Donald Trump has insulted women, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and the disabled. It should not be surprising that the level of support for him among those groups is low. One group that he has not insulted (at least as far as I am aware) are Asian-Americans so one might expect that he is scoring relatively highly among them.
But via Kevin Drum, I came across this interesting chart that shows that his support among Asian-American is abysmally low. Trump’s average support is around 20%, compared to Clinton’s 70%. His support among my peeps, the Asian Indians (that I believe refers to those from the subcontinent and not just to India), is at just 9%. He does best among Filipinos at 32%. [Correction: I checked the questionnaire (see S10.2 on page 46) and it looks like they wanted only Indians and excluded Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans.]
Asian Americans make up about 5.6% of the total population, not insignificant. Maybe the lesson Trump will draw from this data is that he should start insulting Asians as well if he wants to raise his standing among them.
This made me curious about where Trump stands with another similar-sized group and that is the LGBT community. His running mate has a terrible record of opposing LGBT rights and Trump too has said that he would appoint Supreme Court judges who would roll back the right of same-sex marriage (something that will never happen) and has supported state-sanctioned discrimination of transgender people, though on the plus side, he has said that he would support amending the Civil Rights Act to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. A survey found that the LGBT community supported Clinton over Trump by a margin of 72-20% and in the 2012 election, about 5% of voters identified themselves as LGBT.
But European Americans tend to favor Trump
So the LGBT and Asian American communities cannot be blamed in the eventuality of a Trump presidency.
I’m 50% German, 25% English and 25% French, though my family has been in North America for hundreds of years (I’ve confirmed that one came over in the 1600s). What the hell is wrong with my people, especially the Krauts?
Well, Trump did once speak in glowing terms about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two, saying that his policies toward Muslims were just like that in order to justify them. I’d count that as implicitly insulting, and Japanese Americans such as George Takei were rightfully appalled by it. Given this, I’m surprised that his numbers among Japanese Americans are not much, much lower.
I suspect that the Asian Indians numbers are the lowest because a fair number of them are Muslim (particularly if, as you say, this includes Pakistani and Bangladeshi Americans). Many of the rest will have experienced anti-Muslim bigotry because they have been mistaken for Muslims.
This Euro/Norse American (gluten-free white bread) will be voting for Clinton. I’m not a fan of her, but I dispise that reckless and feckless Trump.
cartomancer,
My assumption was wrong. They only wanted people from India. See my update to the post.
Any reason to call them European-Americans? Most of them have been here so long that they may as well just be called white Americans.
On Euro Americans, I noticed that, despite my being “European” in a sense, I don’t belong to any of those demographics. Or is ‘European American’ exclusive of Slavic, Balkan or such? Or are they just not polled?
Or perhaps the right-wing Europeans are more heavily represented in the US. For the other ethnic groups, the US is more liberal, but for Europeans, the US marks a very rightward shift.
People said Trump winning the nomination would never happen. Never be complacent.
smrnda,
Unfortunately the link to the poll analysis is broken so I could not find the precise answer to your question. But reading between the lines, I think they asked respondents to check all the ancestry that they thought applied to them. It may be that the other groups were too small to be statistically worth including.
The thing that jumps out at me is the 29% of Cambodians who support “other” rather than either major party candidate. The results exclude “undecideds” so those “other” voters must have some specific candidate in mind.
None of the other Asian groups has anywhere near as high a percentage supporting “other”.
Is there some reason that Johnson and/or Stein is popular among Cambodians? Or is there a Cambodian-American candidate running that I’ve never heard about?