Why Democrats are losing Asian Americans

At my son’s San Francisco school downtown, homeless tents are steps from the entrance. Drug users sometimes lie prone on the sidewalk outside, as students pick their way around them to get to their parents. The situation hasn’t changed in more than two years.

As an Asian American, I have lost confidence in the current San Francisco city government, and so have many other San Francisco Asian American voters. In fact, 80 percent of Asian Americans polled disapprove of Democratic Mayor London Breed’s job performance. Meanwhile, Chinese immigrant membership in San Francisco’s Republican Party has increased 60 percent since 2019.

This is not a coincidence, nor is it unique to San Francisco. In New York City’s 2022 governor’s election, majority-Asian precincts shifted to the right by 23 percentage points, compared to 2018.

Nationally, Asian Americans have been moving towards Republicans since 2016, with 30 percent voting Republican in 2020 compared to 18 percent in 2016, and 32 percent voting Republican for the House of Representatives elections in 2022. Those national averages disguise even larger Asian American support for Republicans in certain states: in 2020, 54 percent of Asian Americans in California and 40 percent in Nevada voted for Trump.

In recent polls, 67 percent of AAPI adults disapprove of President Biden’s handling of inflation, while 77 percent view his government as doing a bad job dealing with the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. Over 40 percent of registered Asian Americans view inflation as the most important issue in one survey, although health care, the economy, crime and education are other top issues.

Many worry about crime, amid unprovoked attacks such as an alleged assault of a 71-year-old Cantonese-speaking woman in San Francisco by a woman who previously pushed a 63-year-old Chinese immigrant to her death. 

More than half of New York City-based Asian Americans reported experiencing race-related hate within the last 12 months, and 83 percent of Asian American women in the same survey said public safety is a major concern.

Education is also critical, but Democratic leaders and liberal institutions have failed many Asian American families. San Francisco’s school board kept schools closed during the pandemic, instead renaming the schools and attempting to end merit-based admissions at Lowell High School, prompting Asian American groups to organize and successfully recall three of the commissioners.

At the national level, Harvard, other elite universities, and President Biden himself deplored the Supreme Court’s ruling prohibiting the use of race in college admissions. This in spite of Harvard’s clear record showing discrimination against Asian American applicants. Among the most highly academically qualified applicants, Harvard admitted only 12.7 percent of Asian American applicants, compared to 56.1 percent of African American applicants, over four times as many.

The difference was even starker for applicants in the third-highest rung, where only 5.1 percent of Asian Americans were admitted compared to 44.5 percent of similarly qualified African Americans. Asian American applicants were the only demographic group with a negative coefficient, such that being Asian is negatively associated with being admitted to Harvard, whereas African American applicants enjoyed a massive positive coefficient and were more than twice as likely to be admitted as others with similar qualifications.

Apparently Democrats only care about discrimination against minorities if those minorities aren’t Asian students who are “too” successful in school.

Asian Americans number about 24 million but are the nation’s fastest growing voting bloc. In 2024, about 15 million Asian-Americans are eligible voters, about 6.1 percent of all eligible voters, up from about 5 percent in 2020. And Asian American voter turnout is increasing. In 2020, votes cast by Asian Americans increased nationally by 10 percent compared to 2016, including in several swing states — up 84 percent in Georgia, 65 percent in Nevada, and 52 percent in North Carolina.

Key swing states went by very narrow margins for Biden in 2020. Sixty thousand more Asian Americans voted in Georgia that year than in 2016, an increase in turnout that exceeded Biden’s narrow margin of victory in the state. But March 2024 polls in all seven swing states show Trump leading by one to five percentage points.

The Biden administration can point to initiatives such as its webpage for reporting anti-Asian hate, improved data collection on Asian Americans to support better analysis and more informed policies, and federal agencies’ expanded language access. Recently, the Biden campaign launched an ad targeting Asian and Pacific Islander voters across the battleground states. But while costs for the Asian American small business owner in the ad may have gone down, inflation has increased 19 percent from 2020 for everyone else. Supermarket food prices are 25 percent higher in 2024 than in 2020.

Asian American voters in 2024 are increasingly engaged in politics, given recent inflation, crime and education developments. And their concerns play more to Republican strengths than to the things Democrats emphasize. That could be a problem for Biden come November.

Hilary Stockton is Asian American business owner, parent and writer living in San Francisco.