Trump alienates Asian voters
For many, rhetoric leaves ‘no choice’ but to vote Democrat
Tri Minh La would seem to be the classic Republican voter. A Vietnamese refugee, he fled communism on an overcrowded wooden ship with his parents and six siblings. The family arrived in Houston in 1980 with just $2,500 to their name.
Nearly four decades later, they own the largest Asian restaurant in Texas, Kim Son, with three locations across the city and manage restaurants in casinos and hotels. La voted for both Bush presidents, likes limited government and approves of helping small businesses. But this year, in a first, he’s casting a ballot for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
“I support Republicans,” the 53-year-old said. “But right now, in this election, the way Donald Trump talks, it’s not professional. It’s different. It’s not good for U.S. presidents to talk that way.”
Much like Cubans in Miami, the nation’s nearly 2 million Vietnamese-Americans, including about 110,000 in the Houston metro area, have long
been regarded as a shoo-in for the GOP. Stridently anti-communist, they were seen as socially conservative and favoring little government intervention. In 1992, the year La voted for the first time, Asian-Americans as a whole supported President George H.W. Bush by a 22-point margin, according to exit polls.
Two decades later, the country’s fastest-growing minority group has undergone a stunning flip, voting Democratic by 47 points in 2012. Last month, 55 percent of Asians said they would support Clinton compared to just 14 percent who would vote for Trump, according to a National Asian American Survey of about 2,300 Asian-American registered voters. In solidly red Texas, home to the nation’s largest Vietnamese population after California, that gap is even wider, 61 percent compared to 12 percent.
It’s the most rapid political realignment of any racial or ethnic group in the country, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, who directs the survey and is associate dean of public policy at the University of California at Riverside. RNC outreach
Some of the shift is ascribed to the natural evolution of political affiliations as immigrants have children, become more integrated and politically sophisticated and move away from single-issue voting. But Ramakrishnan sees another unifying thread among Asians over the past 15 years.
“Since 9/11, the Republican Party has transformed pretty significantly, and there’s been a rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and rhetoric,” he said. “That’s turned off a lot of Asian-American voters. They don’t see a party that is welcoming anymore.”
After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republican National Committee declared it must prioritize reaching out to black, Latino and Asian-American voters. In a 2013 news conference debuting the report, RNC chair Reince Priebus noted that the country will be majority-minority in 2050.
“The RNC cannot and will not write off any demographic or community or region of this country,” he said.
At first, the committee was successful, Ramakrishnan said, investing in field operations tar- geting Asian-Americans in swing states and supporting Asian politicians, helping to elect three legislators in Southern California, for instance.
“Whereas these efforts after 2012 seemed to bear fruit, now, after Donald Trump, many of those investments seem to be at risk,” Ramakrishnan said. “They have pretty much been destroyed by Donald Trump’s candidacy.”
Immigration has never been a top issue for Asian-American voters, who are much more likely than Latinos to come here legally on professional work visas or as refugees. The settlement of nearly 800,000 Vietnamese between the 1975 fall of Saigon and 2013 is probably the most expansive mass repatriation in American history.
Instead, Asians consistently rank the economy, education and health care as their top three issues. But immigration holds a close place in their hearts. A 2014 AAPI Data survey of AsianAmerican registered voters found that 41 percent would consider switching their support away from a candidate who expresses strong anti-immigrant views, Ramakrishnan said.
“They’re not just paying attention to whether or not a candidate is speaking ill of their particular community,” he said. “They care about how welcoming these parties are.”
Across Harris County, there’s been about a 25 percent increase in Chinese and Vietnamese voter registrations since 2012, said Cecil Fong, president of OCA-Greater Houston, a national Asian advo- cacy group.
Jannette Diep, executive director of the Houston chapter of Boat People SOS, a Vietnamese advocacy group, said the spike in registration and citizenship applications is largely because of candidates’ comments on immigration.
