in their ballot). The survey did find high levels of enthusiasm for voting (82 percent said they were at least as enthusiastic about voting this year as they were in previous elections, with more than half saying they were more enthusiastic), but outreach from political parties has been very low. Only 30 percent of Asian American voters said they have been contacted by the Democratic Party in the past year, and only 24 percent said they have been contacted by the Republican Party.And if the race ends up being anything like 2016, where Trump won key states like Michigan with razor-thin margins, turnout among this relatively small — — subset of the electorate could matter.According to FiveThirtyEight’s , 43.3 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 52.7 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -9.5 points). At this time , 42.7 percent approved and 53.1 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -10.4 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 42.0 percent and a disapproval rating of 54.0 percent, for a net approval rating of -12.0 points.In our average of polls of the , Democrats currently lead by 6.4 percentage points (48.6 percent to 42.2 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 6.6 points (48.5 percent to 42.0 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 7.3 points (48.5 percent to 41.2 percent).Dhrumil Mehta was a database journalist at FiveThirtyEight.Filed underYou are now subscribed!Email AddressSign me up

Welcome to , our weekly polling roundup.Asian American voters . In 1992, less than a third of Asian Americans voted Democratic. But nowadays, most Asian Americans identify as Democrats, with more than half saying they plan to back Joe Biden and less than a third saying they’d vote for President Trump, according to the latest released this week.Asian American voters are hardly a monolith. The different groups that comprise Asian American voters are divided over how much — and whether — they will back Biden for president. For instance, Filipino Americans are more evenly divided among...

How Asian Americans Are Thinking About The 2020 Election

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