Latinos aren’t the only immigrant group that doesn’t seem to want to have much to do with Donald Trump. Though the Asian American population is much smaller than the Latino population, Asian Americans are five percent of voters—and they’re five percent of voters that Donald Trump is losing badly. According to the National Asian American Survey, Trump is trailing Hillary Clinton by 41 points.
Clinton was drawing 55 percent support to Trump’s 14 percent. Ouch. If you count people who are leaning toward one candidate or the other, it’s 59 percent to 16 percent. Ouch again. And Trump may be hurting his party:
"The big takeaway is a continuation of what we saw in the Spring 2016 survey — an Asian-American population that was become more Democratic over time," Karthick Ramakrishnan, the survey's director, told NBC News. "We see that Trump is likely a significant reason for that shift. Trump's unfavorables are like nothing we've seen before."
Of course, the Asian American population is no monolith. It includes numerous ethnic groups with different backgrounds and political leanings. But this time around, they’re all leaning away from Trump. The smallest lead Clinton has (counting leaners) is a mere 26 points among Vietnamese Americans, 46 percent of whom say they support her, with 20 percent supporting Trump and a whopping 29 percent saying they’re undecided. At the other end, 73 percent of Korean Americans say they support Clinton, though she has the biggest lead among Indian Americans, 70 percent to seven percent.
In 2012, Barack Obama drew 68 percent of the Asian American vote to Mitt Romney’s 31 percent, so, if you count leaners, and with 16 percent still undecided, Clinton is running nine points behind Obama while Trump runs 17 points behind Romney. It looks like she’ll at least match and quite possibly exceed Obama’s margin here. And for good reason. Trump may be focusing his anti-immigrant remarks on Latinos, but Asian Americans are heavily immigrants or children of immigrants themselves. They can hear what he’s saying.
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