AAPI, Latino ‘red wave’ still a mirage
GOP benefits as independents decline, but gains appear marginal
Going into politics was not an option until last year for Manuel NorisBarrera, 50, an immigrant from Mexico with a crepe shop on San Francisco’s Mission Street.
The longtime Republican had been so disappointed by former President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat that he re-registered as an independent in 2022, what Noris-Barrera described as “a oneyear lapse” in his Grand Old Party membership.
“What is the point of being Republican?” he said. “Nobody wants to support a loser team.”
In 2023, however, it appeared to Noris-Barrera that the Republican Party might mount a comeback, as he felt people around him, mostly Latino, were expressing disappointment for the status quo and support for the GOP.
“People are getting fed up with what the Democrats are doing,” he said. “We got to capitalize and make those changes.”
In November, the small business owner launched his campaign for the District 17 state Assembly seat, saying it was “good timing.” Noris-Barrera secured only 13% of the vote in the March 5 primary, but because he was the Republican Party’s sole candidate, he advanced to the November runoff to face the Democratic incumbent, San Francisco Assembly Member Matt Haney, who received 82% of the vote.
Indeed, though California voter registration data shows flickers of life for the Republican Party among Latino and Asian and Pacific Islander voters, a coming red wave is still more mirage than statistical reality.
Trend in data
Following decades of decline, voter registration in the Republican Party in California settled at 24% between 2018 and 2024, voter registration data shows.
Last year, the Public Policy Institute of California took a close look at registration data from 2018 to 2022 and noted a few surprising developments: No Party Preference (NPP) registration declined for the first time in 60 years, and the Republican Party was seeing more interest from Latino and AAPI Californians.
“Significant shares of both groups have registered as Republicans, even as Republican registration continued to slide among all other Californians,” Eric McGhee, a senior PPIC fellow focused on elections and politics, wrote in a release accompanying the analysis.
The increase was a marginal 2 percentage points for both groups, one McGhee nonetheless found a “remarkable trend” because Republican registration in those two ethnic groups had either been flat or declining for more than a decade prior to 2018. “But suddenly, we are actually seeing an improvement where the numbers are going up again,” he told the Chronicle.
AAPI and Latino Americans are among the fastest-growing voter groups in California and nationally.
The circumstances of the two groups are not the same however, experts say, as Asian Americans experienced a greater increase in statewide Democratic Party registration from 38% in 2018 to 43% in 2022. Meanwhile, Republican Party registration for the group only grew from 18% to 20%.
For Latino voters, statewide Democratic Party registration rose from 53% in 2018 to 55% in 2022 while Republican Party registration rose from 13% to 15%, according to the PPIC analysis.
“Asians are actually getting more Democratic. Latinos are getting more Republican,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the voter research company Political Data, citing more recent statewide data that showed Latinos’ Republican Party registration increased to 18% in 2023, while Democratic Party registration came down to 51%.
But Mitchell does not think the Republican Party’s gains among Latino voters represent a significant shift, “because the registration is still wildly Democratic.”
“If you got your 2% milk at the store, and it was 2.007% milk the next day, will it taste different to you? No,” he said. “But would you be like — ‘Hmm, that’s weird. I wonder if it’s gonna keep going up,’ right?”
In a follow-up text message, Mitchell estimated it would take “29.7 years for Republicans to match Democrats among Latinos” if the current pace holds, “a lifetime in politics.”
Mindy Romero, a political sociologist and founding director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, agreed, saying there were too many questions to determine whether Latinos, in particular, were trending more Republican.
“Are they people that switched from being Democratic? Are they people that were already leaning Republican but we hadn’t identified them because they were NPP? Or they’re new voters that somehow the Republican Party got engaged and brought into the electorate?” Romero wondered. “I think it’ll depend on what the Republican Party does to engage Latino voters in California. Historically, both parties haven’t been very good at it.”
‘Over generations’
While researchers remained cool about the registration shifts, Mike Madrid, a GOP consultant who is Hispanic, called the change “huge.”
“What it means is the community is transforming in a very, very significant way,” Madrid said of the state’s Latino community.
Madrid, a fierce critic of Trump who has urged his party to reject the former president’s racially charged rhetoric, said the California Republican Party is well positioned to make gains among voters who did not attend college.
