Bent on reversing President Trump’s dismal performance with Asian-Americans, the Republican National Committee used the midterm election to build a vast network of volunteers it plans to activate in 2020 to drum up support within the diverse communities of this key voting bloc.
Republicans were hoping to showcase the person they thought would be Rep. Young Kim as Trump’s re-election campaign geared up. But Kim, a 56-year-old Korean-American woman considered among the party’s top 2018 recruits, lost her bid for California’s open 39th Congressional District in a blue tide that swept Democrats into the House majority. Kim’s defeat set Republicans back a bit in their effort to make inroads with Asian-American voters.
The national party is optimistic, however. The RNC believes that it laid a solid foundation over the past 18 months that will allow Trump to grow his vote share with various Asian-American ethnicities and improve upon the 18 percent to 27 percent he garnered in 2016, according to two different national exit polls that revealed similarly poor results.
“The RNC’s continued and active engagement with APA (Asian-Pacific American) communities during the 2018 cycle laid the groundwork across the nation for success in 2020,” Miki Carver, the RNC’s APA press secretary, said in an email to the Washington Examiner. “Our unwavering dedication to voters from diverse communities strengthens our party and continues to showcase enthusiasm for President Trump’s agenda. ”
Asian-American voters continue to grow as percentage of the electorate — including in key states like Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Texas, and Virginia. Trump’s ability to connect with these groups at the ballot box could prove crucial to his 2020 prospects.
The RNC appears to be treating the challenge with appropriate seriousness, hiring the committee’s first-ever director and staff focused on what it refers to as the APA community. Since November of last year, the RNC has held more than 70 roundtables focused on APA-related issues.
These events included grassroots training to create APA advocates for Trump and the GOP who live in and have personal ties in these communities.
The roundtables took place in 19 states and Washington, D.C., among them California, Nevada, Maryland, New York, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, Virginia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Arizona. The trained volunteers that emerged from those sessions made more than 4 million voter contacts, a part of the RNC’s 80 million door-knocks and phone calls in the cycle.
Shawn Steel, a former chairman of the California Republican Party and the state’s RNC committeeman, has spent years working to expand the GOP’s appeal with Asian-American voters. In California, there are significant pockets of Americans of Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean descent, to name just a few of the category’s major blocs.
For years, Vietnamese-Americans in particular tended to vote Republican, a byproduct of the GOP’s strong opposition to communism. But just as with the descendants of Cuban-Americans in Florida who fled Fidel Castro’s communist dictatorship, the second and third generations of the original Vietnamese immigrants who fled Hanoi are more open to voting for Democrats, if not more inclined to. This generational divide is found in other Asian-American cohorts as well.
“All things being equal, a little bit of love and attention in a native language goes along way,” Steel said, explaining the best way for the Republican Party to forge a politically profitable relationship with Asian-American communities.
Until 2018, that strategy worked wonders for Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo.
He lost in November, another victim of the blue tide that ejected Republicans from power in the House. But prior to this year, Coffman won several hard-fought races in suburban Denver because of the strong relationships he forged with the diverse array of different Asian-Americans who live in the 6th Congressional District.
“He was the only politician that ever showed up. And he didn’t just show up once, he showed up 20 times,” said Tyler Sandberg, Coffman’s longtime campaign manager.
Sandberg noted that in the 2014 midterm elections, under President Barack Obama, the Republicans won the Asian-American vote, according to the exit polls. But the communities that make up this group tend to be highly educated, and just like college educated whites that swung strongly against the Republicans in 2018, so did Asian-Americans.
Republicans have yet to review all of the exit data from Kim’s race. But party insiders are satisfied with the campaign she ran. The Democrats won 40 House seats from the GOP, and Kim was among the dozens of Republican candidates to be swamped by liberal money and Democratic turnout as voters rushed to the polls to rebuke Trump.
A Republican operative involved in the effort to elect Kim said his party didn’t get enough credit in 2018 for recruiting candidates like Kim. But this individual agreed that the GOP could better job overall of going after such candidates — and, perhaps more importantly, being more aggressive in courting nonwhite voters, including Asian-Americans.
