Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Last spring, Canada's Tories achieved a remarkable electoral shakeup by winning big in areas that they had historically written off as un-winnable. The Conservatives gained 18 parliamentary seats in the suburban ridings (think Congressional Districts) of Southern Ontario and the City of Toronto—which are heavily populated by South and Southeast Asian immigrants—as well as all four seats in the ridings of Brampton, whose population similarly includes a large percentage of South Asians.
Meanwhile, going into this year's presidential election, both Democrats and Republicans are behaving as though they don't much care about the Asian vote. The Atlantic's Molly Ball writes:
A large proportion of the Asian-American vote is up for grabs in the 2012 election, according to a new poll. While President Obama leads Republican Mitt Romney by a wide margin -- 59 percent to 13 percent -- impressions of Romney remain largely unformed, and both Democrats and Republicans have work to do with this potentially important but often overlooked voting demographic.
[...]
The large proportion of undecided voters suggests there's room for both parties to grow with the Asian-American vote, yet those surveyed said the parties aren't doing much to engage them. Just 23 percent of those polled said they'd been contacted by the Democratic Party in the past two years, while 17 percent reported contact with the GOP. In the overall population, that number is generally between 30 and 40 percent, according to researcher David Mermin of Lake Research Partners, the Democratic polling firm that conducted the survey.
Asian American voters could very well prove to be the stealth swing vote in 2012.
In swing states such as Nevada, Florida, and Virginia, the Asian-American vote could prove decisive. The poll oversampled [Asian-American] voters in those states and found a closer race than nationally: In Nevada, it was Obama 54, Romney 29; in Florida, it was 57-29; and in Virginia, 57-20.
Republicans would do well to market their pro-business, pro-traditional values message to Asian voters. And the places to start? Nevada. Florida. Virginia.
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Sep '10
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Republicans would do well to market their pro-business, pro-traditional values message to Asian voters. And the places to start?
The US State Department.
Apr '11
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Republicans must point out (and they will have to do it in an extremely subtle way) how Asian-Americans are hurt by affirmative action programs that help blacks and latinos.
Apr '12
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
These Brampton South Asians are from India and are hard working, family oriented, business owners with at home wives and children who study hard and take university degrees. They have self segregated to Brampton, a clean and high income area with the largest Hindu temple in the world outside of India.The Conservatives did not pander to Asians or South Asians as they made it clear they are Canadians and were grateful to be in a peaceful country. there is no one calling themselves African Canadian or Asian Canadian. Toronto is a city where white people are now the minority group.
Oct '10
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
I don't know if Asians need anything from politicians other than to stay off their backs and leave them in peace to succeed.
Jul '10
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Whatever could be the draw toward the democrats of a pro-business, pro-family, pro-traditional values [of which hard work ranks very high] group of people?
Nov '10
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Real conservatives don't pander.
And Asians like that.
May '11
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
I thought we were supposed to shut up about "values issues" according to our genius GOP strategists and pundits who get embarrased when these issues come up in conversation at the fancy parties they attend.
Apr '12
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
I have never understood the Asian American leftward tendency. For first generation Indians they left a stifling bureaucratic socialist regimes, and the so many are successful because of conservative traditional values. In the current it iteration of the democratic party there is nothing attractive for the wrong ethnic group.
Sep '10
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
If there is an Asian American leftward tendency, I suspect it's mainly among the children of Asian immigrants. The dominant culture in the media and universities is left wing, so the (usually well-educated) kids tend to drift that way.
My mother (1st generation, 1/2 Singapore Chinese) was fiercely anti-Communist, pro-American and would have nothing to do with the left.
Aug '10
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
They should start in Southern California, and to do it they will have to expose and confront an organized union driven political machine. The APIA community in the Southland is heavily manipulated by a machine that's preferences/interests don't align with the sentiments of their constituents.
Apr '12
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Do you think we could get pols to do this if we assured them it was a good way to pander to this untapped group? (See also, enlisted military, small business owners, unsubsidized ag workers....)
