Vietnamese-Americans Are No Longer A Lock For The Republican Party
By Farai Chideya
Oct 18, 2016
The future of American politics may look a lot like Lan Diep. As a recent TED talk pointed out, he’s the son of political refugees from Vietnam who over the summer returned from political defeat to win a seat on the San Jose City Council. His margin of victory was just 12 votes.
Diep, 32, a legal aid lawyer who was born in Texas and learned English from watching television, isn’t as anchored to party loyalty as conventional politicians. Though he is a self-described fiscal conservative and a lifelong Republican, he’s voting for Hillary Clinton.
“I think she is something of a flawed candidate, but given the options, she is obviously the only qualified candidate to hold the office of the presidency,” Diep said. “I’m just really disappointed by the candidates that the Republican Party put up this time.” He considered voting for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, “but given his lack of understanding of world events … I’m sticking with Hillary.”
Vietnamese-Americans, who number nearly 2 million, with especially large concentrations in California and Texas, are part of the larger narrative of Asian-Americans who have switched party affiliations and votes from Republican to Democratic. In 1992, Republicans won among Asian-Americans by a 22-point margin in the presidential election, according to exit polls; in 2012, Asian-Americans voted Democratic by 47 points, which was nearly double the margin in 2008.
In 2016, according to the National Asian American Survey (NAAS), there are far more undecided voters, but the Democratic ticket still leads among Asian-Americans by 43 points. As NPR political demographics reporter Asma Khalid said in a recent FiveThirtyEight podcast accompanying this series on voters, “Within the span of two decades, you can see that Hillary Clinton will potentially be able to win an overwhelming majority of Asian-Americans, the very voters who overwhelmingly did not vote for her husband two decades ago.” She calls it the “most rapid realignment” of any racial or ethnic demographic in the country.
MORE:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/vietnamese-americans-are-no-longer-a-lock-for-the-republican-party/?ex_cid=2016-forecast
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