Democrats need to overhaul their playbook for courting Asian American voters

On the heels of Eric Adams’ predictable, landslide, dare we say boring victory in the 2021 New York City mayoral general election, Rep. Grace Meng sent up flares to New York’s triumphant Democratic Party.

“Our party better start giving more of a shit about #aapi voters and communities,” Meng wrote on Twitter two days after the election, using an acronym for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The first Asian American member of Congress from New York, Meng has represented parts of Queens, including Flushing and Elmhurst, in the House since 2013. In the days following Adams’ unsurprising win in deep-blue New York City, Meng was looking more closely at the voter turnout in the race. Republican Curtis Sliwa had performed particularly well in neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn with large Asian American populations, despite winning only 28% of the vote citywide.

“I don’t usually go viral,” Meng remarked recently of her 2021 tweet. “People were like, ‘Oh my gosh, why did you write that?’” Meng replied that it was true.

Though the shift to the political right among Asian American voters echoed national trends, 2021 seemed to be something of a wake-up call for New York Democrats. “From that point forward, I remember, congressional candidates to state Senate and Assembly candidates to City Council candidates were having conversations with myself and others around the reasons for the shift, and (whether) there are better ways to reach Asian American voters,” said Wayne Ho, president of the nonpartisan Chinese-American Planning Council, recalling Meng’s tweet.

Having those conversations is one thing, executing is another. The next year, Republicans continued to make gains in Asian American neighborhoods. Chinese American sections of Sunset Park and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn voted for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, while some Queens precincts in Flushing and Bayside with large Chinese and Korean populations went red too, according to a New York Times analysis.

Last year, several Assembly seats flipped Republican, including an Asian-majority district in southern Brooklyn in which Republican Lester Chang unseated the longtime Democratic Assembly Member Peter Abbate Jr. An analysis of that race by the Asian American Federation found that Chang could have lost if more Asian voters turned out. Despite the broader drift to the right, the majority of Asian voters in the district are still registered Democrats – 52% compared to the roughly 7% who are registered Republicans. But a whopping 40% of registered Asian voters in that district are not affiliated with either party.

That’s not a quirk of that one southern Brooklyn district. Democratic enrollment among Asian American voters in New York City still far outpaces Republican enrollment. But it’s also a population that has a high share of independent or unaffiliated voters. That’s especially true of Chinese Americans, who make up the largest share (roughly 44%) of Asian Americans of voting age in New York City. The rate of unaffiliated registration among Chinese American voters in the city, 37%, is roughly double that of all other voters in the city, according to data sourced from VAN, a database maintained by the state Democratic Party.

Trip Yang, a Democratic consultant who analyzed that data along with consultant Brendan Klein, said despite Republican messaging that has resonated with a lot of Chinese Americans in recent elections, the data was proof that there’s a large population of unaffiliated voters still up for grabs. “Both parties should look at this data and say, ‘We have to take this population seriously,’” Yang said. “This is not a fringe population. This is a population that can actually dictate results in elections.”

Today, both Democrats and Republicans seem to recognize the importance of engaging Asian Americans communities. But a history of overlooking them now requires both parties to put their money on the line. “I think that the willingness is there,” said Democratic Assembly Member Grace Lee, who represents Manhattan’s Chinatown and the Lower East Side, and co-chairs the Assembly Asian Pacific American Task Force. “Now it’s about just making sure that investment actually happens, and building that roadmap to help leaders who are not as familiar with the Asian community actually do that.”

In a handful of competitive City Council races where there are large Chinese American populations, both parties have an opportunity to do so in November.

An overlooked voting bloc

Asian American voters were the fastest growing voting bloc in New York City between 2010 and 2020, according to a report from the Asian American Federation. But that population – which consists of diverse ethnic groups, cultures and languages – has long been overlooked by both political parties and characterized as “unlikely voters.”

For the large population of unaffiliated Asian voters, campaign outreach – if it happens at all – doesn’t start until after the primaries. Independent voters don’t have much use to Republicans or Democrats in closed primaries, after all.

When outreach does happen, campaigns can tend to treat the diverse Asian American population as monolithic and an afterthought. “I have experienced campaigns where Asian Americans are not polled, or Asian Americans are lumped in with other racial minorities,” Yang said. “That is a huge strategic blunder in the political consulting industry.”

“I had a candidate once (tell) me, ‘I’m going to use the Asian language for my mailer,’” Meng recalled. “I’m like, ‘What do you mean the Asian language? There are many different Asian languages.’”

Nonprofit and community civic leaders who do a lot of the legwork of registering Asian American voters weren’t surprised by higher rates of unaffiliated voters in Asian communities. “When we’re registering people to vote, a lot of people don’t know much about the political parties, and it’s difficult for them to make a decision,” said Sandra Choi, the civic participation director at the Flushing-based MinKwon Center for Community Action. “It’s so much more important for campaigns, and for political parties, to reach out and engage our members, especially before they even register to vote.”

Several Asian American elected officials and civic leaders were hesitant to speculate about why the rate of unaffiliated registration was even higher among Chinese Americans than in other AAPI communities in New York. Yiatin Chu, president of the political group Asian Wave Alliance, noted that in addition to lacking information about the parties and process here, there may also be hesitancy to enroll in a party based on where immigrants are coming from. Chu’s organization endorses both Democrats and Republicans for office, but has made a few high-profile endorsements of Republicans recently, including Lee Zeldin for governor and David Hirsch in a competitive Assembly special election last month.

“You look at where these voters are coming from, a lot of them are from mainland China, Communist China, where kind of getting into that politics is, I want to say, risky,” Chu said. “There’s a reticence to have a party designation.”

Drifting right

For the past several years, Republicans have successfully made the case to some Asian American voters that Democrats are on the wrong side of two key issues: public safety and education.

