in many ways, 2018 was a banner year for Democrats. But one you don’t hear often enough is that the Donkey Party achieved record levels of support in America’s fastest-growing racial/ethnic demographic category. If you assumed that was Latinos, you’d be wrong.

Asian-Americans have been the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S. since 2010. They represent 5.6 percent of the population, a number that is expected to rise to 14 percent by 2065. Because the Asian-American population is relatively quite young, and also because of historically low levels of turnout, this demographic group has under-punched politically (they represent about 4 percent of the electorate). But that could be changing.

And that’s a big deal for Democrats. According to exit polls, in 2018 they carried an estimated 77 percent of the Asian-American vote. That’s up from 65 percent in 2016, and way up from 49 percent in 2014.

Vox’s Li Zhou plausibly suggests that the aggressively xenophobic Donald Trump has pushed Asian-Americans away from the GOP. But then again, Barack Obama won 71 percent of the group’s vote in 2012. While it’s often forgotten that Mitt Romney was more than a little nativist on immigration policy that year (his official policy was to encourage “self-deportation” by making life miserable for the undocumented), he wasn’t as obsessive about it as Trump. It’s plausible that Asian-Americans (who are unusually prone to register as independents) are attracted to other elements of the Democratic message and agenda as well, as Karthick Ramakrishnan observed in 2016:


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http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/asian-american-electorate-becoming-important-to-democrats.html