Asian Americans Swung To Trump In 2024. Andy Kim Wants To Focus On Winning Them Back.

At a campaign stop in Texas for Senate candidate James Talarico last month, Sen. Andy Kim said he heard one thing over and over from Asian American voters: They’re not sure either party is really listening to what they have to say.

“They don’t feel like they’re being courted, or being targeted, or being sought after,” Kim told POLITICO. “And they think that’s going to reflect in how people govern.”

Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, says he’s on a mission to change that. The first Korean American senator and one of three Asian Americans currently serving in the chamber, Kim sees the country’s fast-growing but oft-neglected Asian American electorate as a pivotal part of Democrats’ efforts to take back the House and Senate this November, and he wants his party to pay attention.

That began with his touchdown in Houston, where the Asian American population has exploded in recent decades. It will continue throughout the campaign season with additional stops in North Carolina, New Hampshire and other states across the 2026 Senate map where Kim said there are opportunities for the Asian American community to make a difference.

Kim is also looking ahead to 2028, when Asian American voters could play a pivotal role in early Democratic presidential primary states like Nevada, the fourth-most Asian state in the country as of the 2020 Census. Kim has not been mentioned much in 2028 chatter himself — far more speculation has focused on his New Jersey colleagues, Sen. Cory Booker and Gov. Mikie Sherrill — but he said he’s focused on making sure the Asian American community has a voice in the nomination process.

“Nevada, Michigan and Virginia all have major AAPI populations that candidates can’t ignore, and there’s going to be a real chance for the Asian American community to convene forums and debates with the primary candidates,” Kim said.

One of the most frequently cited reasons for Democrats’ loss in 2024 is a sharp swing right among Hispanic voters, long a core part of the Democratic coalition. According to the Democratic data firm Catalist’s analysis of 2024 results, Hispanic voters supported Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by an eight-point margin, an enormous shift from Joe Biden’s 26-point margin among Hispanic voters four years earlier.

But that same analysis found Asian American voters had also soured on Democrats somewhat, shifting from a 30-point margin for Biden to a 21-point margin for Harris — boosting Trump in many key swing states. That shift occurred despite the fact that Harris, whose mother hailed from India, was the first Asian American candidate to lead a major party’s presidential ticket.

Kim’s home of New Jersey, one of the most diverse states in the country, was no exception to those trends. The state’s most Hispanic town, the Central Jersey city of Perth Amboy, shifted 35 points towards Trump between 2020 and 2024; its most Asian American town, the predominantly Korean American suburb of Palisades Park, shifted 16 points rightward.

Janelle Wong, the director of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Maryland, said that it can often be hard to convince political parties to see the Asian American communities as worthy of their time and investment. Many of the nation’s largest Asian American communities are also concentrated in safe blue states like California and New York, reducing their perceived political impact.

“In these weeks prior to the election, the parties are going to focus on those competitive places,” Wong said. “But if they had been building those relationships over time, they would have more of an impact in the long-term. It’s really hard for parties to think beyond the next election.”

In a poll last month conducted by the advocacy group Asian & Pacific Islander American Vote, 42% of Asian and Pacific Islander voters said they’d never been contacted by Democratic organizations in the last year, and 58% said they’d gotten no contact from Republicans. Many of those voters have instead been in closer contact with nonpartisan civic organizations, which Wong said have often filled the gap left by absent political parties.

That is an improvement, though: In APIA vote’s 2022 poll, 52% of respondents said they hadn’t gotten any outreach from Democrats.

And Democratic officials say the party is doing more than it has in the past. Spokespeople for the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pointed to investments the party has made into Asian American outreach, including AAPI-specific phone banks and voters’ rights trainings.

“Democrats are engaging AAPI communities ahead of the midterm elections, with the DNC focused on organizing, mobilizing, and providing voters with information about the issues and choices before them,” DNC Vice Chair Shasti Conrad said in a statement.

One of the activist groups that Kim coordinated with on the ground in Texas, the Asian Texans for Justice Action Fund, cited visits like his as another way that Democrats can mobilize Asian American voters.

