Where Asian Neighborhoods Increased Support of New York’s Republicans

In last year’s governor’s election, voters in Asian neighborhoods across New York City sharply increased their support for Republicans. Though these areas remained blue overall, they shifted to the right by 23 percentage points, compared with 2018, after more than a decade of reliably backing Democrats.

It was the largest electoral shift in Asian neighborhoods in the period from 2006 to 2022, the longest available span of election results by precinct, according to a New York Times analysis.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, won even though almost the entire city moved to the right. Among that wave of red shifts, one set of voters had the largest movement of any racial or ethnic group: residents of Asian neighborhoods. Across boroughs, this pan-Asian constituency spans many ethnicities and ideologies, and this New York Times analysis offers a nuanced look at voting patterns, from the Chinatowns of Brooklyn to Little Punjab in Queens.

Some Asian neighborhoods, like Chinese neighborhoods in Sunset Park and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, had shifts so big that they flipped to support a Republican candidate for governor for the first time in at least a decade. Others, like Manhattan’s Chinatown and Queens’s Richmond Hill, remained solidly Democratic despite an increase in Republican votes.

The Times interviewed more than 20 community organization leaders, scholars and local politicians who serve or study Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in New York. In recent years, they said, Republican candidates have increased their presence in Asian neighborhoods. They added that Republicans have also benefited from residents’ sense of being overlooked by Democratic leaders and that Republicans’ tough-on-crime stance attracted voters after increased anti-Asian violence.

“The only possible way for a shift of a community like this is when that community has largely been ignored by both parties,” said John Park, the executive director of MinKwon Center for Community Action, a nonprofit serving Korean and Chinese immigrants in Flushing, Queens.

Like in much of the city, the red shifts were consistent across predominantly Asian neighborhoods. Ms. Hochul narrowly defeated Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate, in a contest in which the Republican vote increased in all but 1 percent of the city’s more than 4,000 precincts.

Asian residents, who make up about 14 percent of New York City’s population, are the fastest-growing group of eligible voters in the city.

And predominantly Asian areas — precincts with a majority of eligible Asian voters — have undergone a pivotal shift.

About 22 percent of eligible Asian voters in the city live in these areas and are included in this analysis. Below are maps showing the 2018 and 2022 governor’s election results. Here you can see which party won, and by how much, in precincts where more than 50 percent of eligible voters are Asian.

From 2018 to 2022, the Republican share of the vote increased by 27 percentage points in the rapidly growing Chinatowns of Brooklyn, the biggest change in any Asian neighborhood. In Flushing and Bayside in Queens, Republican support increased by 22 percentage points.

The Asian population in New York extends much farther than the predominantly Asian precincts in these maps.

Community organization leaders pointed to a 2018 proposal by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, as a political awakening moment for some Chinese Americans in the city.

The proposal would have changed the admissions process for the city’s elite public high schools, in order to increase the number of Black and Latino students. Offers to Asian students, who make up a majority in the schools, would have dropped by about half under the plan.

For years, many of these schools’ students have been from low-income Chinese immigrant families, a group that is generally concentrated in the city’s Chinatowns. After the proposal was announced, protests sprung up in Sunset Park, Flushing and City Hall Park, which is near Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Manhattan’s Chinatown differs from the satellite Chinatowns in Brooklyn and Queens.

It had a smaller shift rightward in the last governor’s election, and it remained more Democratic. This neighborhood also stands out from the other Chinatowns in its socioeconomic makeup.

All Chinatowns in New York have median incomes below the city’s average. But of all the residents across the city’s Chinatowns, those in Manhattan are the poorest. Additionally, many of these residents’ families arrived in the country during earlier waves of immigration, allowing them to build up party loyalties over generations. The Chinatowns in Queens and Brooklyn are home to more first-generation immigrants, and these areas have a much higher rate of voters registering with no party affiliation.

In New York, the last decade has seen members of this newer, relatively higher-income group of Chinese Americans align more often with Republican candidates, said Pei-te Lien, a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

An uptick in Republican campaigning was a significant factor to increasing Republican support, community organization leaders said.

“I’ve never seen so many signs for a Republican governor in the areas I grew up in,” said Aminta Kilawan-Narine, the founder of South Queens Women’s March, who was raised in South Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park.

“We’re so underresourced that sometimes we settle for those who simply just show up,” Ms. Kilawan-Narine said.

Republican support increased by 21 percentage points in eastern Queens’s stretch of South Asian neighborhoods. They include Richmond Hill, with its mostly Sikh and Indo-Caribbean population; Jamaica Hills, home to many Bangladeshi residents; and Bellerose, a large Malayali community.

Fears about hate crimes, like the recent string of attacks against Sikh men in Richmond Hill, have shaken the community.

John Albert, the founder of Taking Our Seat, a Queens-based group that advocated for the South Asian community during redistricting, said that Republicans had been more effective in communicating with South Asian voters, like those in Richmond Hill, on the issue of public safety.

“I think what the Republican Party has done well is to make very stark for people that they are the party that’s going to keep people safe,” Mr. Albert said. “Whether they’re actually doing it or not is probably less relevant.”

Community organization leaders across the city echoed the observation that a heightened fear of racial violence helped align some voters with the Republican Party’s tough-on-crime platform.

At the onset of the pandemic, experts pointed to racist language used by then-President Donald J. Trump and Republicans in Congress as a prominent cause of increased violence against Asian Americans.

Community organization leaders across the city’s Asian neighborhoods emphasized that Republican candidates may be gaining support among Asian American voters because of political engagement on local issues, not party identification.

For example, Mr. Zeldin, Ms. Hochul’s Republican opponent in the governor’s race, won most of the majority-Asian precincts in Brooklyn’s Chinatowns, but there were a significant number of split-ticket voters in these same areas.

In a down-ballot race for a State Senate seat, Iwen Chu, a Democrat like Ms. Hochul, won in many of the precincts that the governor lost.

In her district’s majority-Asian precincts, Ms. Chu received 22 percent more votes than Ms. Hochul.

Republican outreach to Asian American voters “aligned with their fear, not their needs,” Ms. Chu said.

Dr. Lien said that issues related to education and public safety are galvanizing Asian American communities across the country. The red shifts seen in New York are likely to occur in more places in future elections.

“This is the harbinger of what is coming,” Dr. Lien said.

Source: Elections - nytimes.com