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| AANHPI voter tendencies was a surprise last Nov. 5. |
ANALYSIS
Yes. Prognostigators, including this blog, were right: Asian American voters did provide the winning margin in the Nov. 5 Presidential election, but not in the way most people had hoped. Donald Trump should say "thank you" to the Asian Americans who voted for him.
Even though most AAPI voters favored Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump was able to chisel out a tiny sliver of the AAPI vote to help him win back the White House. Besides the lies, false promises and thin praises, he had the help of foreign hackers who spread misinformation and promoted old country values to splinter the AAPI vote.
Trump did not have to win the vote of the majority of the AAPI electorate, he just had to win over enough to bolster the majority of his votes coming from the White electorate.
AAPI voters cast their ballots for Trump by 38%, which was a nine-percentage-point increase from 2016. When the votes were tallied, Trump wound up with 5% more AAPI votes than he received in 2020. That was the so-called winning margin.RELATED: Misinformation campaign made many Chinese American voters wary of the Democrats.
The story was the same with the Latino community, which felt largely ignored by the Democrats.
"Young and old, men and women, rural and urban. And we had them all helping us tonight," Trump said.
"They had some great analysis of the people that voted for us. Nobody's ever seen anything like that. They came from all quarters—union, nonunion, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American. We had everybody, and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense."
Most of those AAPI votes came from men. For the first time, a gender gap appeared among the AAPI community: most women voted for Harris and enough men voted for Trump.
FEWER VOTERS IN 2024
While Trump lost the Asian American vote to Harris by a margin of 56%-38%, he improved his share of that demographic by 4% from his 61%-34% loss to Biden in 2020, according to an exit poll from NBC News.
Curiously, although counting is still ongoing, Trump actually received fewer votes in 2024 than what he received in 2020 when he lost to Biden. Unfortunately for the Democrats, Harris received 12 million fewer votes this time around than the votes that went to Biden in 2020.
TOTAL VOTES CAST IN LAST TWO PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
2020 2024 Difference
Democrats 81.2M 69M -12M
Trump 74.2M 72.6M -1.5M
I'm not given to conspiracy theories, but Democrats thought they had the overestimated their get-out-the-vote ground game. Or, the GOP's voter suppression strategy -- which began in 2020 when Trump refused to concede his presidency to Biden was enough to question the efficacy of American democracy and 13.5 million voters refused to take part in the election.
So what happened? The loss of 13.5 million voters is the answer to Harris' loss and Trump's victory. Did White supremacists scare enough White to vote along racial lines; to hell with policies? Was the anti-abortion Catholic vote in Pennsylvania and Ohio enough to swing those states towards the OGP? Was the constant drumbeat coming from Trump enough to disillusion enough voters from participating in the democratic process? Did the GOP's voter suppression strategyiesvia state legislatures and governors and Trump-appointed judges more effective than most people thought?
The answer to that question is complicated. and probably involved all of the above elements.
“2012 represented the high-water mark in Asian American support for a Democratic presidential candidate, and it has been going down ever since,” Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder of AAPI Data told NBC enws. “The pendulum has started to swing back.”
WHOSE 'ECONOMY'?
Although AANHPI voters who voted for Trump, along with other voters who switched from the Democrats to the Republicans, the economy was cited as the chief reason for the change. They believed that a man who declared bankruptcy six times would do a better job in fixing the "economy."
“If you’re unemployed or employed, if you’re retired or working, everyone feels the pain of inflation,” Ramakrishnan told NBC in an interview. “That was a significant headwind for the Democratic Party, including Harris.”By most measures, economists around the world cited the US economy was the envy of the world. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the "economy" was measured in national and global terms: more people were working, the rate of inflation was under control, and the poverty and jobless rates were down. Abstract numbers, ordinary Americans couldn't relate to compared to their everyday encounters with their "economy."
For most Americans, what they called the "economy" was more out-of-pocket: the price of gas, groceries and rent, all of which did not go down. That begs the question, who was profiting for the high price of essentials?
RACISM'S IMPACT
The initial wedge driving AAPI voters to the Republicans was the affirmtive action debate. The Biden-Harris administration solidly behind the concept. Driven by white anti-affirmative action activists convinced a segment of the AAPI community to question their loyalty to the Democrats. That portion of the AAPI community, mostly first generation immigrants who were unfamiliar with the civil rights movement saw the policy discriiminated against their children who they felt were not getting proper credit for their academic achievements in their university applications.
The rise in attacks against Asian Americans affected the overall outlook of the AAPI voters. The communities with a tendency to stay out of the limelight started to think in a "law and order" mindset, an area usually associated with conservatives. Republicans were able to use the racist attacks to drive the wedge even deeper separating the conservative and more progressive
In Oaakland and SanFrancisco, after a series of anti-Asian assaults, Asian Americans were major backers of movements to recall their progressive District Attorneys perceived as being soft on crime.
The immigrant community, most of whom sought the American dream that working hard would be the road to success. And the success they sought was more in alignment with the status quo, which had the White majority atop the cultural and economic ladder.
And the majority of Whites -- primarily the non-college educated -- was Trkump's base. Democrats believed White women would vote for Harris because of her support for womens' right to choose their health options, But when it came to crunch time, White women could not see a woman of color in the role of President.
As stated earlier, Asian Americans were not alone in their slight turn to the right, they were joined by enough Latino and Black voters -- enough to dilute the traditional Democrat-voting communities and lead to Trump's apparent victory.
That winning margin Asian American political activists believed, would swing towards the Democrats, They were wrong. I was wrong. Instead, enough AANHPI voters went along with the White majority to tilt the final vote towards Trump. Those AANHPI voters who along other people of color who voted for Trump believed the best way to achieve the American Dream was to go along with the status quo where Whites remained at the top of the American heirarchiy.
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