“It really feels like Asian Texans are an afterthought more than they are part of the conversation,” said Nabila Mansoor, ATJ Action Fund’s executive director. “So when Senator Andy Kim comes to Texas and says, ‘I want to hear what you have to say and what it is that you’re looking for,’ that tells us that we are valued and that there is someone who is willing to listen to us.”

APIA Vote’s August poll found Democrats had a 39-point generic ballot advantage among AAPI voters in November’s midterms, a significant improvement compared both to 2024 results and to APIA Vote’s 2022 survey.

Some of that shift, Mansoor said, could be attributable to the Trump administration’s harsh immigration crackdown — and to the Republican Party’s embrace of some even more stridently anti-immigrant figures. While he was in Texas, Kim said, “everyone was talking about” a recent post by Bo French, the GOP nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, denigrating Asian American students at the University of Texas.

But according to Kim, Asian American voters are preoccupied above all else with kitchen-table issues like the high cost of housing and health care, the same issues that Americans of all backgrounds say are top-of-mind. Small businesses, long a bedrock of Asian American economic power, are also a major concern, Kim added.

“We’re not a special interest group,” he said. “Oftentimes when I’m in D.C. with Asian American groups and I hear some of the remarks given to them, they focus on AAPI discrimination and efforts to try to get a national museum for Asian-Pacific Americans. That’s all important, but we also want a seat at the table for the really big things, like the economy, like health care, like small business, like affordability.”

Views of the Asian American electorate are often driven by “stereotypes,” Wong said: that Asian Americans are focused above all else on education and immigration policies, for example. The reality, she argued, is far more nuanced, and Asian Americans care about both bread-and-butter affordability policies as well as issues like environmentalism and gun control that aren’t typically associated with the community.

Moreover, while Asian Americans are lumped into one racial category by the U.S. Census, the community itself is massively diverse, including people of many different ethnicities, national backgrounds and immigration statuses who may diverge sharply in their political priorities.

“The tendency around Asian engagement is to treat the community as a monolith,” said Nick Rathod, a senior adviser at the AAPI Victory Fund, a progressive advocacy group. “But they’re very dynamic communities — they’re multi-faith, they’re multiple different ethnicities. You can’t paint the community with a broad brush.”

What is undeniable, though, is that the Asian American community is likely to continue growing in size and influence. The number of Asian Americans more than doubled between 2000 and 2023, according to Census estimates, and is projected to grow by tens of millions more in the coming decades.

New Jersey is at the forefront of that population growth: approximately one in ten New Jerseyans is Asian American, though Kim remains the sole Asian American to have ever been elected to either chamber of Congress from the state. He did so, at least at first, thanks almost entirely to non-Asian voters; the GOP-held House district Kim flipped in 2018 was a majority-white seat without a substantial Asian American population.

Kim’s experience is one shared by many successful Asian American politicians, since despite recent population growth, there are still very few areas of the country where Asian Americans are the dominant political force, requiring more coalition-oriented politics. “There is no place where candidates can run on a purely Asian American agenda,” Wong said.

But as Kim is trying to show, there are plenty of districts and states where support from Asian American voters can mean the difference between a win and a loss. Some of the country’s most competitive House races this year will be decided in part by the Asian American electorate, including in New Jersey, where GOP Rep. Tom Kean Jr. faces a stiff race for reelection in a district with a fast-growing Asian population.

As the community continues to grow in political clout, its numbers in political office are likely to grow as well. Congress currently has around two dozen Asian American members — almost all of them Democrats — and more will likely be elected this year, despite the fact that neither party nominated any Asian American candidates in top Senate races.

In 2021, Kim founded In Our Hands PAC, which was designed in part to help recruit and support Asian American candidates for office, much like established groups like the AAPI Victory Fund and Aspire PAC. POLITICO reported during Kim’s 2024 Senate run that other than a splashy announcement, the PAC had done relatively little, though it has since picked up steam and distributed nearly $250,000 to federal, state and local candidates this cycle through Aug. 31 — some of them Asian American candidates, others simply Democratic nominees in key races.

Making longer-term connections with the Asian American electorate, Kim has long argued, is something that urgently needs to be done, and he wants to play a starring role.

“I really think that this next decade is going to be the most dynamic decade for Asian American politics in this country, ever,” he said. “And I think that I can play a leading role in shaping that.”