“They are finding economic mobility; they’re climbing up the economic ladder in this country through more blue-collar or traditional means, oftentimes, small businesses,” Madrid said. “And so what that means is there’s this tendency to support Republican policies.”
He also responded to Mitchell’s 30-year estimate, saying great political realignments “take a long time.”
“What we’re starting to see is political assimilation that is reflective of economic mobility,” he said. “This hasn’t happened in one election cycle. It doesn’t happen in two or four; it happens over generations.”
Nationally, the Democratic Party appears to be struggling to retain Latino support, according to Gallup polling from earlier this year. Democrats still counted a 12-point advantage over Republicans among Hispanic adults, but that marked the slimmest margin since Gallup began regularly conducting Spanish interviews in 2011. Democratic support from Black American voters also reached a record low.
Madrid’s prescription for the Republican Party to gain more support from Latino and AAPI voters is straightforward: “Stop being racist.”
For Noris-Barrera, the shift is mostly not driven by what the Republicans have done. “It is how bad the Democrats are,” he said, adding the Democratic Party has always been in power but not performed to expectations. “That’s why they switched.”
Disinformation
While California’s Asian American voters still overwhelmingly register with the Democratic Party, some community advocates expressed concern about the increase in Republican registration.
“I’m super worried,” said Jinxia Niu, program manager of Chinese for Affirmative Action, an advocacy group based in San Francisco that also runs the Chinese-language fact-checking website Piyaoba, which translates to “let’s fact-check it” in Mandarin.
In 2023, Piyaoba documented a total of 636 pieces of Chinese-language disinformation circulating across social media such as WeChat, Telegram and YouTube. This year, it has documented 136 through March 10.
Since June 2023, election-related, far-right disinformation has been “increasing dramatically every month,” said Niu, adding that little has been done by the Democratic Party to counter the surge.
Top themes of disinformation accuse Democrats of planning to steal the 2024 election and falsely claim the COVID booster is a “poisonous shot that the Democrats created to exaggerate the new variant of the virus,” Niu said.
After conducting interviews with recipients of such disinformation, Niu determined that it was effective in pushing Chinese immigrants toward the Republican Party.
“If you have a social media ecosystem that (is) overwhelmed by rightwing disinformation and conspiracy theories related to elections,” Niu said, then people who are unfamiliar with U.S. politics and those who lack media literacy are “very easily being targeted or influenced by this social media environment.”
Apart from the disinformation, Niu and her colleagues have also noticed that the Republican Party has done a “much better” job with in-language messaging and voter education.
Personalized introductions to Republican candidates coupled with easily consumable voting instructions, for example, were all translated into Chinese and much more available across social media platforms for Chinesespeaking voters in 2022, Niu recalled.
“The overall landscape of Chinese-language media and digital media — it’s all overwhelmingly dominated by right-wing narratives,” she said. “Folks in (the) Democratic Party need to invest much more in in-language API voters’ education and mobilization.”
Southeast Asian communities have also been on the receiving end of the Republican Party’s messaging strategies, said Nick Nguyen, lead researcher and co-founder of the Vietnamese-language fact-checking website Viet Fact Check.
Many Vietnamese Americans arrived as refugees fleeing turbulence, Nguyen noted, and safety is a top priority.
“Vietnamese Americans in particular, tend to support progressive issues like gun control, climate change, health care, but they will vote Republican because the messaging is much more targeted on that trauma,” he said. “It’s really hard for people who have a dedication to tell the truth … to oversimplify, right? But if you’re just trying to get someone to make a decision, you do oversimplify.”
Voters are noticing the messaging differences themselves.
Down on Valencia Street, Quiante Hoggard, a retail worker who grew up in a Sunset District that is more than 40% Asian, said it’s easier for people to digest a simpler message.
“Democrats just talk and talk and talk and Republicans just kind of say simple stuff,” said Hoggard, who is Black and leans Democratic.
“It makes you feel more comfortable,” added his colleague Allen Bounsouk, a second-generation Lao immigrant who leans Republican.
“If you got your 2% milk at the store, and it was 2.007% milk the next day, will it taste different to you? No.” Paul Mitchell, vice president of voter research firm Political Data