“A lot of the comments are very different from previous elections,” she said. “There is an aroused interest.”
Unlike the Hispanic electorate, which shares a common language and similar cultural traditions regardless of which country they come from, Asian voters are incredibly diverse. Chinese and Vietnamese tend to be heavily Republican, bound by a shared hatred of communism, while South Asians such as Indians lean Democratic. Koreans are very religious, many of them evangelical Christian, and socially conservative. ‘Fairly recent immigrants’
But newdata from the National Asian American Survey shows that support for Democrats in 2016 has increased significantly among nearly every Asian ethnic group since 2012, as much as 28 percentage points among Filipinos and 20 percentage points for Vietnamese. A strong majority of registered voters in seven of the top eight Asian ethnic groups now identify as Democrats. The lone exception is the Vietnamese, who support Democrats by 45 percent and Republicans by 29 percent.
“One of the big things that has changed that has been very vis- ible in this election cycle is the anti-immigrant sentiment,” said state Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat and Chinese-American who represents the Gulfton area. “The Asian-American community is very sensitive to that. Even though the community as a whole may be very quiet about it publicly, internally this is something most Asian-Americans have experience with.”
That experience includes rampant discrimination against the Chinese immigrants in California in the 19th century. It includes the internment in prison camps of more than 110,000 JapaneseAmericans during World War II, and stiff domestic resistance to the repatriation of Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War.
Such memories are still painful, said Gordon Quan, an immigration attorney and the first Asian to ever hold an at-large seat on Houston’s City Council.
“Many Asians are fairly recent immigrants,” he said. “This bashing of immigrants doesn’t sit well with them.”
Indeed Quan and his family ended up in Houston mostly because their landlord in San Antonio wouldn’t rent to them after finding out they had recently moved there from China.
Because of their past, statements Trump has made comparing Mexicans to criminals and rapists and policies he has proposed to ban all Muslims resonate with Asians, said M.J. Khan, a Republican and Pakistani-American whopreviously served on the Houston City Council and now is president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston.
“Asians think, ‘I’m not Hispanic, but what he has said about Hispanics is very dangerous, what he has said about blacks is very dangerous,’ ” Khan said. “They think, ‘I don’t need to be a part of that community to understand what’s going on and that I might be next.’ ”
Martha Wong, a former Republican state representative from Bellaire and the first Asian elected to the Houston City Coun- cil in 1993, sees it differently. As a member of Trump’s Asian Pacific American Advisory Committee, she believes that despite polling, Asians will flock to Trump in droves next month. She said Asians don’t want Clinton to pursue President Barack Obama’s policies and his practices of “acting like a dictator,” by issuing executive actions that go against congressional will.
“Asians escaped from countries where they had dictators. … They don’t want a government that tells them how to run their lives. They left their countries because of that,” Wong said. Leaning left
But Janelle Wong, director of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Maryland, said data shows that Asians have actually become more liberal, especially on so-called big government issues. A majority of Asians, led by Vietnamese and Koreans, support Obama’s Affordable Care Act, according to a 2013 National Asian American Survey. They tend to support gun control and increasing environmental protections.
Part of that policy realignment might be getting to know the issues more. But some of it is due to feeling increasingly isolated from the Republican Party, said Ramakrishnan.
“Asians supported smaller government in 1992,” he said. “But one party did much more outreach than the other over that time and they now not only support their candidate, but are adopting the positions of the party where they feel more at home.”
The question remains if and how Republicans will win back Asian-Americans after this election. La, of Kim Son restaurants, said he thinks the GOPis superior on matters of national security. He believes strongly in the narrative of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.
“I like Republicans,” he said. “But this time I had no choice.”
“Asians escaped from countries where they had dictators. … They don’t want a government that tells them how to run their lives. They left their countries because of that.” Martha Wong, a member of Donald Trump’s Asian Pacific American Advisory Committee, who believes Asians will flock to him in droves next month despite polls that say otherwise