As we wrote five days ago, Democrats are having problems hanging onto the Hispanic vote. A major chronicler of that problem has been political scientist Ruy Teixeira.
Now Teixeira finds that Democrats are having the same problem with Asian-American voters, and for at least some of the same reasons. He writes:
1. According to Pew, Biden has lost support twice as fast among Asian voters as among whites since July.
2. In the November mayoral election in New York, once again Asian voters performed poorly for the Democrat.
3. In the November Virginia gubernatorial election, results from the AP-NORC VoteCast survey (snip) indicated that Virginia’s heavily Asian “other race” category, which gave Biden a strong 19 point advantage in 2020, slipped to a mere 6 point advantage for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in 2021. Republican Glenn Youngkin carried 46 percent of these voters in his upset victory.
Why are these voters slipping away from the Democrats? One problem is that Asians are worried about public safety and leery of a Democratic party that has become associated with “defund the police” and a soft approach to containing crime. Another is that Asians, like Hispanics, are a constituency that does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and how it must be remade to cleanse it of intrinsic racism and white supremacy, a viewpoint increasingly identified with Democrats.
Of course the prevalence of Black-on-Asian violence in urban settings and the Democrats' obsession with excusing Black crime must be considered as relevant.
Teixeira once argued that Hispanic and Asian immigration guaranteed Democratic majorities going forward. To his credit, when events proved him wrong, he changed his tune and has reported that Hispanics and now also Asians tend to identify more with Whites than with Blacks.
I hypothesize the fact Asians and Hispanics are here voluntarily, often having made major sacrifices to come, is a key factor in their lack of civil rights militancy.
