GordonGekko
Footballguy
Direct Headline: Will Asian Americans Bolt From the Democratic Party?
Over the past three decades, Asian American voters — the fastest-growing group in the country according to Pew — have shifted from decisively supporting Republicans to becoming a reliably Democratic bloc, anchored by firmly liberal views on key national issues....The question now is whether this party loyalty will withstand politically divisive developments that appear to pit Asian Americans against other key Democratic constituencies — as controversies emerge, for example, over progressive education policies that show signs of decreasing access to top schools for Asian Americans in order to increase access for Black and Hispanic students....
....In 1992, the year national exit polls started reporting Asian American sentiment, the group leaned Republican, supporting George Bush over Bill Clinton 55 percent to 31 percent. But by 2012, that had reversed. Asian Americans overwhelmingly supported President Obama over Mitt Romney — 73 percent to 26 percent....In an email, Kim cited the declining importance of communism as a key factor in the changing partisan allegiance of Asian American voters. In the 1970s and 80s, he said, “Taiwanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese chose the party that had a reputation of being tougher on communism. Obviously, it was the Republican Party. Chinese immigrants, many of whom retained the memory of the Cultural Revolution, were not too different.” After the 1990s, he continued, “the children of immigrants who grew up and received education in the United States replace the first generation, and their outlook on politics is much different from their parents. They see themselves as a racial minority, and their high education level pushes them towards liberalism on many issues...the Cold War ended and a generational shift occurred....”
....Asked for their preference for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, 54 percent of all Asian Americans chose Biden to 30 percent for Trump. Biden had majority support from Indian (65-28), Japanese (61-24), Korean (57-26), Chinese (56-20) and Filipino Americans (52-34). Vietnamese Americans were the lone exception, supporting Trump 48-36....At the moment, affirmative action admissions policies are a key issue testing Asian American support for the Democratic Party. In educational institutions as diverse as Harvard, San Francisco’s Lowell High School, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va., and the most prestigious selective high schools in New York and Boston, conflict over educational resources between Asian American students and parents on one side and Black and Hispanic students and parents on the other has become endemic. Policies designed to increase Black and Hispanic access to high-quality schools often result in a reduction in the number of Asian American students admitted.....
.....Compared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage....Scholars of Asian American politics have found that Asian American voters have remained relatively strong supporters of affirmative action policies, with one exception: Chinese Americans, who constitute nearly a quarter of all Asian Americans...
....Another issue with the potential to push Asian American voters to the right is crime....The 2018 Crime Victimization report issued in September 2019 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Department of Justice found that 182,230 violent crimes were committed against Asian Americans in 2018. 27.5 percent were committed by African Americans, 24.1 percent by whites, 24.1 percent by Asian Americans, 7 percent by Hispanics and the rest undetermined....While most of the experts on Asian American politics I contacted voiced confidence in the continued commitment of Asian Americans to the Democratic Party and its candidates, there were some danger signals — for example, in the 2021 New York City mayoral election. Eric Adams, the Democrat, decisively beat Curtis Sliwa, the Republican, 65.5 percent to 27.1 percent, but support for Sliwa — an anti-crime stalwart who pledged to take on “the spineless politicians who vote to defund police” — shot up to 44 percent “in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian....” ....A wave of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans during the pandemic has heightened a sense of urgency about public safety and law enforcement. Asian anger and frustration have, for the first time, left a visible dent in a city election....
...Similarly, Asian Americans led the drive to oust three San Francisco School Board members — all progressive Democrats — last month. ....The recall also appeared to be a demonstration of Asian American electoral power. In echoes of debates in other cities, many Chinese voters were incensed when the school board changed the admission system for the district’s most prestigious institution, Lowell High School. It abolished requirements based primarily on grades and test scores, instead implementing a lottery system.... since March 2020 there had been “over 3,000 self-reported incidents of anti-Asian violence from 47 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from stabbings and beatings, to verbal harassment and bullying, to being spit on and shunned.....”
