That’s the message Asian-American voters are sending in the Fall 2016 National Asian American Survey, which shows Hillary Clinton with an enormous 41-point lead over Donald Trump. The survey is in keeping with a larger trend of Asian-Americans becoming more Democratic, though Trump himself has been a particularly powerful catalyst. “Trump’s unfavorables are like nothing we’ve seen before,” Karthick Ramakrishnan, the survey’s director, told NBC News.
Asian-Americans, a very loose designation for a group that is highly diverse, are the fastest-growing minority in the country, making their nascent political alliances a concern for both Democrats and Republicans. Since the early 1990s, when George H.W. Bush beat Bill Clinton for the Asian-American vote, they have been steadily gravitating to the left for a number of reasons, including the Democratic Party’s positions on health care, affordable education, the economy, and guns. While certain Asian-American groups share conservative cultural affinities with the Republican Party, Asian-Americans are by and large supportive of the idea of big government.
But above all, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Asian-Americans, like other minorities, simply see no home for themselves in a Republican Party that has increasingly been defined by its whiteness. If Bill O’Reilly’s latest foray into New York’s Chinatown is any indication, it’s not only Trump who’s the problem.