New Poll Reveals How Many Asian Americans Actually Voted For Trump

One poll, the National Exit Poll, was funded by major national media organizations and conducted by Edison Research. The polling firm asked American voters, around 1,00o of whom were Asian Americans, on their voting and political party preferences, revealing that Clinton earned a dominating 65% of the Asian vote while Trump garnered 27%.

However, the percentages are even more exaggerated in an exit poll conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) that was previewed by NPR.

AALDEF’s poll, which surveyed 14,000 Asian Americans, saw Clinton winning 79% of Asian American voters with Trump only getting 18%. AALDEF also collected vital voter trends among Asian Americans broken down by Asian ethnicity, religion, state, and nativity.

Broken down by ethnicity, it’s clear to see that Vietnamese-American voters were the most popular with Trump with Filipinos trailing behind, while Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, both predominately Muslim ethnicities, went with Clinton.

However, it should be noted that AALDEF’s polling methods likely made the survey more accurate than Edison Research’s.

Edison Research’s poll not only polled just a fraction of the amount of Asian Americans polled by AALDEF, but they also conducted polling in English and Spanish with questionnaires that were only in English.

AALDEF’s poll had written questionaires in English and 11 different Asian languages including Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Bengali. They also employed volunteers who could speak altogether 23 Asian languages and dialects.

Broken down by party affiliation and ethnicity, the top three groups who voted for Clinton are unsurprisingly and predominately Democrat. At least a quarter of Asian Americans have not subscribed to a political party.

By state,more Asian Americans in Louisiana voted for Trump over Clinton while the national average had nearly 80% of Asian Americans for Clinton.

It is also interesting to see that more foreign-born and naturalized Asian-American citizens voted for Trump while American-born Asians largely went with Clinton.

Also unsurprising is that the vast majority of Muslim Asian Americans, 97%, voted for Clinton while over a quarter of Protestant and Catholic Asian Americans held on to Trump.

According to Jerry Vattamala, who ran AALDEF’s exit polling, Trump’s loss of the Asian American vote is largely due to his anti-immigration stance, his hard talk against trade with China, and his less-than-welcoming attitude towards Muslims:

Feature Image via Flickr / Gage Skidmore (CC By-SA 2.0)