....The changing selectivity of contemporary U.S. Asian immigration has recast Asian Americans from “unassimilable to exceptional,” resulting in their rapid racial mobility. This mobility combined with their minoritized status places them in a unique group position in the U.S. racial hierarchy, conveniently wedged between underrepresented minorities who stand to gain most from the policy (affirmative action) and the advantaged majority who stands to lose most because of it. It also marks Asians as compelling victims of affirmative action who are penalized because of their race.....
...Catalyst, a liberal voter analysis firm, found that from 2016 to 2020, Asian Americans increased their voter turnout by 39 percent, more than any other racial or ethnic constituency, including Hispanic Americans (up 31 percent) and African Americans (up 14 percent). This turnout increase worked decisively in favor of the Democratic Party as Asian Americans voted two to one for the party in both elections....from 2000 to 2019, “The Asian population in the U.S. grew 81 percent from roughly 10.5 million to a record 18.9 million, surpassing the 70 percent growth rate of the nation’s Hispanic population. Furthermore, by 2060, the number of U.S. Asians is projected to rise to 35.8 million, more than triple their 2000 population.....”
What this means is that Republicans are certain to intensify their use of affirmative action, crime, especially hate crime, and the movement away from merit testing to lotteries for admission to high-caliber public schools as wedge issues to try to pry Asian American voters away from the Democratic Party....The strong commitment of Asian Americans to education has been a source of allegiance to a Democratic Party that has become the preferred home for voters with college and advanced degrees. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is, at the same time, testing the strength of that allegiance by supporting education policies that reduce opportunities for Asian Americans at elite schools while increasing opportunity for two larger Democratic constituencies, made up of Black and Hispanic voters.....
By Thomas B. Edsall March 2, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opinion/asian-american-voters-democratic-party.html
Direct Headline: Why Asian Americans Are Leaving the Democratic Party | Opinion
The U.S. Supreme Court just agreed to take on two college affirmative action cases, and will consider whether the undergraduate admission processes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina discriminated against Asian American students....No issue takes a higher priority in the Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community than education. Besides the cultural tradition of valuing education, most Asian-American parents believe that educational attainment is necessary to ensure their children have a successful life in the United States. Working-class Asian immigrant families especially regard education as a lifeline to lift their children from poverty and achieve their American dreams....
....But on this critical issue, Democrats have chosen to embrace critical race theory (CRT), a neo-Marxist ideology that attributes all disparities in any group outcome to systemic racism. Adherents of CRT claim that they must dismantle the "racist" meritocracy-based education system to achieve equity in education outcomes. In the last two years, Democrats have pushed for education "reforms" such as the elimination of the merit-based admissions to elite high schools, phasing out gifted and talented programs, dumbing down math education and dropping SAT and ACT scores from the college admission process. Most recently, the Biden administration called on the Supreme Court to deny challenge to Harvard's anti-Asian race-based admissions policy....
...Democrats have targeted the institutions where Asian students have thrived the most. Democrats argue that Asian students are "over-represented" in elite schools and should be excluded to make room for "oppressed people of color." San Francisco school board commissioner Alison Collins even accused Asian-Americans of using "white supremacist thinking to assimilate and 'get ahead.'" Proponents of critical race theory have even insisted that it is "disingenuous" to call Asian Americans "POC."...
....Many AAPI parents found these education "reforms" and the Democrats' justifications for them upsetting. Asian Americans have endured a long history of bigotry and racial discrimination in the United States, and have been part of the civil rights movement to help the United States become more just and fair for Americans of all races....The Democrats have not helped matters by openly endorsing a racial hierarchy system that values some races more than others, excluding our children from receiving a good education and punishing them for their hard work and success. This is not progress but the very definition of bigotry....Asian Americans have been on edge about security due to the rising number of violent crimes against Asians in some of America's most progressive cities, such as Oakland and New York City. After a white gunman shot and killed eight victims, including six Asian women, in March 2021 in Atlanta, Asian Americans had hoped that the trending hashtag #StopAAPIHate and the outpouring of national outrage would compel Democratic leaders to tackle violent crimes against Asian Americans. Instead, the security situation for Asian Americans in major cities has gotten worse. New York City alone has seen anti-Asian crimes increase more than 350 percent from 2020 to 2021....
