No Intention to Use Racial Cues: Asian American Voter’s Voting Preferences

• In Event: Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Views of/by Asian Americans

Abstract

Plenty of studies that focus on minority candidates’ campaigns emphasize the importance of their cultural competencies, especially when they run elections in districts where political environments are less hostile to minorities and new immigrants. Minority candidates can get closer to their potential voters by designing ads with non-English slogans, mentioning special traditional holidays or foods of their cultures, and working closely with institutions that are operated by minority voters (Collingwood, 2020). At the same time, minority candidates also use several strategies to attract people across different racial groups by showing how they are different from the negative stereotypes attached to them (McIlwain & Caliendo, 2011; Stephens-Dougan, 2020). Nevertheless, in places where people are less accepting of the minority, minority candidates usually focus more on the policy positions that both white voters and non-white voters prefer to maximize their potential votes (Berinsky et al., 2020; Collingwood, 2020; McIlwain & Caliendo, 2011; Stephens-Dougan, 2020), which may make the minority candidates less attractive to their ethnic groups. However, these various strategies are not strategically used by Asian candidates running for elections in districts where Asian Americans are the majority nor widely used in districts where Asian Americans are the minority. The strategies that Asian Americans use to appeal to voters, regardless of the districts, are mainly focused on policy positions instead of racial cues; in other words, Asian candidates are elected to offices without using racial cues as other minority candidates did.
To understand how Asian candidates appeal to voters and why Asian candidates strategically choose not to mention ethnicity to run elections. This paper shifts the focus from the electoral strategies used by candidates to Asian American voters’ voting preferences. This paper argues that the reasons that Asian candidates focus on policy positions instead of racial cues are associated with Asian Americans’ voting preferences. Since the parenting styles of many Asian Americans focus more on achievements, Asian voters also prefer candidates to focus on policy positions related to economic achievements and the substantial issues that can be directly connected to improving living standards instead of mentioning racial cues. Asian
American voters could also vote for candidates from different ethnic groups simply because they think their policy positions can benefit them more. These voting preferences of Asian Americans make Asian candidates more flexible in appealing to minority and majority voters by focusing on policy positions during campaigns.
This paper surveys college students about their parenting styles, expectations of politics, and voting decisions in presidential and congressional elections. Meanwhiles, this paper also launches a survey experiment to see the impacts of using racial cues to appeal to Asian American voters. This paper aims to collect a total of 1,000 questionnaires and use social network batteries and survey experiments to analyze the data. Other than the survey, this research also uses Topic Model Text Analysis to analyze the texts that Asian candidates use before and after being elected to office to study what topics are emphasized by Asian candidates. Both Asian congressional and presidential candidates, including primary elections, are included in the text analysis, and a total of 187,569 texts are collected and analyzed.
The preliminary results show that parenting styles hugely affect Asian Americans' expectations of Asian candidates to focus on policy positions rather than racial cues. Racial cues, in general, cannot make Asian Americans more likely to vote for Asian candidates. The outcomes of the text analysis on Asian politicians’ campaign messages also show that racial cues are less emphasized during the whole campaign process; the primary topic that Asian candidates focus on is the economy, and the secondary focus of these texts emphasizes the contributions that Asian communities have made to the society.

Author

• Shu-An Tsai, SUNY Buffalo