J.C. Pan's Article, "A Leftist Future for Asian American Politics” dives into the untouched potential of the Asian American electorate. This growing and diverse population, which has been often overlooked by both political parties, has the power and means to further shape this nation. 

While the Asian American Movement assumed that the most straightforward way for people of Asian descent to form a political bloc was to claim a shared identity, Asians have grown more politically similar to each other, even as that notion of a collective identity remains elusive, particularly over the last decade. As Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political scientist at the University of California, Riverside, and the founder of AAPI Data, told me, Asians in the U.S. of all backgrounds tend to express similar preferences on a number of key political issues regardless of how they personally identify. “It turns out that politics—public policy and public opinion—is actually a relative unifier among Asian Americans,” Ramakrishnan said.

According to Ramakrishnan, majorities of every major ethnic group within the Asian American electorate—including those that once leaned Republican, such as Vietnamese Americans—have consistently backed Democratic presidential candidates since the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Survey data also shows the majority of Asian ethnic groups favor bigger government, in the form of increased spending on public programs, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, stricter gun control, and environmental protections. And while there are some divisions on social issues along religious lines—Catholic Filipino and Vietnamese Americans express lower levels of support for abortion and gay rights, for example—Ramakrishnan noted that those opinions didn’t factor much into their behavior at the ballot box. “The top issues in the last few years for Asian American voters have been the economy, health care, and education,” he said.

Karthick Ramakrishnan thinks there are signs that the 2020 election will see record turnout from Asian Americans, whether either candidate will attempt to court these voters in any meaningful way remains uncertain. “We have survey data that shows that Asian Americans tend to vote against candidates that espouse anti-immigrant rhetoric, and that’s likely going to have an energizing effect on the Asian American electorate during this election cycle,” Ramakrishnan said. He, of course, meant Trump, but a recent Biden ad criticizing the president for being too soft on China in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak suggests that Democrats, too, may be more amenable to a strategy of xenophobic fearmongering than making real efforts to expand health care or lower the soaring costs of education.

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