In Democrat-led cities, we continue to see Asian seniors shoved to the ground and beaten, and Asian people and businesses robbed. Most recently, a young Asian woman's life was cut short after a disturbed ex-con shoved her in front of an oncoming subway train at Times Square Station in New York City. ...But it's this November's election that the Democratic Party should worry about most. This may be the year when it finally loses the support of the majority of AAPI voters..... Although they currently represent less than 6 percent of voters, Asian Americans are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U.S., surpassing Hispanics in 2055. This population trend means AAPI voters will play a critical role in shaping America's future. No party should either overlook Asian American voters or take their votes and loyalty for granted.
Helen Raleigh 1/25/22 at 7:00 AM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/why-asian-americans-are-leaving-democratic-party-opinion-1672308
Direct Headline: What Happens When Angry Asian American Parents Get Organized
Our anxiety over the upcoming midterm and presidential elections has turned every vote, however local and peculiar, into a referendum on the future of the nation.... what’s more interesting to me is what actually drives these predictions of doom for Democrats. Two assumptions seem to be lurking somewhere underneath the surface.
The first: School closures irreparably harmed the Democratic Party.
The second: There is a backlash against diversity and equity measures, many of which were established after the nationwide George Floyd protests.
So on Tuesday, when the deep blue city of San Francisco recalled three ultra-progressive, equity-focused members of the school board, ousting them in stunning three-to-one votes, what are we to make of it? Is it a harbinger of coming catastrophe for Democrats? Or are we dealing with a local election with local concerns?...Was the recall the result of parents who were frustrated by the extended closures of schools even when the city had low coronavirus positivity and death rates? At times, the board members had seemed more concerned with renaming schools, including one named after Abraham Lincoln, than with figuring out a plan to reopen....Should the blame be placed on the board’s decision to change the admission policy at the elite Lowell High School from merit-based to lottery?
...Or is Alison Collins, the most controversial of the three school board officials who were forced out, the reason for it all? The wife of a wealthy real estate developer, she was responsible for much-publicized and seemingly anti-Asian tweets, followed by an absurd $87 million lawsuit against the city, the school district and her fellow school board members....What’s far more likely — and supported by the voting data — is that the recall was mostly brought about by a coalition of parents who were mad about the changes at Lowell. On Feb. 2, 2021, members of the school board put forth a resolution to end test-based admissions at the school permanently and to use instead the district’s standard lottery system as a way to diversify the mostly white and Asian student body. On Feb. 9 the school board voted 5 to 2 to adopt the resolution. Ten days later, two parents began the campaign to recall the three school board members....
The vote capped a year of organizing by a mostly Asian American bloc of parents and citizens....But this sort of dismissal belies the actual organizing that went into the effort and the work of hundreds of volunteers who collected signatures for the recall election throughout the city. It also ignores relatively high turnout rates in Asian neighborhoods and the overwhelming majority of those residents who voted to recall.... and for months, nearly every time I went, I would see the same people — mostly elderly Chinese American men and women — standing out front with their fliers and petitions. Asian Americans who normally might not have been involved in the political process started standing in front of restaurants and on corners to collect signatures. This was true in Asian and even non-Asian neighborhoods throughout the city....
....If you want another example of what a group like this can do, consider the leaders of the Asian American organizations that allied with the conservative legal activist Edward Blum to sue Harvard over affirmative action. The case, now before the Supreme Court, will likely bring about an end to race-based college admissions throughout the country...
