Senator Rand Paul in his speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday night highlighted the personal stories of Southeast Asian immigrants, including the Taing family from Cambodia and Vietnamese brothers Hung and Thuan Trinh, who risked their lives to sail to America on a boat from Vietnam. He told us about the risk they took to flee their war-torn countries – a risk often unimaginable to many of us born in the United States – to find freedom, peace and opportunity in the country we call home.
“The number of minority voters under the age of 30 likely to be disenfranchised by these new voting laws -- passed overwhelmingly by Republican-led legislatures across the country -- is a conservative estimate, according to the study's authors. The actual number of voters in that category who could be disenfranchised is probably closer to 1 million, they said.”
Editor’s Note: Numerous articles and news accounts of late have focused on the importance of presidential candidates wooing and winning the Latino vote in the 2012 election. But Peter Schurmann also points us the significance of courting Asian-American voters, who comprise 5.6 percent of the U.S. population. Asian-Americans represent the fastest-growing demographic segment in this country and a critical voting bloc. But, according to a new first-of-its-kind poll, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to be taking note.
WASHINGTON, May 8, 2012 (Reuters) — President Barack Obama, whose campaign has focused heavily on courting Hispanic voters ahead of the November 6 election, reached out to another important and sometimes overlooked voting group on Tuesday: Asian Americans. A recent poll showed the fast-growing Asian American community is largely untapped by presidential candidates even though they are expected to vote in record numbers this fall.
WASHINGTON: The Indian-American community has come out in strong support of US President Barack Obama, who kicked off his re-election campaign with two rallies in Ohio and Virginia, with an overwhelming 85 per cent of them favoring a second term for him.About 85 per cent of the Indian-Americans support Obama for a second term, according to a latest survey conducted by Lake Research Partners, a DC-based political consultancy firm, with APIAVote. APIA stands for Asian American Pacific Islander.
Following an IndUS Business Journal political poll of Asian Indians earlier this year, the Asian American Justice Center and APIAVote have recently released a poll of Asian American and Pacific Islanders that similarly found that President Barack Obama is in high favor compared to other candidates for the 2012 Presidential Election.
COMMENTARY | It's hard to believe Asian-Americans were once a core constituency of the Republican Party. But the pendulum began to shift to the Democrats as Asian-Americans changed their voting preferences. But are the Democrats taking them for granted? Could Asian-Americans come back to the GOP?A report by Lake Research Partners indicates Asian-Americans prefer Democrats by a 3-to-1 margin. And that's not a small factor. Asian-Americans are also the fastest growing voting group, eclipsing Hispanics, blacks and whites.
A full one-third of Asian-Americans in a recent poll indicated that they still have no impression of Republican Mitt Romney as a candidate--but it appears that it’s not for a lack of trying.Just 17 percent of all Asian-Americans say they’ve been contacted by the GOP in the past two years; 23 percent say that the Democratic Party has attempted to contact them.