“Those issues have become more and more stark – the differences between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, particularly here in New York state,” said Ed Cox, chair of the state Republican Party. “The Asian community, as we have worked with it through more than 10 years, has been a huge change from either not being involved in politics or supporting Democratic candidates, to moving over to support the Republican Party and Republican candidates.”

Just as New York’s Asian American communities aren’t a monolith, the issues that matter to Asian voters aren’t uniform. But public safety and education have been winning issues for Republicans with many Asian voters following a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and a Democratic mayoral administration that tried to reform the screening test for specialized high schools and phase out gifted and talented programs.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio and other progressive Democrats saw the programs as exacerbating segregation, as the majority of students who benefited from them were white or Asian. But those programs also offered an elite education to many low-income Asian American students. In many of the competitive districts with large Asian populations, moderate Democrats have supported maintaining the current programs. “I think a lot of Asian Americans just associated all Democrats with those types of policies that they thought singled out and hurt our communities,” Meng said.

There are still issues where Asian Americans tend to align more broadly with Democrats, including on prioritizing support for social services, which have traditionally been the “bread and butter for Democrats,” Chu said.

Still, Republicans’ alignment on priority issues in Asian American communities was a key part of the shift right among Chinese and other Asian American voters in the past two years. In addition to aligning on key issues, Republicans also claimed credit for doing the kind of outreach and engagement work in Asian communities that has long been overlooked by both parties.

Though Cox put it at about 10 years ago that the party started to take seriously the work of building relationships with individuals in Asian American communities, it wasn’t until last year that the party officially announced an Asian Caucus, led by Chloe Sun.

“In the 2021 election, whether it was the mayoral candidates or local City Council candidates, there were posters up that were multilingual,” Meng said of Republican campaigns. “There were definitely mailers that were done in multiple languages. And I personally had not seen that before from Republican candidates. I thought that that was very telling.”

Building a roadmap

Several of the City Council races that will see somewhat close matchups in November have at least one thing in common: significant Chinese American populations.

Among those competitive races is the new 43rd District in southern Brooklyn, in which Democrat Susan Zhuang and Republican Ying Tan – who themselves are both Chinese American – are fighting for the open seat, as is Conservative Party candidate Vito LaBella, who is white. Zhuang is a moderate Democrat and the chief of staff to Assembly Member William Colton, while Tan is a community activist and LaBella is a former cop. All three cite public safety and education as top priorities.

“We know that in the Chinese American community, a lot of the community members we serve know that there are two Chinese American candidates. They know that the Chinese American candidates are trying to do outreach to them. They’ve gotten some phone calls, flyers, or they see them at community events, or at their churches or on the street,” Ho said. “But in terms of the policy platforms, many of our committee members have remarked that it doesn’t seem like there are many differences in their policy platforms.”

The Republican Party backed LaBella in the Republican primary against Tan in June, and his third-party run could split the conservative vote. State and county Republican leaders did not comment on specific investments they might provide Tan in the race, though former Brooklyn GOP Chair Craig Eaton recently hosted a fundraiser for her.

In the 20th City Council District in Queens, Republican Yu-Ching James Pai and independent candidate Dany Chen are running against incumbent Democrat Sandra Ung. “You see her in the Chinese papers for all the good things, so her name is out there. There’s not much controversy around her. I think on education she’s pretty solid,” Chu said of Ung, noting that she was speaking personally and not for Asian Wave Alliance, which has not yet endorsed in the race. “I think her challengers are just not going to solidify forces against her.”

The bigger challenge is for non-Asian candidates to engage Asian American voters in their district, suggested Mae Lee, executive director of the nonpartisan Chinese Progressive Association. “We’re not part of their base, but nevertheless they’re running for office in our community,” Lee said. A recent national Pew Research Center study found that among Asian American voters, policy positions were valued above a candidate’s race or ethnicity, but non-Asian candidates still have to build relationships in Asian American communities.

District 19 in northeast Queens is one of those races, where Republican incumbent Vickie Paladino is facing a repeat challenge from Democratic former state Sen. Tony Avella, both of whom are white. Avella and Paladino both have claimed ties to the Asian communities in the district. Paladino employs a Chinese American community liaison in her council office, and Avella won some goodwill with Chinese voters when rallying to save the Specialized High School Admissions Test in 2018.

In last month’s Assembly special election, Republican David Hirsch performed well in the northern parts of the district that overlap with the 19th City Council District, despite losing the race to Democrat Sam Berger. During the campaign, Hirsch cited education as a top issue, and one that he was highlighting with the Asian community in the district.

But asked what actions campaigns need to take in upcoming council races – and next year’s competitive congressional races – to engage Asian American voters, Democratic leaders pointed to investments made in Berger’s campaign. Meng cited the Berger campaign’s Chinese language mailers, phone calls and text messages, as well as support from Democratic Party leaders. “(Assembly) Speaker Carl Heastie and his campaign committee, DACC, they really focused on this type of outreach,” she said.

It’s a roadmap that Meng and other Asian elected officials are calling on party leaders and campaigns to follow, not just in upcoming council races but in next year’s congressional races. Meng said she has been in “constant communication” on that point with leaders, including state Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Queens Democratic Party Chair Greg Meeks. “I know the state party is looking into hiring Asian community liaisons, which is great. And they started an Asian American Caucus within the state party, which is an important step,” Meng said. “But we will continue to do more.”

Still, there’s a sense that Democrats have work to do to catch up with Republicans’ gains in Asian communities. “Republicans were really targeting their message and tailoring it to the Asian community,” Assembly Member Grace Lee said of recent election cycles. “The Democrats, if we focus on ensuring that we are speaking and tailoring our messaging to things that Asian voters care about, with the right investment, we will see a difference in the way that Asians are voting.”