By Jay Caspian Kang Feb. 17, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/opinion/school-board-recall.html
Direct Headline: Inside the battle for Asian-American votes
With more than 11 (million) eligible voters (nearly 5% of the total), Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing of all the country’s main ethnic or racial voting groups. Once concentrated in New York and California, they now live in some of the country’s most competitive districts. Central Ohio contains the largest Bhutanese community outside South Asia. Around 600,000 Asian-Americans live in and around Houston, another 600,000 in Dallas and 400,000 in the suburbs of Atlanta. In Georgia...the increase in Asian votes in 2020 compared with 2016 was more than five times Mr Biden’s margin of victory in the state....
Turnout of Asian-American voters rose by 50% between the mid-term polls of 2014 and 2018, and by as much as a third from 2016 to 2020. This was the largest increase of any ethnic group’s votes and proved vital to Democratic victories. “We’ve gone from the margins....to the margin of victory....”....But 2020 was an unusual year. The race took place amid widespread racist attacks against Asian-Americans. Between March 2020 and December 2021, according to an advocacy group, Stop aapi Hate, nearly 11,000 “hate incidents” against Asian-Americans were reported to the group. Shocking shootings have included one at a hair salon in Dallas’s Koreatown, and another at spas in Atlanta (where six of the eight victims were of Asian descent).....
....There are two reasons to think the Republican Party could make big gains. First, Asian-Americans are a very varied lot. They come from a score of countries, speak over 100 languages and espouse different religions. Until recently, they barely recognised the term “Asian-American” except as a census category. People thought of themselves as Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans or Vietnamese-Americans; these last make up a Republican-leaning subgroup, like Cubans among Latinos....uniquely among America’s largest racial groups, Asian-Americans are immigrants. More than six in ten were born abroad (that contrasts with 35% of Hispanics, 12% of African-Americans and 4% of white people). At current rates there will be 46 (million) Asian-Americans by 2060, more than there are African-Americans today. Republicans would seem to have a plausible chance of attracting many newcomers....Having a degree is one of the surest predictors of voting Democratic. Asian-Americans are slightly younger than average—and the median age of us-born aapi is only 19, compared with 36 for all us-born people—and younger voters tend to to the left...So, as the political significance of Asian-Americans rises, both parties have work to do. “We have to meet them where they are on their issues, not rely on identity politics...”
The Economist Jun 20th 2022
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/06/20/inside-the-battle-for-asian-american-votes
*********
The key issues for the Asian American voting block
1) They are NOT a monolith. It's a very diverse wide ranging collective. For the Democratic Party to treat them as such is short sighted and will be disastrous at the voting booth.
2) They have a projected exponential growth rate. The size and distance of the voting block will become more and more critical in future elections. This impact expands into more and more districts as the Asian population spreads outside of Big Blue Cities and traditionally Blue strongholds.
3) They are turning out at the voting booths in record numbers and their level of political activism is growing.
4) They have been the recent widespread victims of many hate crimes, to which many in their community believes has been generally ignored by the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration. You can't abandon every day working class people to be massacred and expect them to vote for you.
5) They have pushed back against "racial equity/Identity Politics" in Big Education. No one wants to be punished because their people and culture have committed the crime of working too hard in school and being too successful at it. While Team Blue has an advantage in controlling most of Big Education, thus can push their agenda onto the masses of young Asians in college, idiotic public policy that makes college prohibitively expensive and locking out Asians against the standard of pure meritocracy will shift voters the other way.
Just like for the Hispanic/Latino vote, it appears Team Blue has taken yet another critical voting block for granted.
Do you believe Asian American voters are leaving the Democratic Party en masse?
What is your viewpoint on the Biden Administration's response or lack of response to hate crimes and violence against Asian Americans?
How do you feel about schools removing meritocracy based systems for admissions and advancement in exchange for "equity and inclusion" policies that drive more and more Identity Politics laden agendas?
