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Here’s Why Asian Americans Shifted Right by 9 points
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Anonymous
PP here and I went out of my way to say that this is reflective of a specific group of SE Asian immigrants I work with. It is 100% true for this group. Which has made we think about how political and social views likely vary a lot across Asian populations in the US depending on country of origin, class status, gender, and how recently they immigrated. My comment was specifically not about viewing Asians as a monolith. Whereas you are making these vague sweeping statements about all SE Asians. To me that is racist. Also "SE Asia" is not a country and can't elect a president of any gender. India didn't elect a woman president until 2007. And electing a woman to public office does not eradicate misogyny. The US has many women in very prominent political roles and has for decades and we still have tons of misogyny. There have been a number of women prime ministers in Europe but I remember traveling through Europe in the summer of 2016 and hearing many misogynist comments about Hillary Clinton. People are complex. The mostly-Indian men I work with harbor a lot of misogynist and racist ideas. I doubt they are abberation but I also know they are not representative of all Asian people as I know plenty of people (including those of Indian descent) who are not that way. So maybe climb down of your high horse for a minute and try to have a conversation without calling someone racist for making observations and sharing info. |
Anonymous
| They seem to care only about their own families and making money and upward mobility. They don’t think much about anyone else, so of course they are natural Republicans, the party of me, me, me. |
Anonymous
And I suppose you think that every Asian parent is perfect? Sheesh. Read the pre-med Reddit forum for a few minutes, and you will quickly be disabused of that notion. Yes, Asians are hardworking and they want their kids to go to Ivy League colleges and become doctors. But there are a lot of downsides of ridiculously high expectations and pressures that can really do a number on kids. That is not always healthy and shouldn’t be idealized. |
Anonymous
| This whole thread is racist. Not all Asians think alike. Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Vietnamese do not want to get lumped together just like Hispanics and Latin Americans. Overall, only 46% of Americans have above a sixth grade literacy rate. We're just a dumb country and thus, politicians can fool the masses. |
Anonymous
Just to get the facts right. India elected a woman Prime Minister (actual position of power, President is just a figurehead in India) in 1980. Pakistan elected a woman Prime Minister in 1988, Bangladesh elected a woman Prime Minister in 1996 and of course Sri Lanka elected one in 1960. All four countries have Prime Minister as the equivalent of a U.S President. Do they still have misogynistic views? Yes, it’s prevalent. Can they overcome them to elect a woman? Yes. |
Anonymous
And people forget that a lot of Indians who come here are the rich ones who already had a leg up. |
Anonymous
| Asians (stereotyping here, but probably correctly) value equal opportunity, and have no sympathy for policies promoting equal or superior outcomes without regard to individual effort or merit. |
Anonymous
The original point was that some Indian male immigrants were not as bothered by Trump's misogynist attitudes because they didn't feel particularly shocking to them and also some of them hold these same views. The fact that some SE Asian countries have elected women to leadership roles is not particularly relevant. As Americans understand well, the election of an individual to the top leadership role in the country does not mean that person accurately reflects the culture of the country. |
Anonymous
Asian immigrants who establish themselves enough to become naturalized citizens and to raise kids in the US are much more likely to be wealthy or have wealthy family back home helping to support them. Asian immigration to the US is very different than Central/South American immigration and while of course there are poor Asian immigrants in the US they are a tiny percentage of the overall population. The most common way for Asians to immigrate to the US is on student visas (which unless you are a certified genius generally costs a lot -- international tuition at American universities is very expensive and there are very few financial aid options available) or on H-1B visas. So it's really not surprising that Asian immigrants would skew Republican. Nor is it surprising that they would have strong opposition to illegal immigration (most Asian immigrants are legal for pragmatic reasons). I have never viewed Asian-Americans or Asian immigrants as a particularly liberal group or a major Democratic voting bloc. I know some very liberal Asian-Americans but they are like 3rd and 4th generation, very assimilated. Their parents are assimilated. They tend to be middle or upper middle class and well educated. And then tend to live in or near major coastal cities. Well those are all common traits of Democratic voters. I would not assume that to be representative of all Asian voters just like I wouldn't expect a white lady who went to Brown and lives in Bethesda to be represenative of all white lady voters. |
