“Asian Americans have not always voted blue. In 1992, when The New York Times first added “Asian American” as a racial category in its exit polls, 55 percent of Asian Americans voted for former President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, while 31 percent cast their ballots for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat. In the 1996 presidential election, Democrats narrowed the margin, with 48 percent going for Republican Sen. Bob Dole and 43 for Clinton, and by 2000 Asian Americans had drifted into the blue: Fifty-four percent voted for former Vice President Al Gore and 41 percent for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.”
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“Asian Americans seem to be shifting red. According to a 2016 survey from Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, 19 percent of Asian Americans held at least a somewhat favorable view of Donald Trump. When the survey was conducted again in 2020, Trump’s favorability among Asian Americans had risen to 35 percent.”
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“the many different ethnic groups within Asian America have many different views. For example, a plurality of Vietnamese American voters (45 percent) supported Republican congressional candidates in 2020, according to that year’s Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote survey. Vietnamese Americans, a powerful force in Steel’s California district, have been a loyally red voter bloc dating back to former President Ronald Reagan, whose anti-communism policy stances resonated with the Vietnamese diaspora by nodding to homeland geopolitics.”
“the 18-year-old Lee described what happened to her and her friends (who are all women of Asian descent) just a week before the interview took place. While they were waiting for an Uber during a night out, a car pulled up to them and started yelling Asian slurs out the window. Lee said she got pepper sprayed on the arm as the car sped away.”
“The label “Asian American” is almost comically flattening.
It consists of people from more than 50 ethnic groups, all with different cultures, languages, religions, and their own sets of historic and contemporary international conflicts. It includes newly arrived migrants and Asians who have been on American soil for multiple generations. Depending on visa types, immigration status, and class, there are vast differences even among those from the same country. In fact, the income gaps between some Asian American groups are among the largest of any ethnic category in the nation. Yet these differences are rarely explored and discussed.”
“Two recent studies found that online animosity and offline hate incidents against Asian Americans heightened after Trump linked China and COVID-19 in his tweets; another study found that Trump’s framing of the pandemic as China’s fault increased anti-Asian sentiments and xenophobia in survey experiments; and there’s evidence, too, that rank-and-file Republicans have become much more hostile toward China during the pandemic — views that experts warn pose a threat to all Asian Americans.”
“Asian American voters didn’t always lean Democratic. 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 Asian American Voter Survey released this week.”
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“The different groups that comprise Asian American voters are divided over how much — and whether — they will back Biden for president.1 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.”
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“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.”
https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/4/21/21221007/anti-asian-racism-coronavirus