I'll leave this here for others to discuss.
Over the past three decades, Asian American voters — the fastest-growing group in the country according to Pew — have shifted from decisively supporting Republicans to becoming a reliably Democratic bloc, anchored by firmly liberal views on key national issues....The question now is whether this party loyalty will withstand politically divisive developments that appear to pit Asian Americans against other key Democratic constituencies — as controversies emerge, for example, over progressive education policies that show signs of decreasing access to top schools for Asian Americans in order to increase access for Black and Hispanic students....
....In 1992, the year national exit polls started reporting Asian American sentiment, the group leaned Republican, supporting George Bush over Bill Clinton 55 percent to 31 percent. But by 2012, that had reversed. Asian Americans overwhelmingly supported President Obama over Mitt Romney — 73 percent to 26 percent....In an email, Kim cited the declining importance of communism as a key factor in the changing partisan allegiance of Asian American voters. In the 1970s and 80s, he said, “Taiwanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese chose the party that had a reputation of being tougher on communism. Obviously, it was the Republican Party. Chinese immigrants, many of whom retained the memory of the Cultural Revolution, were not too different.” After the 1990s, he continued, “the children of immigrants who grew up and received education in the United States replace the first generation, and their outlook on politics is much different from their parents. They see themselves as a racial minority, and their high education level pushes them towards liberalism on many issues...the Cold War ended and a generational shift occurred....”
....Asked for their preference for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, 54 percent of all Asian Americans chose Biden to 30 percent for Trump. Biden had majority support from Indian (65-28), Japanese (61-24), Korean (57-26), Chinese (56-20) and Filipino Americans (52-34). Vietnamese Americans were the lone exception, supporting Trump 48-36....At the moment, affirmative action admissions policies are a key issue testing Asian American support for the Democratic Party. In educational institutions as diverse as Harvard, San Francisco’s Lowell High School, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va., and the most prestigious selective high schools in New York and Boston, conflict over educational resources between Asian American students and parents on one side and Black and Hispanic students and parents on the other has become endemic. Policies designed to increase Black and Hispanic access to high-quality schools often result in a reduction in the number of Asian American students admitted.....
.....Compared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage....Scholars of Asian American politics have found that Asian American voters have remained relatively strong supporters of affirmative action policies, with one exception: Chinese Americans, who constitute nearly a quarter of all Asian Americans...
....Another issue with the potential to push Asian American voters to the right is crime....The 2018 Crime Victimization report issued in September 2019 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Department of Justice found that 182,230 violent crimes were committed against Asian Americans in 2018. 27.5 percent were committed by African Americans, 24.1 percent by whites, 24.1 percent by Asian Americans, 7 percent by Hispanics and the rest undetermined....While most of the experts on Asian American politics I contacted voiced confidence in the continued commitment of Asian Americans to the Democratic Party and its candidates, there were some danger signals — for example, in the 2021 New York City mayoral election. Eric Adams, the Democrat, decisively beat Curtis Sliwa, the Republican, 65.5 percent to 27.1 percent, but support for Sliwa — an anti-crime stalwart who pledged to take on “the spineless politicians who vote to defund police” — shot up to 44 percent “in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian....” ....A wave of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans during the pandemic has heightened a sense of urgency about public safety and law enforcement. Asian anger and frustration have, for the first time, left a visible dent in a city election....
...Similarly, Asian Americans led the drive to oust three San Francisco School Board members — all progressive Democrats — last month. ....The recall also appeared to be a demonstration of Asian American electoral power. In echoes of debates in other cities, many Chinese voters were incensed when the school board changed the admission system for the district’s most prestigious institution, Lowell High School. It abolished requirements based primarily on grades and test scores, instead implementing a lottery system.... since March 2020 there had been “over 3,000 self-reported incidents of anti-Asian violence from 47 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from stabbings and beatings, to verbal harassment and bullying, to being spit on and shunned.....”
