2016 Postmortem

Douglas Carpenter

(20,226 posts) Sun Jul 29, 2012, 07:25 PM Jul 2012

Will Asian voters swing the election?

from salon.com

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/28/will_asian_voters_swing_the_election/

In 2010, Asian immigrants outnumbered Latinos, and many of these newcomers haven't chosen between Romney and Obama

By Thomas Schaller

According to an April poll by Lake Research Partners, Asian Americans tilt Democratic and favor Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, but nearly a quarter of them remain undecided about the presidential race, and a much larger share of Asian Americans report never having been contacted by either presidential campaign — leaving many of them up for grabs. “Asian-Americans have, in the minds of the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates, gone from a marginalized community to the margin of victory,” California congressman and Democratic National Committee vice chairman Mike Honda recently told the Hill. Honda’s district is 49 percent Asian American, the largest such share of any district outside Hawaii.

As for their politics, Asian Americans preferred George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole over Bill Clinton in both 1992 and 1996, but have voted majority Democratic and steadily more Democratic in each subsequent presidential election. Ong says many Asian Americans initially felt more connected to the GOP because the Republicans were viewed as strongly anti-Communist, but that with time and generational replacement this connection has weakened — a trend they share with Cuban Americans. Today, Vietnamese Americans still lean more Republican than other subgroups, with Filipinos and Japanese and Indians tilting heavily Democratic.

Compared to the general public, a higher percentage of Asian Americans (55 percent to 41 percent) prefer a bigger, more active government. They are also “more ‘liberal’ on abortion and gay marriage than the general population,” notes Ramakrishnan, though he cautioned that the recent Pew results showed Asian American opinions to be closer in line with Americans overall on these issues. As with other groups, whatever their racial or ethnic background, he noted that “religious identity matters,” with Catholic Asian Americans less likely to identify as Democrats and thus less likely to support abortion. Still, Ramakrishnan emphasized that “these issues are very low priority for Asian Americans.”

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that their concentration in reliably blue California limits their potential clout, the Asian American swing vote is growing in importance. Like 2008, this year’s presidential focus will again be on the 19 combined electoral votes of Nevada and Virginia, the two swing states with the largest Asian American population shares: 8.4 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively. Obama, who boasted about his Hawaiian and Indonesia connections in a speech this past May to the 18th Annual Gala for the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, could amass 270 electors without winning either state. But it’s very unlikely that any winning combination of states for the president will exclude both.

Depending upon how competitive the Obama-Romney contest is in Nevada or Virginia — and if Asian Americans are able to overcome their historically low turnout rates, perhaps with a boost from additional outreach and invested resources from the Obama campaign — 2012 could finally be the year Asian American voters and congressional aspirants finally get their due.

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/28/will_asian_voters_swing_the_election/