Don’t Sleep on Asian American Voters
When Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and other prominent Democrats appeared online at a major fundraiser last night, they spotlighted one of the least discussed lessons of the 2020 election: Asian Americans are poised for a major leap in electoral influence.
In Democratic circles, the bloc’s impact on the 2020 election has been largely obscured by the intense focus on understanding how Donald Trump improved his performance among another rapidly growing minority group, Latinos. But the magnitude of the Asian American turnout surge, and its influence on the result, is drawing increased attention as analysts complete more detailed studies on which Americans voted last year.
Even amid soaring participation from all major racial groups, Asian Americans increased their turnout by more than any other cohort, according to recently released studies by the Census Bureau and Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm. In fact, no major demographic group in recent decades has increased its turnout from one election to the next as much as Asian Americans did from 2016 to 2020, ; not even Black voters grew that much from 2004