....The changing selectivity of contemporary U.S. Asian immigration has recast Asian Americans from “unassimilable to exceptional,” resulting in their rapid racial mobility. This mobility combined with their minoritized status places them in a unique group position in the U.S. racial hierarchy, conveniently wedged between underrepresented minorities who stand to gain most from the policy (affirmative action) and the advantaged majority who stands to lose most because of it. It also marks Asians as compelling victims of affirmative action who are penalized because of their race.....
...Catalyst, a liberal voter analysis firm, found that from 2016 to 2020, Asian Americans increased their voter turnout by 39 percent, more than any other racial or ethnic constituency, including Hispanic Americans (up 31 percent) and African Americans (up 14 percent). This turnout increase worked decisively in favor of the Democratic Party as Asian Americans voted two to one for the party in both elections....from 2000 to 2019, “The Asian population in the U.S. grew 81 percent from roughly 10.5 million to a record 18.9 million, surpassing the 70 percent growth rate of the nation’s Hispanic population. Furthermore, by 2060, the number of U.S. Asians is projected to rise to 35.8 million, more than triple their 2000 population.....”
What this means is that Republicans are certain to intensify their use of affirmative action, crime, especially hate crime, and the movement away from merit testing to lotteries for admission to high-caliber public schools as wedge issues to try to pry Asian American voters away from the Democratic Party....The strong commitment of Asian Americans to education has been a source of allegiance to a Democratic Party that has become the preferred home for voters with college and advanced degrees. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is, at the same time, testing the strength of that allegiance by supporting education policies that reduce opportunities for Asian Americans at elite schools while increasing opportunity for two larger Democratic constituencies, made up of Black and Hispanic voters.....
By Thomas B. Edsall March 2, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opinion/asian-american-voters-democratic-party.html
Direct Headline: Why Asian Americans Are Leaving the Democratic Party | Opinion
The U.S. Supreme Court just agreed to take on two college affirmative action cases, and will consider whether the undergraduate admission processes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina discriminated against Asian American students....No issue takes a higher priority in the Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community than education. Besides the cultural tradition of valuing education, most Asian-American parents believe that educational attainment is necessary to ensure their children have a successful life in the United States. Working-class Asian immigrant families especially regard education as a lifeline to lift their children from poverty and achieve their American dreams....
....But on this critical issue, Democrats have chosen to embrace critical race theory (CRT), a neo-Marxist ideology that attributes all disparities in any group outcome to systemic racism. Adherents of CRT claim that they must dismantle the "racist" meritocracy-based education system to achieve equity in education outcomes. In the last two years, Democrats have pushed for education "reforms" such as the elimination of the merit-based admissions to elite high schools, phasing out gifted and talented programs, dumbing down math education and dropping SAT and ACT scores from the college admission process. Most recently, the Biden administration called on the Supreme Court to deny challenge to Harvard's anti-Asian race-based admissions policy....
...Democrats have targeted the institutions where Asian students have thrived the most. Democrats argue that Asian students are "over-represented" in elite schools and should be excluded to make room for "oppressed people of color." San Francisco school board commissioner Alison Collins even accused Asian-Americans of using "white supremacist thinking to assimilate and 'get ahead.'" Proponents of critical race theory have even insisted that it is "disingenuous" to call Asian Americans "POC."...
....Many AAPI parents found these education "reforms" and the Democrats' justifications for them upsetting. Asian Americans have endured a long history of bigotry and racial discrimination in the United States, and have been part of the civil rights movement to help the United States become more just and fair for Americans of all races....The Democrats have not helped matters by openly endorsing a racial hierarchy system that values some races more than others, excluding our children from receiving a good education and punishing them for their hard work and success. This is not progress but the very definition of bigotry....Asian Americans have been on edge about security due to the rising number of violent crimes against Asians in some of America's most progressive cities, such as Oakland and New York City. After a white gunman shot and killed eight victims, including six Asian women, in March 2021 in Atlanta, Asian Americans had hoped that the trending hashtag #StopAAPIHate and the outpouring of national outrage would compel Democratic leaders to tackle violent crimes against Asian Americans. Instead, the security situation for Asian Americans in major cities has gotten worse. New York City alone has seen anti-Asian crimes increase more than 350 percent from 2020 to 2021....
