Asian Americans clinched a landmark Supreme Court victory that returned equality to the college admission process. The Left thought they had widespread support in their latest tantrum against the Supreme Court, which they now hate since they’ve lost their majority and Trump appointed three justices. It’s also part of the more significant debate regarding the shifting political allegiances within this demographic. As one of the fastest-growing voter blocs in the country, Democrats probably sat pretty, confident that their sizable advantage in voter preference could save them. Wrong.
That’s the thing about Democrats: they never stop to think that voters in America can and do vote differently with every election. Public opinion is always shiftable sand. The irony is that the Trump coalition, whom they loathe, has demonstrated this consistently; right-leaning populists aren’t hard-core Republicans. They will vote for Democrats, which we saw in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Asian Americans are no different because they were a reliable voter bloc for the Bush 41 years. However, they shifted when Bill Clinton pushed a pro-business, middle-of-the-road agenda following the Republican Revolution. Seth Moskowitz has a good post in The Liberal Patriot, highlighting two issues driving Asian American voters into the GOP: education and public safety.
The recall of soft-on-crime San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin might be the first red flag that this demographic had reached a boiling point with the Democrats’ pro-criminal approach to public safety. The proposals to remove honors classes and institute a lottery system for the best schools also bred resentment, therefore accounting for the voter bloc’s “lurch” to the Right in 2022:
Democrats lost significant ground among minority populations over the last decade. Between the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections, black voters moved six points towards Republicans and Latinos shifted eight. The exception to this trend was Asian American voters, who inched one point towards Democrats over those eight years.
In 2022, this silver lining dulled appreciably. New data from the analytic firm Catalist shows that Democrats struggled with Asian American1 voters in the midterms. The demographic lurched seven percent towards Republicans in just two years—more than any other major ethnic category. And while Asian Americans, who make up around four percent of the voting electorate, do still favor Democrats by about a 20-point margin, the shift in 2022 reveals that Democrats have a problem on their hands.
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Frustration about crime wasn’t isolated to San Francisco. Asked in a national poll ahead of the midterms how important crime was to determining their vote, 85 percent of Asian Americans said it was “extremely” or “very” important. And when asked which party handles crime better, Asian Americans broke about even between Democrats and Republicans. Compared to other issues like health care, immigration, and gun control, on which Asian Americans overwhelmingly prefer Democrats, crime is a striking outlier.
The other issue most responsible for Asian Americans’ rightward shift is education. For many Asian Americans, especially those who are immigrants or low-income, education represents the step ladder for reaching a better life for themselves or their children. In recent years, however, Democrats have begun to fold up that stepladder in the name of racial equity. Across the country—from San Francisco to Boston to New York City and beyond—public school systems have tried to restructure the admissions process for “gifted and talented” schools and programs. By replacing academic assessments with lottery systems or other subjective evaluations, these proposals would dramatically reduce the number of Asian American students admitted, sometimes by as much as 40 or 50 percent.
The response from Asian Americans? Anger, resentment, and an electoral backlash. In San Francisco, Asian Americans drove the recall of three school board members who had rammed through one such admissions change. In New York City, frustration with a new admissions process that replaced academic screenings with lottery systems for hundreds of selective public middle and high schools eventually drove Mayor Eric Adams to roll back the unpopular reform.
And while admissions changes like these are certainly animating for many Asian Americans, Democrats are pushing plenty of other education policies that are likely just as politically toxic. One example is California’s attempt to eliminate honors-level classes and prohibit schools from sorting students according to academic achievement. Another is the ongoing attempt to encourage colleges to consider race and ethnicity when deciding which students to admit, something that only 21 percent of Asian American adults support according to a recent Gallup poll. In short, Democratic attempts to meddle with education in the name of equity and social justice at the expense of equality and fairness are driving away Asian American voters.
Moskowitz also adds that the Democratic Party’s affinity for identity politics is also a cancer with Asian American voters, who think that the Republican Party is better at managing the economy. He concluded that 2022 could be the election cycle where things fell apart between Democrats and Asian American voters.
We’ll see. Asian Americans are also notoriously hard to poll, having little to no patience for these surveys. But while they were lockstep behind Democrats for over a few cycles, especially under Obama, they were also a bloc that could be persuaded to vote Republican. They’re the only demographic where most think that getting married, being good parents, and having an educated are important factors in life. This made the shift easy, among other factors, though I’m not sure it was due to GOP outreach. It seems that the Democratic Party became so insane that they pushed these people into the GOP camp. The question is whether the Republican Party can build on this gift the Left inadvertently delivered to their doorstep.
There is, indeed, an opening for the GOP here to bring Hindu voters into the coalition. (We’re seeing this with Muslim American voters, too.) Just because this will likely take time and effort doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. pic.twitter.com/WYWinSc6JG
— Renu Mukherjee (@RenuMukherjee1) July 10, 2023
@dhume wrote about other reasons (education/meritocracy issues, crime) for why courting Asian American voters into the GOP might be possible in the long-term in his June 8 @WSJopinion column. https://t.co/fy0sbs5hvK
— Renu Mukherjee (@RenuMukherjee1) July 10, 2023