Nov '10
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
The generational split in the Vietnamese-American community is extreme. It's not that there aren't conservatives and Republicans in the younger generation, but there are certainly a lot of that generation who have been brainwashed into liberalism through higher education. The older generation has not been at all successful in communicating their politics to the younger.
This is accentuated in a subgroup of that generation who have gone into careers like social work or studied the social sciences. Lots of them have been trained to adopt a victim mentality. They are taught to view the world through the prism that says that they are victims of racism, and they can't seem to see that the way the lefty "racism" machine works, with affirmative action and so on, actually harms them.
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
R. Craigen: Real conservatives don't pander.
And Asians like that. · 23 hours ago
What do we make of this article describing how the Tories courted the immigrant vote? Does it count as pandering? Or just good marketing?
Apr '12
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Diane Ellis, still struggling to quote your comment above (sorry billy)."Finally, the Conservative platform for the 2011 election was designed, with its targeted tax breaks, to appeal to the young, suburban, new Canadian families the party needed to win a majority government.“People tend to forget that the main appeal isn’t on … community-specific issues. It’s based on the core platform,” Mr. Kenney said. “If you look at the ads we ran in Mandarin, Punjabi and Cantonese, it’s exactly that. Vote your values.” The conservatives said that people should not be judged as groups like Black or Asian but by how they fit into Canada. Hard work, family, self sufficient were some values discussed. Soccer mums cross over all groups, hard working entrepreneurs were other groups. It worked.
Apr '12
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Test
Mar '11
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
So true and succinctly stated.
Such vile pandering to ethnicity disgusts me. That the left embraces the balkanisation of the citizenry into ethnic tribes they can pit against each other for electoral advantage is despicable. That there are conservatives who wish to embrace such tactics is beneath contempt.
Are we a nation of equal citizens before the law or merely defined by our ethnicity and rewarded or punished on that basis? If citizens want the "success" that embodies the states of the former Yugoslavia then indeed let us continue down that course and pursue the electoral "victories" it brings.
Edited on May 6, 2012 at 8:54pmNov '10
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Roberto
So true and succinctly stated.
Such vile pandering to ethnicity disgusts me. That the left embraces the balkanisation of the citizenry into ethnic tribes they can pit against each other for electoral advantage is despicable. That there are conservatives who wish to embrace such tactics is beneath contempt.
Are we a nation of equal citizens before the law or merely defined by our ethnicity and rewarded or punished on that basis? If citizens want the "success" that embodies the states of the former Yugoslavia then indeed let us continue down that course and pursue the electoral "victories" it brings. ·
The problem is that the young people in many of those communities are being indoctrinated with left-leaning views precisely because the communities have such a traditional respect for education, and because the educational establishment is very left-leaning. Furthermore, they are taught to see themselves as victims of racism. It isn't "pandering" to go into those communities and counter those messages.
Mar '11
Re: Who Cares About the Asian Vote?
Lucy Pevensie
Roberto
Such vile pandering to ethnicity disgusts me. That the left embraces the balkanisation of the citizenry into ethnic tribes they can pit against each other for electoral advantage is despicable. That there are conservatives who wish to embrace such tactics is beneath contempt.
Are we a nation of equal citizens before the law or merely defined by our ethnicity and rewarded or punished on that basis? If citizens want the "success" that embodies the states of the former Yugoslavia then indeed let us continue down that course and pursue the electoral "victories" it brings. ·
The problem is that the young people in many of those communities are being indoctrinated with left-leaning views precisely because the communities have such a traditional respect for education, and because the educational establishment is very left-leaning. Furthermore, they are taught to see themselves as victims of racism. It isn't "pandering" to go into those communities and counter those messages. ·
Ms. Ellis has not put forward a position on appealing to youth. She has tacitly recommended appealing to a demographic based solely on their ethnicity. This position has nothing to do with the myriad flaws of public education