In Democrat-led cities, we continue to see Asian seniors shoved to the ground and beaten, and Asian people and businesses robbed. Most recently, a young Asian woman's life was cut short after a disturbed ex-con shoved her in front of an oncoming subway train at Times Square Station in New York City. ...But it's this November's election that the Democratic Party should worry about most. This may be the year when it finally loses the support of the majority of AAPI voters..... Although they currently represent less than 6 percent of voters, Asian Americans are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U.S., surpassing Hispanics in 2055. This population trend means AAPI voters will play a critical role in shaping America's future. No party should either overlook Asian American voters or take their votes and loyalty for granted.
Helen Raleigh 1/25/22 at 7:00 AM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/why-asian-americans-are-leaving-democratic-party-opinion-1672308
Direct Headline: What Happens When Angry Asian American Parents Get Organized
Our anxiety over the upcoming midterm and presidential elections has turned every vote, however local and peculiar, into a referendum on the future of the nation.... what’s more interesting to me is what actually drives these predictions of doom for Democrats. Two assumptions seem to be lurking somewhere underneath the surface.
The first: School closures irreparably harmed the Democratic Party.
The second: There is a backlash against diversity and equity measures, many of which were established after the nationwide George Floyd protests.
So on Tuesday, when the deep blue city of San Francisco recalled three ultra-progressive, equity-focused members of the school board, ousting them in stunning three-to-one votes, what are we to make of it? Is it a harbinger of coming catastrophe for Democrats? Or are we dealing with a local election with local concerns?...Was the recall the result of parents who were frustrated by the extended closures of schools even when the city had low coronavirus positivity and death rates? At times, the board members had seemed more concerned with renaming schools, including one named after Abraham Lincoln, than with figuring out a plan to reopen....Should the blame be placed on the board’s decision to change the admission policy at the elite Lowell High School from merit-based to lottery?
...Or is Alison Collins, the most controversial of the three school board officials who were forced out, the reason for it all? The wife of a wealthy real estate developer, she was responsible for much-publicized and seemingly anti-Asian tweets, followed by an absurd $87 million lawsuit against the city, the school district and her fellow school board members....What’s far more likely — and supported by the voting data — is that the recall was mostly brought about by a coalition of parents who were mad about the changes at Lowell. On Feb. 2, 2021, members of the school board put forth a resolution to end test-based admissions at the school permanently and to use instead the district’s standard lottery system as a way to diversify the mostly white and Asian student body. On Feb. 9 the school board voted 5 to 2 to adopt the resolution. Ten days later, two parents began the campaign to recall the three school board members....
The vote capped a year of organizing by a mostly Asian American bloc of parents and citizens....But this sort of dismissal belies the actual organizing that went into the effort and the work of hundreds of volunteers who collected signatures for the recall election throughout the city. It also ignores relatively high turnout rates in Asian neighborhoods and the overwhelming majority of those residents who voted to recall.... and for months, nearly every time I went, I would see the same people — mostly elderly Chinese American men and women — standing out front with their fliers and petitions. Asian Americans who normally might not have been involved in the political process started standing in front of restaurants and on corners to collect signatures. This was true in Asian and even non-Asian neighborhoods throughout the city....
....If you want another example of what a group like this can do, consider the leaders of the Asian American organizations that allied with the conservative legal activist Edward Blum to sue Harvard over affirmative action. The case, now before the Supreme Court, will likely bring about an end to race-based college admissions throughout the country...
