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<\/a><\/p>\nI’m in the middle of doing a survey of the Sunday TV political shows, reading through transcripts of discussions of Asian American voting behavior just prior to and immediate after the recent elections. I was inspired to do this research when I witnessed with shock the complete surprise among pundits across the political spectrum over the overwhelming percentage of Asian American voters who chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. I figured I should check my perception of what went down against the record.<\/p>\n
I won’t get into too much detail concerning the findings since a detailed report is forthcoming. But, to give you a preview, my perception matches reality. Most of what went down went something like this: this wasn’t supposed to happen and nothing we know about Asian Americans could have prepared us for it.<\/em><\/p>\n This reaction provides a striking, albeit brief, view into what the most visible analysts left and right think about Asian Americans. That is, almost nothing at all, a point punctuated by how quickly the story died, returning Asian Americans to relative invisibility.<\/p>\n The shock and awe expressed in that moment was made all the more striking because political analysts are, for the most part, data wonks. Yet, in spite of widely available data indicating that Asian American voters were trending liberal, everyone with a horn to toot expected something along the lines of the opposite.<\/p>\n I find that maddening. I’m not a data person and yet I knew what was coming. I didn’t expect such overwhelming support, but I did expect that Asian Americans would decisively go for Obama. And how? One word. Google<\/em>.<\/p>\n Pre-election, I typed the terms Asian Americans, voting behavior, national,<\/em> and research<\/em> into my browser and found, among other useful hits, this<\/a> overview of a report by the Pew Research Center on The Rise of Asian Americans<\/em>. While Pew has been widely criticized for using faulty methodology in constructing its sample, and relying on a deeply problematic conception of “racial characteristics” (that I criticized here<\/a>), the report is nonetheless widely cited, including by some of the very same political analysts puzzled over Asian American voting behavior.<\/p>\n Just scroll down the summary findings of the Pew Center report and you will quickly arrive at a graphic headed by this phrase:\u00a0Asian Americans Lean Democratic.<\/em><\/p>\n The graphic shows 50% of Asian Americans surveyed leaning Democratic, compared with 28% leaning Republican. This is in contrast to 49% of the general public leaning Democratic and 39% leaning Republican. While 49% and 50% are pretty close, 28% and 39% aren’t. Yet, pundits and political analysts ranging from racist academic Charles Murray<\/a> on the right, to The Nation’s Chris Hayes<\/a> on the left, were surprised. And Hayes even mined the same Pew report for figures concerning the relatively high median family incomes of Asian Americans in order to make his case that the Asian American vote for Obama was surprising.<\/p>\n