Asian Americans are Deserting the Democrats and Shifting to the Right

Asian Americans are Deserting the Democrats and Shifting to the Right

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, one of the big stories was the rightward shift of Latino voters. Now that people have had a chance to analyze data from the elections, it appears a very similar shift took place among Asian American voters.

The New York Times looked at data from New York which illustrates this point:

Asian Americans, Shifting Right

The Chinatown area of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was long a Democratic stronghold. The party’s candidates would often receive more than 70 percent of the vote there. Last year, however, the neighborhood underwent a political transformation.

Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor, managed to win Sunset Park’s Chinatown, receiving more votes than Gov. Kathy Hochul. This map, by my colleague Jason Kao, shows the change:

Here’s the graphic:

This is as clear a visualization and reported explanation as I've seen of one of the biggest shifts in last year's midterms.

Read @jasonYkao on how New York’s Asian neighborhoods shifted to the right https://t.co/ukiE7zZxEg

— Nicholas Fandos (@npfandos) March 6, 2023

More from the Times:

This shift is part of a national story. In the past two elections — 2020 and 2022 — Asian Americans have moved toward the right, according to election returns and exit polls. Democrats still won Asian voters by a wide margin in last year’s midterms but by less than in the recent past:

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican incumbent, beat Beto O’Rourke among Asian voters, 52 percent to 46 percent, and Texas House Republicans also did well, according to polls by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. In statewide races in Florida and Georgia, the Republican candidates received at least one-third of the vote, substantially more than in previous elections.

The Times has just published a series of maps and charts focusing on New York City neighborhoods where most eligible voters are of Asian descent, including Sunset Park, Flushing and Manhattan’s Chinatown. Jason told me that he had started thinking about this subject after his father, who rarely talks about politics, said that he had voted for Zeldin. Later, Jason saw a post-election map of New York and was shocked to see that some of the Chinatown neighborhoods where he grew up were colored red.

As Aminta Kilawan-Narine, a community activist who was raised in South Richmond Hill, which is home to a large Indian American population, told Jason, “I’ve never seen so many signs for a Republican governor in the areas I grew up in.”

In hindsight, this shift was obvious. Asian-American voters played a key role in a school board recall in San Fancisco in 2022.

In 2021, the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York came out publicly against Critical Race Theory.

A second New York Times article looks at this shift:

Where New York’s Asian Neighborhoods Shifted to the Right

In last year’s governor’s election, voters in Asian neighborhoods across New York City sharply increased their support for Republicans. Though these areas remained blue overall, they shifted to the right by 23 percentage points, compared with 2018, after more than a decade of reliably backing Democrats.

It was the largest electoral shift in Asian neighborhoods in the period from 2006 to 2022, the longest available span of election results by precinct, according to a New York Times analysis.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, won even though almost the entire city moved to the right. Among that wave of red shifts, one set of voters had the largest movement of any racial or ethnic group: residents of Asian neighborhoods. Across boroughs, this pan-Asian constituency spans many ethnicities and ideologies, and this New York Times analysis offers a nuanced look at voting patterns, from satellite Chinatowns in Brooklyn to Little Punjab in Queens.

Some Asian neighborhoods, like Chinese enclaves in Sunset Park and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, had shifts so big that they flipped to support a Republican candidate for governor for the first time in at least a decade. Others, like Manhattan’s Chinatown and Queens’s Richmond Hill, remained solidly Democratic despite an increase in Republican votes.

Lots of people are talking about this on Twitter:

The rightward shift within NYC’s Asian American communities can and must be replicated by Republicans all across the US. We have the vision and ideals most Asian Americans are passionately looking to for their families and future. https://t.co/AhuMKDj5rC

— Lee Zeldin (@LeeMZeldin) March 6, 2023

Asian Americans, like all Americans, want safe streets, great schools, low taxes, a strong military, & our country's pride back.

The America my parents came for decades ago is slipping away & we've got to fight for it at the ballot box.https://t.co/L4CiHEeylv

— Ken Farnaso (@KLF) March 6, 2023

“The Democratic Party, especially its liberal wing, has increasingly come to reflect the views of college-educated professionals…

“To a growing number of working-class voters, however, the newly upscale version of the party has become less appealing.” https://t.co/hf7CgoG32d

— Terry Moran 🇺🇸 (@TerryMoran) March 6, 2023

"In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican incumbent, beat Beto O’Rourke among Asian voters, 52 percent to 46 percent, and Texas House Republicans also did well, according to polls by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund"https://t.co/JE7UKKkIwi

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) March 6, 2023

I would suggest this is happening because Asian Americans are no different than other Americans. They see the Democrat party increasingly under the control of the radical left. They are taking the country in a direction most people see as fundamentally un-American.

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