Why Asian-Americans Have Turned Their Backs on the Republican Party
Why Asian-Americans Have Turned Their Backs on the Republican Party
by Lloyd Green Feb 26, 2013 4:45 AM EST
As recently as the 1990s, the fast-growing group leaned right. Lloyd Green on what changed.
The Republican Party’s problems with Latino voters are well documented, but its poor performance with Asian-Americans should be giving the party even greater pause. By and large, Asian-Americans are affluent, well educated, and disproportionately absent from the dreaded 47 percent. Moreover, they once had a history of voting Republican. In 1992, Asian-Americans favored George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton, and four years later they went for Bob Dole.
Much has changed. Since 2000, Asian-Americans have consistently voted Democratic. In 2008, Asian-Americans gave 62 percent of their vote to Barack Obama. Last November that number jumped to 73 percent even as the president’s margin of victory in the popular vote was cut in half as he garnered a Dukakis-like 41 percent of white voters and slid by more than 13 points among Jewish-Americans.
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These days, the GOP strikes Asian-Americans, along with many other Americans, as hostile to science and modernity. For example, George W. Bush severely restricted the use of federal funds for embryonic stem-cell research and cast his very first presidential veto to block enactment of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. More recently, Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia—a member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee and a prospective Senate candidate—declared that evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang were lies that emanated from the pit of Hell. Apparently, a low-taxes-only agenda is no longer enough to woo a demographic whose median household income exceeds $90,000 by the time that they become third-generation Americans.
And there is a further rub. According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Asian immigrants hold at least a college degree—compared with less than one in three members of the overall adult population. At Cal Tech—where race, ethnicity, and legacy status are excluded from admissions criteria—Asian-Americans comprise nearly 40 percent of the student body. At MIT, which professes a commitment to diversity, Asian-Americans comprise more than a quarter of students.
What’s more, Asian-American students tend to concentrate in the STEM jobs—sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics—that are crucial to our economy. Thus, in a sense, Asian-Americans are not just another ethnic group waiting for a politician to march in a parade, eat some exotic food, and then announce a community grant or shill for votes. Rather, they are also a subset of high-tech America, and one thing is clear: high-tech America is not in love with the Republican Party.
In Santa Clara County, California—the heart of Silicon Valley—Obama beat Romney by a 42-point margin. As Nate Silver documented, Obama received approximately $720,000 in contributions from Google employees, while Romney received a paltry $25,000. At Apple, the story was almost the same. Its employees gave more than nine out of every 10 campaign dollars they contributed to the president.
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To top it off, the economic resentments that motivate many voters are relatively absent among Asian-American voters. Three-quarters of Asian-Americans report that their living standard surpasses that of their parents. Nationally, the average is only 60 percent.
Regaining the votes of Asian-Americans, like making inroads with Latino voters, will be a slog for the Republican Party. It is not just about a difference in ethnicity. Rather, it is also a difference in attitude. Asian-Americans are generally more economically liberal than the GOP’s older working- and middle-class evangelical base and are less responsive to a message of unvarnished rugged individualism, despite their relative wealth and attainment. And that is a gap not easily bridged. Indeed, a party whose leadership professes a desire to drown government in a bathtub has little appeal these days to most Americans.
All kidding aside, in addition to the GOP being hostile to the sciences the Asian community has embraced as a stepping stone to prosperity, I think (heck I know as child of immigrants this is pretty much my scenario) Asian American who attained a middle class or upper lifestyle did so in such a recent fashion - within living memory - that they remember when they needed welfare and school lunches and medical clinics for when they had no insurance so that their new found prosperity is seen as being in part from the help they got from the govt (like in free education). And if they come from places like Taiwan and South Korea, they are coming from nations that have “socialized health insurance” (as the GOP types would call it - Taiwan copied the Canadian model).
Meanwhile the GOP base is composed of people whose prosperity was made a few generations ago and who forgot that if not for the GI Bill and other govt programs they would never have attained middle class status. Also, the GOP base allowed their racism to blind them to the GOP doing a bait and switch where the GOP destroyed their middle class economic foundation while using dog whistle racism and religion to keep the middle class white base voting Republican while the GOP passed laws that went against their white middle class base’s economic interests (more or less the “What’s the matter with Kansas” thesis).
