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A large proportion of the Asian-American vote is up for grabs in the 2012 election, according to a new poll. While President Obama leads Republican Mitt Romney by a wide margin -- 59 percent to 13 percent -- impressions of Romney remain largely unformed, and both Democrats and Republicans have work to do with this potentially important but often overlooked voting demographic.
Obama was strongest among Indian-American voters, leading Romney by 76 percent to 8 percent in the poll, and weakest among Filipino Americans, where the breakdown was 57 percent to 20 percent. Among Chinese Americans, it was 68 percent for Obama, 8 percent for Romney.
The large proportion of undecided voters suggests that there's room for both parties to grow their support among Asian-Americans, yet those surveyed said that the parties aren't doing much to engage them. Just 23 percent of those polled said they'd been contacted by the Democratic Party in the past two years; 17 percent reported contact by the GOP. In the overall population, that number is generally between 30 and 40 percent, according to researcher David Mermin of Lake Research Partners, the Democratic polling firm that conducted the survey.
