The 2024 election season featured an unprecedented number of Asian Americans, from Vivek Ramaswamy’s rise in the Republican primary to soon-to-be second lady Usha Vance, to the Democratic candidate herself, Kamala Harris. Just a few years ago, this would have been a cause for celebration on the political left: Asian Americans have reliably voted for Democrats for decades. But the election results revealed that racial and ethnic minorities are not as loyal to the Democratic Party as previously believed. Much like Hispanics, Asian American voters made a major shift to the right.
Nationally, 2020 and 2024 exit polls from The Washington Post show a 5-point shift to the Republicans in the presidential race among Asian American voters relative to 2020. In some states, such as Nevada and Texas, the polls suggest that Donald Trump won the Asian American vote outright. The NBC News exit poll found a 5-point shift to the right nationally among Asian Americans relative to 2020. And in their survey of Asian American voters prior to the election, Asian Americans Advancing Justice saw a 7-point shift away from the Democrats relative to 2020.
Exit polls are far from perfect measures of voting behavior, though. A spokesperson for APIAVote, a group that focuses on encouraging Asian American political engagement, pointed out when asked for comment that the exit polls may not be a “representative sample of the Asian American electorate.” For instance, the exit polls were not conducted in any Asian languages, which would preclude some Asian American voters with poor English skills from participating.
My analysis of precinct-level voting data in four major urban areas shows that the exit polls may actually be understating the degree to which Asian Americans shifted to the right. Using census data, I identified majority-Asian precincts in these areas and compared the Republican margin of victory (or loss) between the 2024 and 2020 elections. The results are much more stark: Majority-Asian precincts in New York City, for instance, saw a rightward shift of 31 percentage points. Precincts in Dallas and Fort Bend counties in Texas both saw rightward shifts between 17 and 20 points. And precincts in Chicago saw a 23-point shift to the right.
If the rightward shift among Asian American voters is real and significant, what is behind it?
When asked, neither APIAVote nor Asian Americans Advancing Justice were able to provide an explanation. But several Republican-leaning Asian American voters I spoke with were not surprised by the shift.
“I had so many [South] Asians, who are registered Democrats, let me know specifically that they voted for Trump this year,” South Asian Coalition Chairwoman for New Jersey’s Republican Party Priti Pandya-Patel said. “I believe most were always ‘closet Republicans’ and now they are starting to come out.”
The economy
The voters I spoke with repeatedly mentioned a few key reasons why they and others they knew voted for Trump this election. The first was dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ handling of the economy, particularly inflation.
“Many of us expressed discontent towards Biden’s energy policies that skyrocketed the costs of grocery prices and gas prices,” Nevada voter and director for Asians Making America Great Again Lisa Noeth said. “Las Vegas specifically is like an island in the middle of the desert; the increase of fuel costs trickled down to the pockets of consumers at the grocery stores with goods being transported from California to Las Vegas.”
Rudy Pamintuan, chief of staff for Nevada’s lieutenant governor, said inflation was tough on Asian American entrepreneurs. “Many households had to take an extra part-time job to make ends meet.”
The data backs up Noeth and Pamintuan’s perceptions. John Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said economic-related concerns, healthcare, and housing costs were some of the top issues the organization found in its 2024 survey of Asian Americans. And a July AAPI Data survey indicated that Asian Americans thought Republicans had a slight edge on handling inflation over Democrats.
Public safety
While voters across all racial and ethnic lines felt the impacts of inflation, Asian Americans grew dissatisfied with poor Democratic leadership on crime and safety in major cities. As disorder grew after the pandemic, Asian Americans soured on Democrats as they watched their quality of life decrease. Asra Nomani, author of Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom, said many Asian Americans felt “unprotected amid rising violence and harassment.”
In New York City, a 2023 survey found substantial portions of Asian Americans adopted some kind of “avoidance behavior” to deal with crime—48 percent avoided going out late at night, and 41 percent avoided taking public transportation. Meanwhile, Democrat-run city governments have taken a more relaxed approach to handling crime, even spending thousands of dollars to protect criminals by humanizing them as “justice-impacted individuals.”
“You only understand what you signed up for after they [Democrats] win and you have to put up with crime and squalor,” Pennsylvania voter Teesta Dasgupta said.
Asian Americans increasingly oppose soft-on-crime policies. The majority of Asian Americans in California supported the passage of Proposition 36, which imposes harsher penalties for certain types of crimes. A disproportionate Asian American voter base also recalled former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who infamously declined to prosecute the murder of an elderly Thai immigrant as a hate crime and instead chalked it up to a “temper tantrum” of the perpetrator.
‘Wrong side of brown’
Asian American voters also told me that they were turned off by the Democrats’ racial equity policies. The Democratic Party heavily leaned into racial equity following George Floyd’s death and the riots that followed in 2020. Democrats made bold promises to reduce racial disparities in economic and other outcomes, arguing that current racial disparities are the result of decades of systemic discrimination that must be addressed. However, race-conscious policies like affirmative action often ended up pitting Asian Americans against other minority groups. For many Asian Americans, they end up on the “wrong side of brown,” as Nomani puts it.
Noeth told me that Asian American parents were “fed up” with affirmative action policies in school admissions. Sue Ghosh Stricklett, a former Trump administration appointee, said the Harvard affirmative action case and the removal of merit-based admissions at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia, both “ignited passionate activism” among Asian American parents. Thomas Jefferson High School changed its merit-based admissions policy in a bid to “decrease the representation of Asian Americans” in favor of other racial minorities.
“The injustice of being labeled as ‘privileged,’ ‘selfish,’ ‘cheaters,’ ‘overrepresented,’ ‘white adjacent,’ and ‘resource hoarders’ hurt very deeply,” Nomani, who is also a parent of a Thomas Jefferson graduate, said. It led to “political mobilization and a reconsideration of long-standing political loyalties.”
Is this a permanent shift?
According to the Asian Americans I spoke with, many factors will determine if the momentum remains.
Kenny Xu, author of An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy, believes the growth to the right is limited.
“There is a definite ceiling in Asian American rightward support due to their highly educated demographics, and the tendency of highly educated people to vote left.”
Dasgupta believes growth is dependent on messaging.
“If Dems move to the center, Asian Americans stay where they are right now, but if the allegiance to gender ideology and soft-on-crime remains, then they [Asian Americans] will move right.”
Pamintuan says engagement with Asian American voters “could make a difference between winning or losing” in tight races, particularly at the local level.
Time will tell if Asian Americans will fully shift right. But an alliance is emerging. And both Democrats and Republicans should pay attention.
This article first appeared on November 19, 2024 in RealClearPolitics.
Neetu Arnold is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a Young Voices contributor. Follow her on X @Neetu_Arnold.
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