The Asian American vote by state...

[Beet]

IME Asians tend to be socially moderate-to-liberal and economically moderate-to-conservative. Bill Clinton did wonders to bring Asians into the Democratic Party, but Mitt Romney is also well-tailored to appeal to the Asian vote. Unfortunately there is also a residual racism among many Asians especially older Asians. They see white people as the gold standard and are quite openly racist toward blacks.

I've been noticing a lot of Asian American Republicans lately. Just anecdotally--

I was shocked last week, one of my best friend's dads suddenly passed away. He knew he's a huge Democrat and he's Indian American, so I expected his family to lean Democratic too. I was shocked to hear that his 29-year old cousin who is from Charlotte is voting for Romney, even though he says he is a Democrat and supports Obamacare. He said Obama "fooled" people in 2008 and my friend's uncle agreed. Then he complained to me that he offers $10 an hour for drivers but people just apply so they can get unemployment benefits and don't seriously want to take the job. He thinks Romney having no convictions is a good thing because it suggests flexibility. I tried to push back a little pointing out how the economic is recovering but he then said he didn't want to talk about it further.

Of course my best friend who is also Indian American and vocally left-wing, a big Obama supporter in 2008, says he's voting for Jill Stein. Of course he doesn't live in a swing state so it doesn't matter. But he volunteered for Obama four years ago and isn't now. Obama lost him a long time ago, probably 2010 at the latest.

Another Chinese American (from mainland) I knew from High School and College (yeah I live in one of the highest concentration areas of Asian Americans in Montco) told me over the summer that he's a Republican, which doesn't surprise me in the least, as I think he was Republican in College as well. He's always been a Wall Street Type. E.G., he works on Wall Street, and when I ask him why he likes Republicans he says that he doesn't like it when the poor leech off others. He says he should be rewarded for planning ahead in life and getting his currently high paying job, and so on. But he's also moderate, like he agrees that welfare is needed for "social stability". He reminds me a lot of my Sikh roommate in College who was also economically conservative, socially liberal moderate Republican who ended up becoming an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, after reading Liar's Poker.

Last year I found out one of my coworkers who is Korean is also a massive evangelical Christian, when they had that things about the supposed end of the world that that one preacher predicted, I asked this guy about it and he said-- it's not going to happen, because-- and listed off like a dozen super specific things that would presage the End Times... this is a really smart guy, a senior engineer on our team. You never once would have suspected it.

I still probably know more Asian American Democrats than Republicans, but there are more Republicans than I would have thought. I get the sense that people perceive Obama as being more left-wing economically than he actually is, even though his health care and tax policies are economically to the right of Clinton's, it's not well recognized that Obama can't do welfare reform all over again, he can't repeal Glass-Steagall over again like Clinton did. He is President at a different time than Clinton, facing different circumstances. It doesn't necessarily mean that his economic instincts are any more interventionist than Clinton's.