- More than 20% of Asian Americans say they do not plan on voting in the 2020 election, making the group more likely than Black and Latino respondents to indicate they won’t turn out, according to a series of Insider polls conducted in conjunction with SurveyMonkey between August and October.
- Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) advocacy groups have been talking about how to address this problem for some time.
- Turnout among AAPI voters went up between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections in several states, but new Insider polling data shows a substantial gap remains between the group and other minorities.
- Asian Americans are 8% less likely than average to vote in 2020, compared to 2% for Black respondents and 3% for Hispanics and Latinos, according to Insider’s survey data.
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Asian Americans are less likely to vote in 2020 than other minority groups, according to a series of Insider polls conducted between August and October.
This data is based on an aggregation of eight polls with a total of 8,975 respondents conducted on SurveyMonkey Audience from August through early October. Respondents were asked if they were registered to vote and then subsequently if they intended to vote in the 2020 election, as well as a number of other demographic questions. Overall, 12% of respondents indicated they probably or definitely would not vote in the 2020 election.
More than 20% of Asian American respondents said they do not intend on voting this year, making them 8% more likely than the average correspondent not to turn out.
In comparison, Black respondents were just 2 percentage points more likely to say they plan on staying home, while Hispanic and Latino respondents were 3 percentage points more likely to respond that way.
Turnout has been a major focus for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) advocacy groups, with a variety of factors contributing to the phenomenon.
Principally, neither major party has any kind of top-level messaging focused on the diaspora in the way issues like immigration or criminal justice reform are tied to Latino and Black voters.
While such messaging efforts can come across as pigeonholing diverse coalitions of potential voters, they at the very least signal that turnout among the demographics is a priority for the parties.
Cultural legacies are also at play.
"A lack of access to targeted, in-language civics education is a major barrier to civic engagement for many Asian Americans," Stephanie Cho, Phi Nguyen, Nathalie Levine, and Yuri Lee write in a wrote in an issue of the American Bar Association's Civil Rights Magazine from June.
"Three-quarters of Asian American adults were born outside the United States, many in countries where they did not participate actively in democratic electoral processes," the article continued.
Turnout in the AAPI community did go up between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, which typically see reduced turnout among the American public overall.
The lack of targeted messaging from campaigns coupled with the unique barriers to civic engagement form a negative feedback loop, with political operatives hesitant to risk dedicating resources on a low turnout group and the potential voters themselves remaining uncontacted.
An AAPI Data study from September 2019 predicted Asian American turnout would go up in the 2020 election, following the midterm trends, but cautioned that while Indian and Filipino Americans saw big boosts in their turnout rates, Vietnamese Americans saw no change between 2014 and 2018.
SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn't try to weight its sample based on race or income.
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