The Untapped Potential of the Asian Voter.

• Author: Desai, Saahil

Asian Americans are the Democrats' fastest growing CONSTITUENCY, BUT THE PARTY HAS FAILED TO MOBILIZE THEM. THAT'S A MAJOR MISSED OPPORTUNITY.

A few weeks before Donald Trump's inauguration, while most Democrats were still reeling from the 2016 election, David Reid was preparing to run for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. It was his first foray into politics. The district had gone for Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama before her, but the Republican incumbent had kept his seat since 2009.

Reid, a defense contractor and retired U.S. Navy officer, was born into poverty in the mountains of western Virginia. But he had come a long way since then. Virginia House District 32 sits in Loudoun County, a sprawling Washington, D.C., exurb that for the past ten years has had the highest median income in the nation. When Reid looked around at the district he sought to represent, a few things stood out. One was nightmarish traffic, the result of a recent population boom. (Transportation would feature prominently among Reid's campaign issues.) Another was a stunning demographic shift. Loudoun County's growth over the past three decades has been driven in part by Asian Americans, who have flocked there to work for AOL and other tech companies that have set up shop in the area. Today 18 percent of the district's residents are Asian American. Nearly half of those are Indian American; between 1990 and 2010, the number of Indian Americans in the county grew by a factor of fifty. Drive past a park on a summer evening, and you'll see cricket matches under way--the Loudoun County Cricket League has forty-eight teams and more than 1,200 players.

Reid realized that he would need to win over Asian American voters to carry the district--as he eventually did, part of a 2017 blue wave that was bolstered by higher-than-expected Asian turnout statewide. He visited the local Sikh gurdwara, ate iftar dinner at the mosque, and had an Indian friend join him canvassing Asian American households. During this time, he started noticing a strange pattern: an unusual number of these voters were former Republicans. "Going door to door," he said, "I met an Indian woman who said, 'I used to vote Republican, but I can't anymore. I'm voting for you.' And then I went two or three doors down and, talking to a Pakistani gentleman, he told me almost the same thing."

Reid had stumbled upon one of the most overlooked transformations in American politics: the overwhelming leftward shift of Asian American voters. In 1992, the first year that exit polls specifically tracked Asian Americans--an umbrella term referring to anyone with ancestry from East Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent--55 percent of them supported George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton. Eight years later, A1 Gore became the first Democrat to win a majority of Asian American votes, and by 2012, the group favored Obama over Mitt Romney by almost 75 to 25. And the trend seems to be accelerating. More than a quarter of Asian American Republicans have abandoned the GOP since 2011, by far the largest shift of any demographic group. At the same time, the Asian American share of the population has doubled since 1990 to 6 percent overall.

The GOP's increased nativism after 9/11 has long been a turnoff for Asian Americans, even before Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015. Trump has spent the better part of three years fear-mongering about undocumented immigrants--one out of six of whom is Asian. Asian Americans are the biggest beneficiaries of family reunification policies, which Trump and other prominent Republicans have taken to bashing as "chain migration." (Family reunification is how nearly all Vietnamese and Bangladeshi immigrants have come to America.) Asian Americans might not be the direct target of Trump's disdain as often as Hispanics, but the modern Republican Party's increasingly overt hostility to nonwhite immigration can't help but push them away.

All of which is good news for Democrats. But here's the problem: Asian Americans have among the lowest voting rates of any racial group in America--49 percent of eligible voters, in 2016, compared to 65 percent among white people...