By Jay Caspian Kang Feb. 17, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/opinion/school-board-recall.html
Direct Headline: Inside the battle for Asian-American votes
With more than 11 (million) eligible voters (nearly 5% of the total), Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing of all the country’s main ethnic or racial voting groups. Once concentrated in New York and California, they now live in some of the country’s most competitive districts. Central Ohio contains the largest Bhutanese community outside South Asia. Around 600,000 Asian-Americans live in and around Houston, another 600,000 in Dallas and 400,000 in the suburbs of Atlanta. In Georgia...the increase in Asian votes in 2020 compared with 2016 was more than five times Mr Biden’s margin of victory in the state....
Turnout of Asian-American voters rose by 50% between the mid-term polls of 2014 and 2018, and by as much as a third from 2016 to 2020. This was the largest increase of any ethnic group’s votes and proved vital to Democratic victories. “We’ve gone from the margins....to the margin of victory....”....But 2020 was an unusual year. The race took place amid widespread racist attacks against Asian-Americans. Between March 2020 and December 2021, according to an advocacy group, Stop aapi Hate, nearly 11,000 “hate incidents” against Asian-Americans were reported to the group. Shocking shootings have included one at a hair salon in Dallas’s Koreatown, and another at spas in Atlanta (where six of the eight victims were of Asian descent).....
....There are two reasons to think the Republican Party could make big gains. First, Asian-Americans are a very varied lot. They come from a score of countries, speak over 100 languages and espouse different religions. Until recently, they barely recognised the term “Asian-American” except as a census category. People thought of themselves as Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans or Vietnamese-Americans; these last make up a Republican-leaning subgroup, like Cubans among Latinos....uniquely among America’s largest racial groups, Asian-Americans are immigrants. More than six in ten were born abroad (that contrasts with 35% of Hispanics, 12% of African-Americans and 4% of white people). At current rates there will be 46 (million) Asian-Americans by 2060, more than there are African-Americans today. Republicans would seem to have a plausible chance of attracting many newcomers....Having a degree is one of the surest predictors of voting Democratic. Asian-Americans are slightly younger than average—and the median age of us-born aapi is only 19, compared with 36 for all us-born people—and younger voters tend to to the left...So, as the political significance of Asian-Americans rises, both parties have work to do. “We have to meet them where they are on their issues, not rely on identity politics...”
The Economist Jun 20th 2022
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/06/20/inside-the-battle-for-asian-american-votes
*********
The key issues for the Asian American voting block
1) They are NOT a monolith. It's a very diverse wide ranging collective. For the Democratic Party to treat them as such is short sighted and will be disastrous at the voting booth.
2) They have a projected exponential growth rate. The size and distance of the voting block will become more and more critical in future elections. This impact expands into more and more districts as the Asian population spreads outside of Big Blue Cities and traditionally Blue strongholds.
3) They are turning out at the voting booths in record numbers and their level of political activism is growing.
4) They have been the recent widespread victims of many hate crimes, to which many in their community believes has been generally ignored by the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration. You can't abandon every day working class people to be massacred and expect them to vote for you.
5) They have pushed back against "racial equity/Identity Politics" in Big Education. No one wants to be punished because their people and culture have committed the crime of working too hard in school and being too successful at it. While Team Blue has an advantage in controlling most of Big Education, thus can push their agenda onto the masses of young Asians in college, idiotic public policy that makes college prohibitively expensive and locking out Asians against the standard of pure meritocracy will shift voters the other way.
Just like for the Hispanic/Latino vote, it appears Team Blue has taken yet another critical voting block for granted.
Do you believe Asian American voters are leaving the Democratic Party en masse?
What is your viewpoint on the Biden Administration's response or lack of response to hate crimes and violence against Asian Americans?
How do you feel about schools removing meritocracy based systems for admissions and advancement in exchange for "equity and inclusion" policies that drive more and more Identity Politics laden agendas?
I'll leave this here for others to discuss.
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