The Fighting 44s

Thank you to 44’s member Lingyai who sent this article.   People always ask about the Asian American vote.  I actually just met someone today who works to register Asian American voters.  But the question always remains: what do we stand for?  We’re typically on both sides of the aisle and in all parts of the political spectrum.

The article covers that same question about what happens for a group that doesn’t all vote the same way:

An argument can be made—and is—that excessive partisanship is exactly the problem with a lot of ethnic politics. It goes something like this: Democrats take black voters for granted, Republicans don’t even try to win them over, and the result is that they have less influence than they would if they had less party loyalty.

But an argument can also be made that partisanship enhances influence. On the national level, the most powerful groups—unions, African-Americans, evangelicals—are often the most partisan. A pandering politician wants to maximize the efficiency of his pandering. So if the strategy is to mobilize the base, it makes more sense to court a loyal group. (Plus, it gets you more media coverage. The one time the national media noticed Asian-Americans this election cycle was when Hillary Clinton won 75 percent of their votes in California.)

I have my own ideas about this, about how to bring out the similarities that I do believe we all have, but I have a feeling that this is more of a podcast topic than a blog topic.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Advocacy & Activism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Comment »

Share