Republicans across the country are pressing to find ways to keep — or better, grow — their party’s new support among Asian American voters, after a sudden boost for Donald Trump.
Exit polling showed anywhere from a 5-point to 9-point shift rightward among Asian American voters in this year’s presidential election relative to 2020. The gain wasn’t surprising to some Republicans, said a source familiar with the Republican National Committee’s outreach to Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. The source told NOTUS that the outcome makes sense given Trump’s efforts to connect with AAPI communities.
Trump “set the standard” for how to engage with Asian American communities, the source said, and future candidates will follow suit. Trump pitched himself directly to the communities with events in Nevada (where there’s a growing community of Filipino American and other AAPI individuals) targeting AAPI voters and a visit to the Eden Center (a Vietnamese American commercial center in Virginia).
The president-elect is “a workhorse, and because of that alone, he was able to touch more people,” the source said. “These people, even if they might have aligned with the party’s value system, they didn’t feel like people were engaging with them … and now that has shifted, I think that they have a real sense of engagement with the Asian American populace.”
The nation’s Asian American electorate has traditionally held a wide range of political allegiances. For groups like Vietnamese and Filipino Americans with larger populations of Republicans, voters are often motivated by strong opinions about politics in their home countries, religious views and a focus on the economy spurred by the concept of the “American dream.” And for South Asian Americans, factors like post-9/11 racism and religious discrimination have led voters to lean more liberal.
But postelection surveys suggest that all these groups, including ones that still voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris, drifted right.
Republicans have long tried to court Asian American voters, including those they see as disillusioned Democrats. Party members have suggested in the past that AAPI communities’ feelings toward the GOP could be a bellwether for the party’s overall success.
The 2024 trend could be temporary, said Christine Chen, the executive director of APIAVote, a nonpartisan civic engagement organization. The rightward shift may just be a consequence of who did the best job connecting with AAPI voters this time around, and future outcomes could be tied to how each party delivers on their promises.
“It’s still really about who is reaching out to them, what investments are being made and also thinking about are they doing this for long-term relationship building as well,” Chen told NOTUS. “How [Trump’s] policies get implemented and the rhetoric that actually is utilized will also determine whether or not his base of voters from the Asian American community will continue to support him, or if they’ll be turned off by that.”
Whether Asian Americans turn back to Democrats or continue their rightward turn could be a deciding factor in races as early as next year. Asian American voters could decide who next holds the governor’s offices in New Jersey and Virginia — where Democrats are trying to stem the changing tides and Republicans want to make them even stronger.
And given that Asian Americans are the country’s fastest-growing racial group, each party’s success or failure in winning them over could have even more implications in the midterms and beyond.
In places like New York, Republican leaders have come to this realization — and they think the success they’ve seen with Asian American communities outside of just the presidential race could signal further wins, as long as they target policy areas that some Asian American voters have traditionally cared about, like reducing crime and eliminating affirmative action.
New York Republican State Committee executive director Jason Weingartner said his party has gradually gotten more competitive with Asian Americans. “We will continue making inroads, especially if the Democrats don’t change their views on merit-based education or public safety,” he said.
Democrats see the same numbers and are pushing to counter Republican efforts.
Rep. Ro Khanna told NOTUS that the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus has already started discussing strategy changes needed to win back Asian American swing voters.
“We’ve talked about how we need to do more outreach early into these communities, that we have to have multilingual approaches,” Khanna said. “We have to be talking about the American dream and the access to capital and the access to good, high-paying jobs.”
Caucus members’ thoughts on strategy largely echoed what their counterparts in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus have said: Voters of almost every demographic group shifted to the right this year because of the economy, and Democratic politicians have to respond accordingly.
CAPAC Chair Judy Chu, though, said Democrats did do enough talking about the economy — the messaging just didn’t get through the right way, and that’s where the focus should be. Asked if there are specific messaging plans in the works for future cycles, she told NOTUS, “Not yet.”
“We’re just trying to absorb it all right now,” she said.
Chu also underscored that Democrats saw some success with Asian American voters. In California’s 45th Congressional District, for instance, Democrat Derek Tran is ahead of incumbent Rep. Michelle Steel by 0.2 percentage points and may be poised to take her seat. Tran and Steel are both Asian American, and the district’s population is more than 36% Asian. And in the neighboring 47th District, which also covers Orange County — an Asian American stronghold — Democrat Dave Min defeated Republican Scott Baugh by fewer than 3 percentage points.
But to the source familiar with Asian American voter outreach efforts by the RNC, those successes are just an illustration of identity occasionally trumping ideology, which is a factor that they say can actually help Republicans in other cases.
“It’s a different dynamic when you have someone who’s also from an Asian Pacific background,” the source said. “The fact that you’re even seeing two Asian Pacific American candidates become their major party nominees in battleground congressional districts, and that both parties are seeing the importance of putting candidates forward like that … that’s actually telling about where America’s shifting as a whole.”
Some Republicans pointed out that to maintain their success with Asian Americans, there’s a line the party has to walk with their messaging — especially on issues like immigration.
“A lot of people that have voted for Trump are immigrants,” said Yiatin Chu, a Republican who lost her race this month for a New York State Senate seat representing part of Queens. In Queens, about three-quarters of the Asian American population are immigrants.
But a sense of dissatisfaction predominated this year — something that benefited Republicans if they can figure out how to capture it and not be swallowed by it when they take control of Washington.
“I would say when I speak to Asian voters in my district, specifically, but even around the city, in the past year, it’s more about being anti-Democrat than it’s necessarily about pro-Republican,” Chu said. “Like there is such a rebuke on what we’ve been living under, that something else must be better.”
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Shifra Dayak and Torrence Banks are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.