http://prospect.org/article/how-asian-americans-became-democrats-0

The last two decades have seen a major shift in the party preferences of Asian Americans, but they're still not deeply engaged in civic life.

As a force at the ballot box, Asian Americans caught the media’s attention in 2012, when exit polls showed that they supported Barack Obama with 73 percent of their votes, a level exceeded only by African Americans. That year, Obama also won a big majority of Latinos, but his strong showing among Asian Americans was a much bigger surprise. In 1992, the majority of Asian Americans had voted for George H.W. Bush, creating the impression that as an upwardly mobile and affluent group, they would continue to vote Republican. But 20 years later, in an astounding shift, Asian Americans moved 40 points toward the Democrats in presidential elections. Since they’re also the fastest growing racial group in the United States, the change has major implications for the future of American politics.

While the attention to Asian Americans in 2012 was long overdue, much of the commentary was short-sighted and misleading. By that year, the high level of Asian American support for Democrats should not have come as a surprise; a leftward shift had been building from one election cycle to the next. Some pundits also misread the sources of the change. In 1992, writing in The Washington Post, Stanley Karnow had claimed that Asian immigrants were more likely to identify as Republican because they valued individual responsibility and free enterprise and many of them had fled communist countries. In 2012, New York Times columnist David Brooks claimed that Asian Americans voted Democratic because they came from cultures that do not put a high value on individualism and instead approve government intervention. If cultural values can be used to explain both voting Republican and voting Democratic, they may not explain either one very well. The actions of parties and political leaders over the past two decades provide a far better explanation for the politics of Asian Americans today than do the disparate cultural traditions that immigrants have brought with them.

To understand the shifting political allegiances of Asian Americans, we need to look closely at the evidence of their political attitudes and behavior. Recent years have seen a significant increase in survey data on Asian Americans from such sources as the collaborative National Asian American Survey (NAAS) and AAPI Data, a project that I direct. These and other surveys help to correct some mistaken explanations for the shift of Asian Americans to the Democrats, but they also show another pattern that blunts the impact of that shift. Despite their high average levels of education and income, Asian Americans have among the lowest levels of civic and political participation in the United States.

This low level of participation should worry not just Democrats but anyone concerned about the future of race relations in America. The juxtaposition of large-scale Asian immigration, high levels of economic achievement, and low levels of civic integration runs the risk of reverting Asian Americans to a place they have occupied through much of U.S. history: a “middleman minority” in America’s racial order, ignored by the powerful and resented by the powerless. Any effort to make sense of Asian Americans’ politics today has to begin with that historical background.

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