The anti-immigrant rhetoric this campaign season is making Asians reconsider their political identity - yet again, Ramakrishnan said. "Many South Asians I know personally who might have been sympathetic to the Republican Party were starting to have second thoughts."Īnti-Immigrant Rhetoric Could Push Voters Away "The most likely explanation there is the kind of exclusionary rhetoric after 9/11 with the Patriot Act and racial profiling of South Asians," said Ramakrishnan. Bush administration, the leftist Asian tilt continued. It is portraying itself as a centrist party with respect to economic policy, and it is also trying to see itself as 'big tent' kind of party."ĭuring the George W. "The Democratic Party is changing itself. "There's a big shift that happens there," said Ramakrishnan. The Asian-American political conversion started during Bill Clinton's presidency because of a deliberate effort to court Asian-Americans. Asian-Americans, he added, "including wealthy Asian-Americans, support policies that tend to be more in line with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party."īut Ramakrishnan said it wasn't always that way. "Asian-Americans tend to have progressive positions on things like taxes, on things like preserving social safety net, supporting the Affordable Care Act," said Ramakrishnan. Nguyen's change in voting behavior isn't surprising, according to research from Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at the University of California, Riverside who also directs the National Asian American Survey. She said she's not yet committed to any presidential candidate this election cycle, but she wants someone who will be strong on the economy and foreign policy, specifically the clash in the South China Sea. "Many are working low, minimum-wage jobs, so we really care for the higher, better minimum wage," she said. It's not communism that Vietnamese voters are worried about these days, Nguyen said, they're concerned about jobs, affordable health care and the economy. "I think the Republican has gone too far to the right, and they are not the Republicans of the Reagans anymore," she said.īut voter concerns have changed, too. "Reagan was my hero because many Vietnamese at the time, we were very much victims of communism." "I remember I did vote for Reagan," she said at a Vietnamese mini mall that offers everything from jasmine rice to jade jewelry. When she first became a citizen, she voted for the Republican presidential candidate. But, she said, she now feels Republicans have "gone too far to the right." from Vietnam in 1975 and remembers voting for President Reagan.