Asian-Americans have recently surpassed Hispanics as the fastest growing ethnic voting bloc in the United States, with their voting numbers expected to double by 2040. Admiring thrift, hating waste, valuing education, upholding traditional family values, and with a disproportionate number of small business owners, these voters would seem to be natural recipients of the Republican message. The Filipino, Korean, and Vietnamese-American communities, in particular, contain large numbers of churchgoers whose values are also in sync with the GOP.
Yet there is a growing disconnect with the Republican party, which becomes quite clear in voting statistics. Asian-American voters have demonstrated the largest demographic partisan voting shift in the past quarter century. While, according to the Roper Center, 55 percent of Asian-American voters supported President George H.W. Bush in 1992, almost three-fourths, 73 percent, supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, his highest demographic support after African-American voters. Of even greater significance, only 10 percent of Asian-American voters under 30 supported Romney, according to an Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund 2012 exit poll.
And it appears that the nativist, anti-immigrant rhetoric of Donald Trump and his supporters could drive these numbers for Republicans even lower. Interviews with Asian-American voters indicate that the idea of a Trump presidency has disturbed these communities in a way possibly not seen in American politics since the nineteenth century “Know Nothing” party, which led a populist attack on Irish Catholic and other immigrant communities. A Chinese-American restaurant owner, a Korean-American dry cleaning proprietor, a Vietnamese-American barber, a Filipina-American professor, a Mongolian-American clerk, and a young Taiwanese-American all express outright distress at the thought of a Trump presidency. Part of the reason may lie in the fact that, as reported by Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, two-thirds of Asian-Americans favor comprehensive immigration reform. Unwelcoming rhetoric directed at not only illegal but legal immigrants is taken very personally by many first and second-generation immigrant families. Should Trump win the Republican nomination, this could well doom his candidacy in the crucial swing state of Virginia.
While Asian-American votes in such Democratic bastions as California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York may be inconsequential come November, Virginia is a different story. The up-to 80,000 strong Korean-American community in and around Koreatown in northern Virginia and the more than 40,000 Vietnamese-Americans in and around Little Saigon in the same locale have emerged in recent years as a key voting bloc.
A January report in the Los Angeles Times cited a 2014 exit poll by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund demonstrating that Asian-American voters provided the slim margin of victory for incumbent Democratic Mark Warner over Republican candidate Ed Gillespie in the Virginia Senate race. Gillespie lost during the 2014 Republican wave year by less than one percent, but he lost Asian-American voters by a 2 to 1 margin. Warner thus owed his slim victory to northern Virginia’s Asian-American community as it made up three percent of the overall electorate.
Virginia’s Korean-American community also demonstrated its new grassroots political muscle when Korean-American voters flooded Richmond in 2014 to lobby for passage of legislation authorizing the dual naming of the Sea of Japan in Virginia schools’ textbooks as the Korean-preferred East Sea. Governor Terry McAuliffe rather reluctantly signed the legislation, despite Japanese commercial pressure, seemingly to help Hillary Clinton with this key voting bloc in a swing state. Mr. Trump’s public, nativist stance has caused apprehension in these very same Asian-American communities. And fear, just as much as anger, can be a powerful motivating factor in turning out votes in 2016.
Perhaps that’s why, according to a diplomatic source, the Trump campaign has made contact with Korean-American leaders in northern Virginia, urging them to disregard his anti-immigration rhetoric. The Trump supporters reportedly told the community leaders not to pay close attention to his rhetoric, which is “just campaigning.”
But it may be too late.
Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser on Asian issues to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute (SAIS) and an adviser to the Poblete Analysis Group.
