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Asians are the New Republicans
Buried deep in exit polling results — here, for instance, is a national poll of voters in House races — are some interesting numbers.
Democrats trounced Republicans among Latinos — 62% to 36% — but that suggests a pretty solid floor of Hispanic support for Republicans. Bush garnered almost 44% of that vote in 2004; Chris Christie in New Jersey won 50%. If you start at 36% — and this was in a year with lots and lots of immigration news — that’s not bad.
Republicans also captured 45% of self-described “moderates,” which is hard to parse in any meaningful way, but suggests people who are shy of identifying with any ideological wing. In other words, “independents.”
But here’s what caught my eye:
Republicans won Asian voters, barely, 50% to 49%. But this represents an amazing and fundamental shift in the way Asians have been voting. And it suggests that the fastest-growing ethnic group in America is realizing that the Republican party is its natural home.
If you think of the New Republican Coalition as whites, married people, Asians, 36% of all Latinos, and 45% of all independents — well, that’s a lot of people.
Enough, perhaps, to keep growing and keep winning.
Published in General
Soto, do you have a bunch of these in your wallet? Showing them around the office today?
“Oh, you gotta see this one! So cuuuute….”
How did Greg Abbott do in Texas with Latinos? I heard he was spending a lot of time in El Paso and in the border counties at the end of his race.
Ni hao!
Rob, I have to correct something- that 44% number for Bush in 2004 was a mistake that the exit pollsters later corrected. Bush got somewhere between 35-40% depending on which pollster you ask. That 44% factoid has been kept alive largely by Karl Rove repeating it for years for his own purposes, long after he knew it was false. And still it persists – Charles Krauthammer recently claimed on Fox that Bush “got almost half” the Latino vote in ’04. It’s the myth that will not die.
When John Derbyshire was writing a review of Jeb Bush’s book on immigration last year, he said one of the first things he did was search the Kindle edition for the term “44%.” When he found it, he knew what sort of thing he was in for.
I’m a bit of a downer, but i don’t think just 60% of the white vote is going to be enough to win in 2016. They still have to get more white share.
All the people who are finding out that they aren’t on the winning side of the left-wing spoils system are probably open to persuasion on the idea that while the republicans may not be perfect, they at least the recognize their right to exist generally unmolested.
Good point. Whatever happened to the folks who just wanted to be left alone, no government interference? I always thought there were more folks on the left with that attitude than the right, but maybe I’m wrong . . .
With the possible exception of Latinos isn’t this essentially Harper’s coalition in Canada?
I am not as bullish on the Asian vote. My guess is that the Asian vote in the midterms is similar to the white vote in midterms- more educated, more informed, more well-off and more interested than the average. The Asian vote, like the white vote, will revert to the mean in the big media hubbub of a Presidential election year. That’s why I am skeptical that the GOP’s 60% white share is going to be good enough for 2016- it really should have been higher this year.
Abbott won 50% of Latino men, lost Latino women handily. Abbott outperformed Rick Perry among whites, winning 72%. He won white men by 61 points, 80-19%.
Building on wmartin’s point, I’d love to believe this, and perhaps the final, analyzed number will look pretty good, but today is way too soon to talk about the Asian vote, or any other demographic, with confidence. The exit polls are unreliable in their raw form and need to be rectified with the actual results. Paging Dr. Trende, paging Dr. Trende!
Excellent news – also read that Sam Brownback got 47% of the Latino vote in Kansas, his Democrat opponent got 46%.
The whole discussion on the race vote, it is stupid. All we are is playing into, and reinforcing the race warfare argument liberals keep making. In addition to the polling data being Ceteris paribus anyways.
The genetics that are related to the color of your skin have nothing to do with how you vote. The only reason we collect the information is because progressive and the news media want us to believe it matters. It does not.
Color is only a crude metric to one’s culture background. It is culture background groups that we need to win, not race. Until we start to redefine the demographic argument as one based on culture and needing to win specific cultures, we will keep playing into the democrats’ fundamentally racist and class based arguments. The parental status you had as a kid growing up, and one’s theological belief of how you see God (is more important than ones denomination/religion) are much better voting metrics than all the popular ones.
So can we please stop the silliness and start talking in clear language on relevant groups we need to change like single mothers and married, successful rich people. In the end just because you measure something, it does not mean it actually results in the behavior you want to measure.
Did I miss something?
Do we now have more Asian immigrants and births each year than hispanics?
Yes.
No. You failed to cite a source so I looked it up myself (I was really trying to avoid that).
http://www.dailynews.com/general-news/20130613/us-census-bureau-asians-fastest-growing-ethnic-group-in-the-nation-last-year
Asians: 18.9 million, 2.9% growth
Hispanics: 54 million, 2.2% growth rate
18,900,000 * 0.029 = 548,100
54,000,000 * 0.022 = 1,188,000
Based on these rates and starting with the 2013 numbers, Asians will overtake Hispanics in the year 2167.
In short, talking about a “fastest growing ethnic group” growth in terms of percentages is misleading.
Of course, I am willing to eat my words if a better source can be cited.
I hope Republicans are already working on their Asian Strategy, as that’s only 76 election cycles away. I’d put Bob Dole on it.
I’ll start with a caveat. The public opinion research group Latino Decisions collaborates with lefty entities (and has a Daily Kos endorsement on its site), but they advance reasons to disbelieve the national exit poll’s estimates of the Latino vote,1 which aren’t outlandish at first read. Essentially they argue that the methodology used for the exit poll creates a systematic bias toward middle-class, better-educated, and better-assimilated Latinos–thus overstating Latino support for Republicans and understating their already hefty support for Democrats.
These researchers claim their eve-of-election polls better capture Latino views and sentiments. If their 2014 eve-of-election poll2 is to be believed, Abbott’s total support among Latinos was 33%, instead of the 44% figure cited by media sources such as CNN.3 They say Abbott had 37% and 30% of the vote of Latino men and women respectively.
Links:
1 http://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/2012/11/01/how-the-exit-polls-misrepresent-latino-voters-and-badly/
2 http://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Latino-Election-Eve-Poll-Nov-2014-Crosstabs.pdf
3 http://edition.cnn.com/election/2014/results/exit-polls
Actually, what matters is not growth percentage, or raw numbers of immigrants. What matters is raw number of political participants among those groups. As well as the timeline between immigration and their ability/willingness to vote, legally or not.
We saw that earlier this year (I think) when Asian Democrats in California mutinied over the push to bring back affirmative action. Someone helpfully pointed out that Asians were usually counted among the ones who were “overrepresented” in college admissions, meaning they would be the ones losing out.
The bad news is that this indicates that they haven’t actually let go of the “spoils system” mentality, which could be problematic for the GOP in the long run.
See here for a few reasons to doubt the exit polls and inferences drawn from them about the Asian vote.