GOP 'rising star' mulling over switching parties

Hawaii State Rep. Beth Fukumoto

ASAM NEWS

ONE OF the "rising stars" of the Republican Party, Hawaii State Rep. Beth Fukumoto is considering a switch from the GOP after she was removed from her position as Hawaii’s House minority leader earlier this week.

Fukumoto told NBC News that she no longer felt she was able to defend the Republican Party and its actions. Fukumoto claims she has been receiving criticism from the GOP since her participation in the Women’s March in Honolulu on Jan. 21.

“What ended up being very problematic for me was that my caucus and others said, ‘If you want to stay in leadership, then you need to make a commitment to not criticize the president for the remainder of his term,'” she said. After all of the executive orders that President Trump has signed since his inauguration, Fukumoto did not believe she could follow through with what her party wanted of her.

At the Women’s March in Honolulu, she spoke out against President Trump’s rise to the presidency she said was founded on racism and sexism. “It doesn’t matter to me who you voted for. People cast their votes for a lot of different reasons,” Fukumoto said. “But, no matter who your choice was, the fact remains the same. A man won the White House with anger and hate, and our kids watched it happen. Now, it’s our jobs to make sure they watch us fight back.”

Her speech at the Women’s March led to immediate responses, in the form of messages from her colleagues to meet and calls for her resignation. Republican Rep. Cynthia Thielen defended Fukumoto’s participation in the march at the caucus on Wednesday. Thielen herself also spoke at the march. “Now she is being punished by three-and-a-half of our members for participating in the democratic process,” Thielen voiced.

When another caucus member tried to divert the discussion away from the topic of the march, Thielen responded: “It’s all about the Women’s March. It’s all about Representative Fukumoto standing up for women and human rights.”

Fukumoto’s letter to her constituents this past week expressed her desire to leave the Republicans; she has said she may be joining the Democratic Party.

GOP makes a push for Asian/American voters

BELIEVE IT or not, the Republican Party is making an effort to woo Asian/American voters, who in the last two presidential elections have moved more into the Democratic camp.

The GOP hopes that they will be able to sway enough AAPI voters to weaken the impact the small but politically and financially potent influence that Asian/Americans have in key states and races. 

This past summer, the RNC launched the Republican Leadership Initiative, which hopes to recruit “Asian Pacific American grassroots leadership.”

The release of this commercial "It's Our Time," is part of that outreach.

Nothing groundbreaking or innovative, but at least the attempt is there.

"There was a time when Asian Americans seemed reliably pro-Republican. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush got 55 percent of the Asian American vote. Bob Dole also won more of the AAPI vote — 48 percent to Bill Clinton’s 43 percent," wrote Bobby Calvan for Al Jazeera in a three-part series about Asian/American & Pacific Islander voters.

Republicans pin their hopes on the fact that nearly half of Asian/American voters claim to be "independent," according to a Pew study.

The GOP believes that the AAPI vote still can be persuaded to vote GOP.  "In the 2014 midterm elections, some exit polls suggested that Asian Americans were about evenly split between Democratic and Republican candidates — a dramatic turn from the 2012 presidential election, when 73 percent of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) aligned with the Democrats," read the Al Jazeera article.

RELATED: 3-part series on Asian/American electorate by Al Jazeera

• Democrats, Republicans slow to woo the Asian voter
• Asian Americans lag in voter registration
• Seeking campaign case from the Asian boom

It remains to be seen if the party's new message can overcome what's coming out of the mouths of the GOP's presidential candidates. 

There are a number of factors why AAPI have shifted to the Democratic camp in the last eight years. One is President Obama himself, who spent most of his childhood among Asians in Hawaii and Indonesia. 

There is also a fear that the influence of the Christian right on the GOP raises questions about the Republican party's assertion of openness among Asians, the majority of whom are non-Christians.

The biggest obstacle for the GOP efforts is its stance on immigration. Most Asian/Americans, no matter how long they have lived in the U.S., favor a more liberal immigration policy including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.


The "anchor baby" controversy has set back any efforts of wooing the Asian/American electorate, the fastest growing immigrant groups. In 2012, immigration from Asian countries surpassed immigration from Latin America. The statements and wild anti-immigrant statements the GOP presidential candidates constitute a strong push factor in making AAPI voters swing more towards the Democrats.

What the GOP doesn't understand is that if they take a stand against immigrants and you take a stand against family.

It does not help the Republican party’s attempts to dispel that unfavorable notion when most of the “Asians” in its newly formed “Asian Republican Coalition” turns out to be white businessmen in Hong Kong,

“We have a very broad definition of what constitutes the Asian American community," says white businessman Thomas Britt, the vice chairman of ARC and a former Asia Finance Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

 "The Asian Republican Coalition is open to all Americans, including Asian Americans and those of us like me who are not ethnically Asian but have spent twenty years living in Hong Kong.” That might appeal to some Asians, but certainly not to the admittedly small group of  Asian/Americans that with whom I interact, most of whom strongly resent anything that might even hint at a colonial relationship.

"Is this a joke?" asks Frank Chi, a Democratic media consultant, when told how Britt defined  Asian American. "If not, then this is a fundamental misreading of politics in a multicultural America."

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