Anonymous
It is because Democrats entire political strategy is about pandering to capture specific constituencies intend of offering a universalist message that everyone can get behind. Obama understood this and offered the universalist message. Democrats seem to have forgotten his success. In fact, the worst thing that Obama did during his first campaign was to point out that it was Republicans who were pandering, ie the famous “clinging to guns and religion” comment. A policy platform that is a patchwork of pandering policies ends up missing the forest for the trees and ultimately risks alienating the very same voters that you were trying to appeal to. The time for the pandering patchwork of policies to appease constituencies is after the election, particularly the state of the union speech. |
Anonymous
DP SE Asia = Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia South Asia = India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh |
Anonymous
I sort of agree. I take issue with the implication that Asian Americans are not patriotic or don't feel any loyalty to the US. Ironically, there's a large swath of MAGA that's not in it for merit-based policies alone. The TJ and Harvard policies may become the least of their worries. |
Anonymous
+1,000,000 to this. If Biden had announced he wasn't running and declared there should be an open primary there would have been continuous, sustained media coverage of a Democratic primary season. Maybe we would have ended up with Kamala, maybe not. But at least a last minute change in candidate wouldn't be part of the equation. Democrats have not successfully communicated that the policies that regular people actually like ARE THEIR POLICIES. And they don't appreciate that most voters are low information voters, if they vote at all. |
Anonymous
It's this kind of condescending bullsh*t that drives them even further. As an Indian American who voted (and has always voted) democrat, here's my take: - Asians ARE treated as the wrong kind of Brown. Look at all the chinese hate crimes by Blacks in cities after Covid. Regardless of who started it, what did the cities, esp. the ones on the west coast, do about it? - We hate the opaque college admissions process in this country. We know the narrative that it helps the disadvantaged but think it helps the rich more than the disadvantaged. My kid ended up going to a 'lesser' school over an ivy and we saw 'lower qualified' kids get in.. and they were not even 'real Blacks', just immigrant kids with UMC parents but from Africa. That hurts. BTW, two such families we know talked about voting Trump 
- Crime: We (US and friends) have kids working in Chicago, LA, SF and NYC. Crime is rampant and there's no action. Young people getting mugged when exiting the metro or filling gas late at night has happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah.. crime is low per capita relative to Red state cities and long-term trend is down. None of that matters if you are the victim. - Immigration: We spent years, some of us decade+, to get permanent status in this country with major consequences for even minor infractions, but we see that all it takes now is a walk across the border, declare you are persecuted in your home country and you are released into the wild. Where do you think they all end up? What are the consequences? We've seen this happen in our home countries, see it happening in Europe and Canada, and don't want a repeat of that here. And if you were to say (I've heard this), "You wouldn't be here but for our friendly immigration policies", my response would be "F U! Of course I wouldn't be here, I chose to come here and would have gone elsewhere more welcoming or stayed where I was which would have been perfectly fine". - Mindless spending: Enough said on this topic but y'all know what I'm talking about. - Lesser citizens: There's sometimes an insinuation that we are somehow 'lesser citizens' compared to people born here. This comes from both sides. The Right accepts Elon (who has been in this country for less period of time that I) as more of a citizen that me. Dems of all color insinuate that in some conversations implying that we don't 'fully understand' American history. To such people I say, I (and other Indians) are better educated, make more money, have more international perspective that y'all. Don't think that or bring that up. You are only pissing us off. Despite all this, the vast majority of Asians still vote Democrat. If Trump's 4 years ends up being 'not that bad', this trend towards voting R will only accelerate. Fix that before the R's realize this, become more moderate and become the Big Tent party. |
Anonymous
I thought so too but the shift Rightward is so pervasive that I don't think it happened overnight. The Kamala bump for the Dems was an anamoly based on excitement that dissipated over the next couple of months. Same thing would have happened regardless of who they put up. Hard to find a Dem who would have gone against Biden's policies and won the primaries. |