What Will Happen to the Asian Vote?
Thinking through 2024
Unintentionally, I’ve found myself writing a lot about the shift of Asian voters to the Republican Party. Some of this was borne out of the inability of mainstream pundits and politicians to recognize, for long stretches of 2021 and 2022, this was happening. These days, such denialism is less rampant. You have both Asian American and non-Asian Democrats recognizing that voters who were once Obama supporters are now willing to back Republicans. In New York, this was most obvious in the last midterm, when a Trump Republican, Lee Zeldin, was nearly elected governor. Zeldin ran very strongly in the Chinese and Korean enclaves of Brooklyn and Queens. His campaign almost exclusively focused on crime, and how he’d revoke bail reform and get tough on the criminals who Democrats allegedly coddled. Crime, in the pandemic era, had spiked, and anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise. The other concern was how Democrats were trying to alter or eliminate the standardized test that was the sole determinant of whether an eight grader was admitted to one of the top magnet schools, including Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science. Over the last decade, New York Democrats and various activists have fretted about the decline of Black and Latino students at these schools; Bill de Blasio, the prior mayor, finally announced in 2018 he wanted to eliminate the specialized high school admissions test, or SHSAT.
It was then, really then, the Asian neighborhoods of New York revolted.
To recap: Asian students have been doing very well on these tests. While some liberals have tried to make the declining Black and Latino populations at a school like Stuyvesant about the number of white, wealthy students who were gaming the test, it was Asians filling these slots. Stuyvesant admitted seven Black students in its class of 762 last year, which was the New York Times headline. Buried down in the story was the reality: of that 762, 489 (64%) were Asian. White students numbered 158. In New York City, the category “white” is a bit of a misnomer. In the rest of America, it might mean a WASP. Here, whites can be first-generation Russian, Middle Eastern, or something else. The actual whites—what both liberals and conservatives feverishly imagine when they toss the category around—usually end up in private schools. They go to Trinity or Dalton or Catholic schools like Regis or Xaverian, which is down the block from where I live. High-achieving Black and Latino students also tend to opt for private schools because scholarships can be generous. Very wealthy private schools, especially in the DEI era, don’t want to seem too white. And charter schools pick up plenty of nonwhite students as well.
I’ll lay my cards on the table: I don’t like standardized tests. I think having one test be the sole determinant of entry into a school is a bit deranged, and has probably terrified or even crippled several generations of city schoolkids forced into “cram” schools not all that long after they learned how to ride a bike. I’m glad my bar mitzvah fell on the day of the SHSAT and I never took it. When I went to Stony Brook University, I met a lot of Brooklyn Tech, Stuy, and Bronx Science kids. A good number of them, by eighteen, were completely tired of school, badly burnt-out. My view, popular with almost no one, is to return to the twentieth century system of having kids attend their neighborhood high schools. Now that New York is genuinely diverse and gentrification, along with immigration, has thrown many different races and ethnicities together, local zoned schools would not actually be monolithic. The children of aged hipsters and working class Puerto Ricans could be at the same high school. Or a school zone encompassing, let’s say, Sunset Park and Park Slope—that forces parents to send their kids there—would be, by any race or class metric, very diverse. After a few years of screaming (liberals and conservatives would find plenty of reasons to hate all of this) parents would get used to it. In that way, New York would be like the rest of America.
But the Asian vote! Asians understandably were furious. They are, largely, not very wealthy, and many of them are first or second-generation immigrants. They saw the so-called SHSAT schools, rightly or wrongly, as the ticket to the middle class for their children. They saw how Asian these schools were becoming. It’s not an exaggeration to say Asian families in New York invest almost everything they have into their children’s K-12 education. Imagine, then, when politicians suddenly say, in so many words, they are the problem. “Too few Blacks and Latinos” invariably translates to “too many Asians.” Because any system that is designed to systematically increase the number of Black and Latino students—scrapping the test, adding in essays or other “personalized” metrics—would lower the number of Asian students. These slots are finite. Whites, I promise, are not fighting for their great share of the SHSAT pie. They don’t care. It’s Asians who feel solely under attack. And since it was a Democratic mayor in Bill de Blasio who wanted to end the SHSAT and Democrats talking about changing the admission criteria at elite colleges, Asians suddenly saw where they stood.
They were going to vote Republican.
The question, now is, what what will happen in 2024. In a presidential year, will these trends cement themselves? Will Asian Americans who reflexively chose Joe Biden four years ago now opt for Donald Trump? Down the ballot, in New York City, will they stop supporting Democrats?