On Politics: Asian American voters could be key swing voters of 2024
Good evening! Tonight, we're looking at the role Asian Americans could play in the 2024 election. Amy Qin, a national correspondent who covers Asian American communities across the country, will take it from here. — Jess Bidgood
Asian American voters could be key swing voters of 2024
The latest, with 84 days to go
One thing you often hear about Asian American voters is that they primarily vote Democratic. That's been true since as early as 2008, the year that nationally representative surveys about Asian Americans were first conducted. And in 2020, Asian American voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, then the president, by roughly two to one. But look a little closer, and the data reflects a more complex picture. While Asian American voters do mostly vote Democratic, they tend to have weaker party affiliation. So, as both parties work furiously to find persuadable voters in a presidential election that is widely expected to be close, Asian Americans could emerge as a target for both parties. "Asian Americans are the quintessential swing voter group," said Karthick Ramakrishnan, the founder and executive director of AAPI Data, a research organization that focuses on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. An unusually independent group of votersAsian American voters, a hugely diverse group with roots in more than 20 countries and numerous languages spoken, make up the fastest-growing eligible electorate in the country. They are starting to turn out in record numbers. And, crucially, neither party can take their support for granted. Compared with the general electorate, Asian American voters are twice as likely to identify as purely independent, according to data from American National Election Studies and AAPI Data. Support for Democrats appears to be slipping among Asian Americans. While roughly two-thirds of Asian Americans voted for President Biden in 2020, that is below the high tide of over 70 percent who voted for Barack Obama's re-election as president in 2012. Only 59 percent of Asian American voters who identify as Democrats say they are "strong" Democrats — a figure that is lower than the 67 percent of general-population Democrats who see themselves that way, according to an analysis by AAPI Data. This matters because it suggests that Asian American voters are more persuadable than the general electorate, and possibly more open to campaign messaging and outreach efforts by candidates. One reason may lie in the fact that Asian Americans are the only racial group that is majority foreign-born in terms of its voting population. Much of the growth of the Asian American electorate comes from newly naturalized American citizens who came of age in different political environments abroad and did not grow up in traditionally Democratic or Republican households. These newly eligible voters often identify initially as independent and are still "venue shopping," as it were, to see which party best represents their values. "Identification with a party means real commitment and understanding of what that party stands for," said Christine Chen, executive director of APIAVote, a nonpartisan, voter-education group for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. "Many first-time voters don't have that yet." Swinging both directionsThe 2020 presidential election saw a breakthrough in Asian American mobilization, with turnout surging nationally by about 40 percent over the 2016 election — the largest jump of any demographic group. It made a difference especially in Georgia, where Asian American voters came out in force to oust Trump and elect two Democratic senators in a runoff that decided control of the Senate. But at times, Asian Americans have swung toward Republicans. Take the midterm elections in 2022, when the Chinatown area of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, once a Democratic stronghold, voted for Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor of New York. Zeldin lost, but interviews showed that many Asian American voters had drifted away from Democrats because of concerns about crime. Asian Americans are not an enormous group. They made up 4 percent of the national electorate in 2020. Latino voters, by contrast, make up about 15 percent of the electorate. Black voters, who are crucial to the Democratic base, account for 14 percent of eligible voters but have higher turnout rates than Asian and Latino voters. But an analysis by TargetSmart shows that in almost every 2024 battleground state, the number of Asian Americans who voted in the 2020 presidential election exceeded the margin of victory. (The only exception was Michigan.) In each of those states, at least 17 percent of Asian Americans who voted in the 2020 election were doing so for the first time. Untapped potentialIn recent years, we have seen a growing investment in outreach to the community from both Democrats and Republicans. I saw this firsthand during the 2022 midterms in Nevada, where Asian Americans now make up 10 percent of the state's eligible voters. Both parties sent out mailers in multiple Asian languages and placed ads in local Korean, Chinese and Tagalog-language newspapers. The G.O.P. hosted events at an Asian community outreach center in the heart of the Las Vegas Chinatown, one of several such minority outreach offices that they opened for a time across the country — although most have since closed down. Democrats have stayed focused on the group this time around. In July, Vice President Kamala Harris started an Asian American voter outreach initiative in Las Vegas. Her campaign has a number of staffers focused on mobilizing the Asian American community and has said it is hiring more in the battleground states. If elected, Ms. Harris would be the country's first South Asian president and first Asian American president, as well as the first woman and first Black woman to assume the role — although it's not yet clear how motivating this will be to Asian American voters writ large. Asian American voters are playing an important role this year in several competitive down-ballot races as well, notably in Orange County, where Representative Michelle Steel, Republican of California, is being challenged by Derek Tran, a Democrat, in a district that is a quarter Asian American. In San Francisco, too, where people of Chinese descent make up one-fifth of the population and are seen as up for grabs this year, the leading mayoral candidates are bending over backward to woo the community. Still, when it comes to Asian American voters, experts say there is much more untapped potential for both parties. A recent national survey showed that 42 percent of Asian American voters said they had not been contacted by either the Democratic or Republican parties or candidates.
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